Your best shop is subsidising your worst

The most dangerous number in multi-site retail is the total. Two shops, combined revenue up 4 percent — lovely. Except site A grew 12 and site B shrank 8, and the total quietly averaged your success with your problem until neither was visible.

Blended numbers are how weak sites survive for years. The strong shop pays the weak shop’s way, the owner sees an acceptable total, and the question that should have been asked in March gets asked in November — by the accountant.

Split everything

Pulse’s store comparison puts every location side by side on the metrics that matter: revenue, units, average transaction, margin where cost data exists. Growth plans and above get it automatically the moment your data carries store names. The first look is almost always uncomfortable. Good. Uncomfortable and specific beats comfortable and blind.

The patterns to hunt: a site whose average basket is drifting down while footfall holds — that is range or merchandising, not demand. A site strong on revenue but weak on margin — that shop is buying its top line with discounts. And the gap itself: if your best and worst sites differ by more than a third on like-for-like, you do not have a chain, you have a good shop funding an experiment.

Transfers before markdowns

Multi-site retail has one weapon single shops lack: what will not sell in Bristol might fly in Brighton. Kauzio’s transfer suggestions match one site’s dead stock against another’s velocity before either resorts to a markdown. Moving a box costs pounds; discounting it costs margin forever.

Judge sites like decisions

A weak site is not a verdict, it is a question: fixable or structural? Range, staffing and merchandising are fixable — run the fixes as tracked decisions in Kauzio and let the 90-day numbers answer. Location and rent are structural — and if the structural answer keeps coming back no, the bravest use of the comparison page is admitting it early, while the strong shop’s subsidy is still a choice and not a habit.