We have attempted to dissect the three across home-improvement and hardware retailers. The 800-pound gorillas (Home Depot and Lowe’s) are [fully] reliant on larger tickets just to cover inflation, not to expand margins. Floor & Decor still opens fast but is slowing. ACE is basically flat. Tractor Supply is the steady grower. This diagnostic breaks down each engine over time. Every number ties to a filing.
Floor & Decor and Tractor Supply grow on new stores; Home Depot and Lowe’s have flat footprints and grow only on same-store sales — which, as the rest of this page shows, is itself running on price, not customers. Acquisitions are excluded.
Now open up the comp. Every positive same-store number since 2021 was bought with price and mix while customer counts fell. Each row is a quarter; grey = not disclosed.
Traffic line (colored) has sat below zero for years; the ticket line (dashed) is what kept comps positive. Pick a retailer to see the trend.
Pick any two retailers: the bridge shows whether the gap between their comps is customers or ticket.
A higher average ticket can mean three different things: the retailer took real price (margin expands), it merely passed cost inflation through (margin flat), or customers traded up and bought more (volume). Gross margin is the tell — and across this cohort, almost none of the ticket gains were real pricing power.
For the growers, the question is whether the new boxes earn their keep — and how much room is left to open them. The first chart compares each retailer’s new-store contribution against its same-store comp; the second shows how built-out the footprint already is vs. company target store count (if stated).
Only Tractor Supply quantifies the split in its press release; the rest disclose it on earnings calls or in 10-Q MD&A. Every row carries the verbatim sentence and document URL, and both legs must tie back to the reported comp under the retailer’s own identity convention.
| Retailer | Where the split is disclosed | Identity convention | Traps handled |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Depot | earnings call, CFO remarks (never the press release) | multiplicative (FX inside total comp) | FY2024 was 53 weeks; 2 quarters ticket given only qualitatively |
| Lowe's | earnings call; 10-Q MD&A repeats it verbatim | additive, ties exactly | 53-wk FY2022; Canada/RONA sold Feb-2023 |
| Floor & Decor | earnings call; 10-Q MD&A quantifies both legs since FY2024 | multiplicative, ties within 0.11pp | 53-wk FY2020 (FY2026 next); guides both legs |
| Tractor Supply | press release — the only one that puts the split there | additive (PR table footnote) | 53-wk FY2022; Orscheln outside comp base until POS conversion +1yr |
| Ace Hardware | quarterly results press release (newsroom) — a retailer-owned cooperative | multiplicative, ties within 0.3pp | rotating ~3,200→4,000 member-store sample, not a fixed comp base; FY2023 Q1/Q3 unrecoverable; revenue & store counts are wholesale/membership, so Ace is SSS-comparable and shown on a co-op basis in the growth charts (excluded from AUV/runway) |
One workbook, a tab per table — every retailer and quarter with a verbatim quote + filing URL per row, plus the store ledgers. README tab explains the sources.