Measure the performance of a merchandising business. There are numerous measures used to evaluate the performance of merchandising businesses. In this chapter, we introduced three of these measures: (1) comparable store sales which helps determine whether customer demand is rising or falling at established locations, (2) sales per square meter of selling space, which is a measure of how merchandising effectively a business using its facilities to generate and revenue, (3) gross profit rates, which help users of financial statements gain insight about a company's pricing policies and the demand for its products