The cornerstone objective of the Retailer Health Ratings™ is to focus the user on long-term business building competence, and not short-term results. Thus, the RHRs generally incorporate five years of data for most measurements.

We measure and compare each retailer over four components:

• Healthy Growth
• Asset Utilization
• Pricing Power
• Balance Sheet Strength

Each of the four components is comprised of a variety of factors and measurements that, taken together, yield a relative score for each retailer in the component. Each component is important to overall health, but we do not weight each component of the RHRs equally. We employ a proprietary weighting system that incorporates the correlation of the components to commonly used financial performance metrics such as return on assets, net income margin, total investment return and return on capital.

Importantly, we note that the Retailer Health Ratings™ total and component scores are relative scores, thus reflecting where a specific retailer's data is compared and benchmarked against the rest of the retailers' scores. The relative scores are then used to rank the retailers and place them into one of five rating tiers.