Barracuda Restaurants · Traffic

Transaction Trend

Toast check counts by location, September 2024 through September 17, 2026. Traffic is measured as checks, not sales — average check is reported alongside so price and volume can be told apart.

Source Toast Location Overview
Pulled Sep 18, 2026
Through Sep 17, 2026

Transactions, two years, monthly

Toast Location Overview · Sep 2024 – Aug 2026 · check counts, not sales

Two locations are now losing transactions. Baton Rouge is still gaining.

Tchoupitoulas. Transactions ran positive year over year every month from September 2025 through April 2026 — often double digits. They turned negative in May 2026 and have stayed there: −1.6% in May, −5.6% in July, −7.7% in August, −8.1% for September to date. Average check moved less than 1.5% in either direction throughout. This is a demand problem, not a pricing or mix problem, it is about four months old, and it is holding steady rather than deepening.

Algiers has turned. It ran positive on transactions in all twelve completed months through August, finishing at +4.3%. September to date is −8.1%. One month against twelve makes this an emerging signal rather than an established trend, but it is a clean like-for-like comparison and it is the first negative reading Algiers has posted in the series. Its cost position is separately poor — prime 68.0% year to date against a 60% target, hourly labor 24.9% against 22%.

Baton Rouge. Added transactions in all twelve comparable months and is +7.4% in September. Same brand, same menu, opposite result.

Bay St. Louis. Lost between a quarter and half its transactions every month for ten straight months before closing 9/7. Not a close call.

Transactions year over year, by month

Check count versus the same calendar month a year earlier · zero line is flat

Full calendar months only. September 2026 is excluded — it is a partial month, shown separately below. Bay St. Louis’ October 2025 comparison is also excluded: it opened part-way through October 2024, so the +187% it shows is an opening artifact rather than growth. Huntsville has no prior-year month and does not appear.

September to date

Sep 1–17 against Sep 1–17 last year · 17 full days each, Labor Day inside both

Location	Checks LY	Checks TY	Δ checks	Δ ticket	Δ sales	Traffic $	Ticket $	August, for reference
Tchoupitoulas	7,880	7,238	−8.1%	+1.5%	−6.8%	−$17,834	+$2,964	−7.7%
Baton Rouge	5,443	5,847	+7.4%	−1.6%	+5.7%	+$9,298	−$2,165	+8.9%
Algiers	3,892	3,577	−8.1%	+0.8%	−7.4%	−$7,385	+$676	+4.3%

Comparable stores only. Huntsville has no prior-year September; Bay St. Louis closed 9/7. Across the three, transactions are −3.2% and net sales −3.3%. This is a partial month and sits outside the twelve-month chart above, which uses complete calendar months only.

Dating the break at Tchoupitoulas

Single months are noisy; the trailing three-month view is where the sign change is unambiguous

Month	Checks LY	Checks TY	Δ checks	Trailing 3	Δ ticket	Δ sales	Traffic $	Ticket $

Traffic $ is the change in checks priced at last year’s average check. Ticket $ is the change in average check applied to this year’s checks. The two sum to the sales change.

Every location, same test

Change in transactions year over year, percent

Location

What the Tchoupitoulas break is worth

July and August together lost 1,837 transactions against last year, worth −$49,936 at last year’s average check. Ticket gains gave back $6,207 of that, so net sales fell $43,729 across the two months.

If August’s −7.7% run rate holds, that is roughly $30,000 of net sales a month, or about $370,000 annualized, at the single largest location in the group. It is also showing up in labor: Tchoupitoulas’ total labor cost ran 22.2% of net sales in July 2026 against 20.7% in July 2025, and 20.8% in August against 19.8% — the store is carrying a cost base built for the old volume.

What this does and does not establish

Read before acting

It dates the break. It does not explain it. Open

Something changed at Tchoupitoulas between April and July 2026. The data here cannot say what. Candidates worth checking against the calendar: a menu or price change, a schedule or hours change, a manager transition, construction or parking access on Tchoupitoulas Street, a new competitor within a few blocks, and the end of whatever drove the very strong March–April. The next step is a timeline, not more math.

May 2026
first negative month

The 2026 comparison base is unusually high in March and April Check

Tchoupitoulas rang 17,671 and 17,707 checks in March and April 2026 — its two best months in the two-year series. A pull-forward of that size can make the following months look worse than the underlying trend. It does not change the sign of July and August, both of which are below their own prior-year months, but it argues for watching September and October before sizing a response.

17.7K
peak checks, Apr

Huntsville has no year-over-year comparison at all Structural

Huntsville’s first month of sales in Toast is March 2026. It has no prior-year month, so it is absent from every comparison on this page and will be until March 2027. Its own trend is a separate question: 8,395 checks in April falling to 4,520 in August and 2,116 over the first seventeen days of September is a steep opening-curve decay that deserves its own look.

Mar 26
first month open

The metric is checks, and checks are not guests Minor

Toast’s guest count tracks check count almost exactly at every location in this series — the largest divergence across the series is 1.6%, at Algiers in December 2025. Party size is therefore not moving, and checks are a fair proxy for guests here. Worth re-testing if table service or split-check behavior changes.

1.6%
worst guests vs checks

Two orders are dated October 2026 Data quality

Tchoupitoulas carries two checks totalling $4,538 with an October 2026 business date — an average of $2,269 each. Almost certainly forward-dated catering deposits, but they are sitting in a future period and will distort October when it closes. Worth confirming how catering deposits are being dated in Toast.

$4,538
future-dated

What I would do next

1. Build a Tchoupitoulas timeline for March through July. Every operational change, in date order: menu, prices, hours, staffing, marketing spend, third-party listings, street access. The break is datable to within a month, so a timeline will either produce a candidate or rule the internal ones out.

2. Work Algiers on both fronts now. Cost is still the bigger number — prime 68.0% year to date against a 60% target, hourly labor 24.9% against 22%. But September’s −8.1% on transactions is the first negative reading in the series, and its dine-in is down 23.7%. Treat the cost work as the priority and put the traffic reading on the watch list for October.

3. Ask Baton Rouge what it is doing. Twelve straight months of transaction growth, plus September, in the same brand with the same menu. It remains the most useful natural experiment in the group.

4. Re-run this when September closes. September to date is already in, but the full month is the first clean read after the break was identified and the first without Bay St. Louis. It will also settle whether the Algiers reading is a turn or a blip.

5. Size any response off −6 to −8% transactions at Tchoupitoulas. That is the range the full-month series supports, and it is what the cost and staffing plan should be built against.