Abbey Carpet Co. vs Aaron's and Aaron's Sales & Lease Ownership

Aaron’s gives us a bigger total addressable market by a factor of nearly 3×—1,162 total units versus Abbey’s 408. That raw unit count matters because every location is a potential seat for POS, scheduling, and back-office tools. More importantly, Aaron’s investment range tops out above $800K, signaling deeper per-location budgets and a more complex operating model that actually needs automation. Abbey’s ultra-lean build-out ($23K–$62K) suggests operators running on spreadsheets and manual processes, which means lower willingness to pay and longer sales cycles to justify even modest software spend.

The tradeoff is franchisee count and control. Abbey has 405 franchised units out of 408 total, meaning nearly the entire system is independently owned and making its own tech decisions. Aaron’s is 80% corporate-owned; only 224 units are franchised. That corporate dominance can work in our favor if we land a headquarters deal that mandates rollout, but it also means a single “no” locks us out of the bulk of the system. Abbey’s franchisee-heavy structure gives us more independent buyers to pursue in parallel, but with negative unit growth (−2.6% YoY) we’re selling into a shrinking ecosystem where churn will eat into any book of business we build.

Timing and terrain tip the scale. Aaron’s flat unit growth isn’t exciting, but stability beats contraction when you’re selling multi-year SaaS contracts. The higher per-unit investment range and corporate-backed procurement model create a terrain where compliance and operational complexity make software a necessity, not a nice-to-have. Abbey’s low fee and slim investment profile attract owner-operators who are price-sensitive and unlikely to adopt a full tech stack. We’ll burn fewer cycles chasing deals that close and stick at Aaron’s.

Verdict: Aaron’s is the stronger opportunity right now—bigger TAM, richer per-unit economics, and a stable footprint outweigh the franchised-unit deficit.