Michael Mullican: First off, Anthony, if you couldn’t ask a question on the last call, we’ll let you ask us 2. So you can ask us 2. We’re happy. Yes, new stores. I would say this year was really about capability building in test and learn. And so we have all 9 stores opened this year. We tried different formats, different markets. We did urban stores, we did takeover spaces. We did traditional build-to-suits and we tested a lot and we learned a lot and we build the capability, all 9 stores are open. We’re happy with the performance as a whole overall. There’s always things when you’re testing and learning that you want to do different and do better, and we’ll apply those learnings next year. So we opened 4 new stores in Q3, 2 more in Q4. We haven’t announced our targets next year, but it will be more than we did this year.
Kenneth Hicks: One thing, Anthony, I think that’s important, as Michael said, we are pleased with the overall performance, and we have some really good winners. We have a store that we would like for it to be better, and it’s a good learning store. But 1 of the things that’s actually really pleasing for us is some of the new markets that we’ve entered both that were adjacent or completely new markets. We’ve seen some very good results there. So we’re getting some — we’re pleased with our ability to enter places where people might not be as familiar with us to the last store on the last 2 we just opened in Barboursville, West Virginia, not only a new market. It’s a new state. And I got to tell you, a line around the block in the snow.
I’m sure if you followed us a little bit on social media, you’ve seen some of that. That is exciting and shows the potential of not only being able to ability to grow in that market. But in that region, where there’s a lot of white space for Mid-Atlantic.
Anthony Chukumba: Got it. Very helpful. And then as a second question to make up for the fact that I wasn’t able to ask any question on the earlier call. So yes, just a real quick one. You mentioned supply chain and some of the improvements you’re going to be making there. Michael, if I recall correctly, when we had last spoken, you said that you thought that the warehouse management system would be installed in 2023. I just wanted to confirm if that was still the case or what your thought was there?
Michael Mullican: That’s going to be a multiyear, but yes, I think towards the end of 2023, we’ll start to bring that online.
Anthony Chukumba: Okay. Very helpful.
Michael Mullican: We will phase that in across all of our DCs. So we’re not doing anything all at once. So — but we’ll start at the end of ’23 and then roll it out to other distribution facilities.
Anthony Chukumba: Got it. Keep up the good work, guys.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Brian Nagel with Oppenheimer.
Unidentified Analyst: This is Andrew Chazen off on for Brian Nagel. I just have 2 quick questions. One is shorter term in nature and the other 1 is longer in the near term. Can you — can you call out any specific trends in the Black Friday, Cyber Monday specifically, how you describe the brick-and-mortar traffic trends versus pre-COVID? And then longer term in nature, as the pandemic dynamics decided — has your thinking towards a longer-term growth algorithm of ASO changed at all?
Steven Lawrence: I’ll take the first part. I’ll give the second part to Michael. One of the things we’ve seen this Christmas, candidly, that started in early November and blend in the Black Friday week is kind of a return to pre-pandemic shopping patterns. So what is — what we mean by that is, if you go back pre-pandemic, customers really waited until Black Friday week to kick off. The last 2 years, we’ve seen pull forward of demand early in the month, particularly in some of the bigger ticket categories where there was scarcity of supply. And so we’ve seen that kind of revert back this year. So softer demand for big ticket early in the month. Then when we got into Black Friday week, another thing we’ve seen is people over the past couple of years, we’re really trying to avoid large crowds on Black Friday itself, they tended to shop earlier in the week.
And then we saw a little bit softer trend over the weekend, and that’s reverted back to where the weekend was much more important this year. And as Ken mentioned already, it was the largest day in our company’s history from a sales perspective. So I would say the biggest thing we’ve seen is kind of reversion early on back to more of the soft goods business. We’ve seen it shift back to they’re shopping on the big days more pre-pandemic than where they have been. But we also believe that, that’s going to drive the big ticket sales closer in, which we’ve seen pre-pandemic as well.
Kenneth Hicks: One of the other things we did see though was the customer was willing for the right item to buy the big ticket. So we — this is not — it was not — Black Friday was not just driven by apparel. We did very well in that. But we also saw a number of our big ticket items, some of the categories that Michael called out, like outdoor cooking, sports and the like also performed very well during the event.
Michael Mullican: Where we had great value.
Kenneth Hicks: Where we had good value.
