Carl Ford: But Cristina, I will — I saw some of the early print that came out associated with comparing our fourth quarter of this year to the fourth quarter of last year. I know all of you are aware of that. This is a 53rd week fourth quarter. There are 14 weeks of sales in it. That has always been in our guidance. But I saw some early reads, as I just looked at quickly, associated with like the amplification to last year’s fourth quarter. I do want to remind you there’s a 53rd week.
Cristina Fernandez: Yes. And then the second question I had, with the sales coming a little bit lower, how are you thinking about inventory for the year? And related to that, with the consumer shifting more to value, does it make you change the buys you have, leaning more towards that lower-price and lower-ticket assortments, focusing more on clearance activity? Any color there on inventory and buy would be helpful. Thanks.
Steve Lawrence: Yeah. I would say, one of kind of the strengths that we’ve shown, I think, over the past four years is strong inventory management discipline. I think that’s continued through the past quarter. Inventories are flat on a total basis, down about 4% on a store-per-store basis from a unit perspective. So we feel like the inventory is in a good position on a TYOY (ph) basis. But we also feel like the content beneath the surface is much better than where it was a year ago in stocks, or the highest had been since the pandemic started. So we don’t anticipate any sort of overhang of inventory coming out of the holiday. In terms of how we’re structuring our buys, yes, the customer is gravitating towards value. We see that expressed several different ways.
We talk a little bit about sometimes the private label mix. Private label business was a little better than some of our national brand business, which we infer as a flight to value there. So certainly, that’s a growth initiative. We’ve talked about how over time, we want to grow that business from around 20% or 21% of the business to 25%. You’ll see us continue to lean into that and grow that business. You’ll see us continue to lean into our everyday value proposition and really highlight those and feature those in marketing. And you’ll see us use promotions around the key must-win shopping moments on the calendar to make sure that we’re driving traffic into our store and winning that driveway decision. And then at the end of the seasons, clearance is another way to deliver value.
So all those things are parts of our playbook. We’re definitely leaning into them at the appropriate time to deliver value to the customer. We think our position as a value leader in the space gives us a really good position to be in as the customer is under pressure.
Cristina Fernandez: Thank you and good luck, the rest of the holiday season.
Steve Lawrence: Thank you. Okay. So, that was our last question. I just want to say from a recap perspective, our approach over the remainder of the year is going to take the appropriate actions to navigate the short-term softness in customer demand with really a focus on delivering new and innovative products, offering compelling value in order to help our customers stretch their holiday budgets, while also thoughtfully managing expense and inventories. On a longer-term basis, we believe we’ve got a unique concept that resonates with active young families. We believe our model is scalable and transportable, and we’re going to continue to make investments in our future growth so we can enable more people to have fun out there by shopping Academy.
In closing, I want to thank all 22,000 of our Academy associates for all the hard work and effort they put in and will still put in this holiday. Our employees are kind of a key ingredient of our secret sauce. And I know that every one of our team members is going to give it their best during Q4 and in the future. So, thanks for joining us today, and have a great holiday, everybody.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this call has now concluded. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.
