Barnes & Noble Education, Inc. (NYSE:BNED) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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Michael Huseby: Alex, it’s Mike. I’ll make one general comment and then Jon has been spending a lot of time in our stores during rush can pick it up. First off, there aren’t fewer students driven to the store through First Day Complete, if anything, there are more. Because most of those programs result in students coming in to pick up their First Day Complete package, of course, we’re on or before the First Day. So that as opposed to more of a random who’s going to show up when from a student perspective, it’s fairly predictable in terms of store traffic, in terms of the scale of students that are showing up to pick up First Day Complete. So and I don’t think our results having analyzed this would not indicate that we have any falloff in a general merchandise sale kind of on a per student basis as we change the model then I’ll let Jon give more details.

Jonathan Shar: No, that’s exactly right. We’re actually seeing more students come into the store post transition to First Day Complete based on the fact that we’re serving nearly all of the students at that institution. And the primary sort of fulfillment channel is in-store pickup. We can ship the materials to students if they select, but most of them from a convenience standpoint come into the store and pick up their materials or go through the process in real time and have us pick them and sort of box up their materials for them for distribution. So it’s actually an opportunity through some of the merchandising strategies and cross merchandising strategies that we have to increase the sales of everything else in the store like general merchandise items that we sell to students as part of that visit.

So we’re actually optimistic that, that’s going to have a positive impact. And just from a store traffic point alone. So we think that the model works well with the other parts of our business that we are looking to continue to drive growth in.

Alex Fuhrman: Okay. That’s really helpful. And then just the other part of the question, just thinking about the strong merchandise sales despite the pretty significantly smaller number of stores that you were operating during the quarter. I mean can we interpret that to mean that your biggest, most kind of long-standing profitable stores we’re experiencing really strong increases in sales during the summer months or was it part of that maybe just driven by the fact that the 100 something stores that you’re no longer operating were just pretty small contributors to merchandise?

Michael Huseby: Yes, I think it’s a combination of both of those. And as we called out in some of the prepared remarks, we had very strong summer, early summer first quarter in graduation products, which was somewhat of a surprise to us, quite frankly, we planned on. We did a lot of great things in our merchandising group to make that happen. But if you recall last year in the spring and summer of ’22. There are many schools that actually had commencement ceremonies to include more than just one graduating class because of the impacts of COVID and the fact that many schools weren’t able to walk graduating classes in prior years. So even with that as a benchmark, the graduation products performed better year-over-year and much better and of course with our expectations.

So that was a big part actually of the contribution of general merchandise growth. As it relates to the other categories, we continue to see good performance, but graduation was one that really stood out for us in the first quarter. The other thing I would say is that it impacts both the digital kind of the digital weighting of sales and the margin and also a number of students on campus. There were many schools this year that had online virtual courses this summer more than actually in the number we expected. So even with that and not having as many students on campus for the summer, general merchandise sales did well.

Alex Fuhrman: Okay. That’s really helpful. Thank you.

Operator: And we have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Hunter Blankenbaker for some final closing remarks.

Hunter Blankenbaker: Great. Thank you, Rob. That does conclude our call and we’re going to get back to Fall Rush here. We look to — forward to speaking with you in early December on our second quarter call. Thank you.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

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