Peter Keith: Okay. That’s helpful, Matt. And then — and Corie, I guess everyone is very curious on product innovation and understanding we’re kind of in this air pocket with very little innovation. But I’m curious are there any little green shoots that you’re seeing in stores, maybe smaller products that we’re not thinking about that give us some optimism that newness can drive sales?
Corie Barry: Yeah. I actually — I mean, I might be biased, but I think there’s a lot of green shoots that are out there. And you’re right, back to the — one of the first questions, definitely what has also caused the pullback in CE, and I didn’t hit it, to begin with, I’ll hit it now, is just a bit of a lack of innovation when everyone was trying so hard to produce as much as possible or pull back as hard as possible, we just haven’t seen it. Now we are starting to see a little bit of that turn toward innovation. What we can see, even in TVs, we can see there’s a lot more interest in those large screen sizes. We can see growth in the like 77-inch plus kind of categories where people want to get that newness. We actually have double the amount of SKUs in the 97-inch and above TV category, which I know sounds insane, but those are really interesting things to people from a true entertaining at home perspective.
In majors, there’s a brand-new washer/dryer combo unit from GE, so you can both do the washing and the drying in one unit, which is a really interesting innovation for people like me who might want to do two loads at once, full time and get through it all. In gaming, you can see there’s really good availability of consoles, with some really interesting new titles that are driving some demand, some handheld gaming from ASUS and Lenovo. Those are great. And then there’s kind of some smaller just interesting things. We talked about the Meta Quest 3, the Meta Ray-Ban sunglasses and not only can you capture pictures but has audio built in. And then I think there’s lots of just really small fun giftable things, right? There’s everything from the automated bird feeder to the automated litter box and everything in between.
So what’s cool and the reason a little tongue in cheek, we mentioned the Best Buy sells that is there are actually a ton of really interesting fun consumer technology devices. And to your point, they’re kind of small, but they’re starting to lead the way into what I think will be more meaningful cycles as we head into the back half of next year. As you think about, we mentioned generative AI and products and importantly, chips that geared toward running those kind of large language processing models. And you can imagine that will extend not just into computing, but into other areas. And we can’t always talk about everything that we can see on the horizon, but we definitely can see some interesting products as our vendors, as you all know, are just as incented to stimulate demand as we are.
Peter Keith: Very good. Good luck with the holiday season.
Corie Barry: Thank you.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Mike Baker of D.A. Davidson. Your line is open.
Mike Baker: Okay. Great. Thank you. And this was sort of touched on, but the promotional activity, I think you said it’s up. Where is it versus plan? Do you expect it to get more promotional as we get through the holiday season? And you said this year, it will be more traditional, i.e., Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the last few weeks, et cetera. Can you remind us how the holiday played out last year?
Matt Bilunas: Sure. I think strategically — I think we’ve done a really good job of managing our promotional plan overall. I think the promotions in terms of the discounts and mix of promotions are up versus last year, and in many cases, up compared to where they were pre-pandemic. Again, it hasn’t necessarily manifested in our pressure on our product margin rates because we’re still receiving a good amount of funding from our vendors to help stimulate the sales that you would expect us to want to do. I think as you look about the holiday season, I think we are expecting the holiday to be a very sales-driven event. Consumers are looking for deals, and they’re looking for value. And because of that, we believe it will look probably more closely to like it was pre-pandemic, where people are gravitating towards the big sale events around Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday and a couple of weeks before Christmas.
So a pretty similar cadence to what we saw in FY ’20, although in FY ’20, we did — didn’t have as much pull forward into October as we likely still have in this current year. So a more similar cadence to promotional events. I would expect holiday always to be promotional, and we are well positioned to be promotional and still maintain a great profitable story for our investors. So overall, I think we’re in a great spot.
Corie Barry: And just to be explicit, what we actually had said, the promo environment was as expected. It was in line with our expectations in Q3. And you can imagine we’re kind of taking — what we’re seeing and pushing that into Q4, but it hasn’t been wildly outside our expectations.
Mike Baker: Got it. Okay. Thank you. If I could ask one more, and maybe you can’t answer this, but you did talk a lot about some crowding out in that kind of dynamic with the higher inflation. Well, now all of a sudden, the inflation concern is turning to deflation concern. Asking you to look into your crystal ball, how that could impact your sales results next year if the inflation goes away and we’re more in a deflationary environment?
