Tom Houdek: Andrew just to – as you mentioned in your math that’s right. The $1 million coming out of the build cost improves the return by in that 3% area.
Andrew Wolf: Great. Thank you, for the color, Greg and feedback. I have a kind of analogous question this is my last question on the remodels. I’m just trying to sort of back into the sales lift. And I would assume it’s a little less than a one-for-one dollar-for-dollar because the incremental profit margin is better. I just want to sort of check that. Or are you able to talk to directly what the sales lift is?
Tom Houdek: Sure, Andrew. The way that we’ve been rolling out these remodels, there’s a couple of different scopes. So the lower scope where we’ve been adding a few extra booths and doing some of the touch-ups around the restaurants that’s about $250,000. And those ones are seeing in the neighborhood of about $1000 or $1500 extra on a weekly sales basis, which to your point it’s incremental traffic and the flow-through on that is nice. So we’re seeing the returns in the 20% or higher. The larger-scope remodels that Greg mentioned and these are the ones that we actually like even more because it really is brand-building and traffic-driving and you redo the bars and do painting on the outside and put on new murals and brighten up the dining rooms and reconfigure some of the booths.
Some of these remodels can be $600,000 or $700,000 or even a little higher. And we’re still seeing the same type of return. So it is — as we think of the sales lift, we’re seeing a multiple of that type of sales lift in these restaurants.
Andrew Wolf: Okay. Thank you, very much. That’s helpful.
Tom Houdek: Thank you, Andrew.
Operator: The next question comes from Nick Setyan with Wedbush Securities. Please go ahead.
Nick Setyan: Thank you. I appreciate the monthly cadence as the quarter progressed and obviously the October pickup. Any way to kind of parse out this was sort of x percent was seasonality and the rest was some kind of a consumer slowdown? I know it’s a very difficult question but it would also help us have some confidence in terms of the go-forward trend as well. If it was seasonality then low-single-digit comp for Q4 makes sense. But if there was something else that you saw perhaps we should be a little bit more concerned.
Greg Levin: Nick obviously a great question. And we all are trying to decipher different things as you just mentioned there. I think the biggest thing for us when we look at this number and look at what happened in the quarter and think about where we are today is — and look I’ve been doing this a long time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an August weekly sales average above July, whether it was my days back in California Pizza Kitchen as a public company to BJ’s. You generally see a movement coming off of June into July, lower August and then a lower September. And as we were going through, it was just — I wouldn’t say odd. It’s just a trend we haven’t seen where August sales are higher than July sales. And then as we did the same thing kind of to your question there, we started looking at how October, November and December played out and compared it to 2019.
And last year in 2022 October, November and December played very traditional in regards to seasonality. So that’s where we kind of looked at it. And then as soon as September was over and we went into October, our sales just bounced back by that more than 500 basis points that Tom talked about. And while we had some great promotion around Spooky Pizookie and some other things that we’ve done that are specific to BJ’s that type of turnaround really gave us much more of a view that this was kind of going this was really the consumer moving back to normal seasonality. Additionally, where we saw it just getting a little bit more granular per se is we kind of thought in that secondish week, the third week of August right when school started to come back into session — I know both you and I grew up here in California and I remember starting school after Labor Day.
That no longer happens anymore. And as kids went back to school in August that’s when we started to see that slowdown come through. The other side of it is California which with 60-plus restaurants in California that’s going to have a big delta on our business. And I would probably say you can see it in the Black Box data as well. California probably came down the most and then has come back the most. And California was one of those states that also came out of COVID the last so to speak. I even remember myself personally in 2021 still facing COVID here in California and regulations and so forth. So I think California had much more of a for lack of a better term revenge dining last year in 2022. And as I said as quickly as we saw it come in August, we’ve seen it reverse here in October.
And we always say this on our calls as well look this is where our sales are right now. Just like when we reported in Q3 we were talking about where our sales were in July at that time frame. I don’t know Tom, if you want to add anything to that?
Tom Houdek: I think Greg covered most of it. And just the one other aspect and we mentioned this in the prepared remarks was around the 2019 comp. And when we looked at our sales through — the same cadence through each of the periods, each of the months, it was very consistent. And we hit September where we had a pricing round rolling in from 2019. We saw the comp dip a little bit on the three-year basis. And then when we took our pricing round at the end of September, we saw it step back up. So it was following very closely to the patterns that we would have expected on a 2019 basis if the seasonality was the same as it was pre-COVID. So all of the evidence that we’re looking at is pointing to the 2022 seasonality was the difference in the quarter.
Nick Setyan: So nothing in terms of less attach rates trade-down, anything else you’re seeing that would kind of imply consumers are becoming a little bit more cautious?
Tom Houdek: That’s right. We poll it by week looking at the incidence rates, things we want to be selling the Pizookie and alcohol any beverage appetizers the things that if there is some check management you would see it on. And also seeing the more value-oriented sides of our menu our happy hour our lunch value and daily Brewhouse Specials. And looking by the week and this is looking actually both to last year as well as 2019 there’s no — it looks very consistent as we go through the weeks and through the period. So no shifts in those types of metrics that would signal some type of a check management or the consumer pulling back.
Nick Setyan: Anything in terms of the holiday seasons and how that might impact or benefit Q4 this year versus last year to be aware of?
Tom Houdek: Compared to last year, so Christmas will fall on a Monday versus a Sunday. So there’s a modest benefit there but that might be 20 basis points for all-in for the quarter. So a little help, but very — there’s not like New Year’s Day falling in or out of a year, which can swing Q4 a little more dramatically. There’s probably some promotions that we might be looking at differently around Veterans Day. So I think all-in, it’s going to be a very similar quarter as the calendar lines up.
Nick Setyan: Okay. Thank you very much.
