Brandon Cheatham: Hey everyone, this is Brandon Cheatham on for Paul. I’d like to go back to the commentary about the income cohort. It sounds like your low income consumer was particularly strong in 3Q, and I think that’s a change from the second quarter, when I think you all said the higher income consumer was really the bright spot. I’m just wondering, did you see an inflection in the lower income consumer cohort behavior, are you gaining more share of wallet – that’s kind of what it sounds like, but any category or anything that you all are doing or communicating that really drove that inflection?
Bob Eddy: Yes, morning Brandon, thanks for the question. You know, we’ve seen growth in all of our this year, as we’ve talked about. The beginning of the year, we were seeing a ton of higher income folks come into the business or buy more. We are still seeing that. We’re also seeing good purchasing behavior out of our lower income cohorts, and that’s been the real story for us. In every other down market, we’ve seen the higher income cohorts come in and try and search for value, and as I talked about earlier, we’ve seen lower income cohorts trade-out or trade down as EBT budgets dried up. That certainly has not happened this year – they have performed very, very well, and continue to. I think they will continue to, so we’re very happy with how we see our purchasing behaviors going.
Both higher and lower income cohorts are showing us very healthy behaviors and we’re looking forward to that continuing. I think the reason why you’re scratching after is value, right – we are showing the best pricing that we’ve ever shown to folks, we’re showing better prices that some of our competitors, and people are believing it. We’ve got some credibility with our members as we continue to prioritize value in everything we do, so we’ll continue to do that and hopefully they continue to reward us.
Brandon Cheatham: Got it, and then one follow-up, if I may, on digital sales. It seems like a meaningful driver of comp these days. Anything different about how that consumer engages with you? What percentage of your members are shopping with you digitally, and is there anything to call out on the margin side from the digital sales business? Thanks.
Bob Eddy: Yes, thanks for bringing that up, we haven’t talked about digital all day. It’s been a growing part of our business over the years. As you remember, the longer term story four years ago or so, we didn’t really have a digital business to speak of, and we’ve spent a bunch of time building the infrastructure, and lo and behold now we’re well over a billion dollars and 9%-ish of our business. Our members are really reacting to that, most particularly in the BOPIC and curbside parts of our business, where we’re really saving them time. Our aim is to save people money – we keep going back to value, but it’s also to save our members time. If I can have them not spend time walking around our clubs, throwing things in their basket for their routine shops, that’s great.
We still want to get them in the clubs for their opportunistic shops, but we’ve not seen that behavior fall off either. We have done things like our express pay product, where you can skip the lines if you are in our clubs, you check out on your phone, that saves you 10 minutes. It’s been pretty popular. We’ve also changed the way that we market and promote from a digital perspective, so a huge amount of our member acquisition is now coming from digital, where three or four years ago I would tell you that was zero or close to it. Five years ago, we were worried about the fact that our primary promotional product was paper coupons, and nobody loves paper coupons, so now well over two-thirds, I think it may have even been three-quarters of our promotion is done digitally – you click your coupons on our app or online versus clipping the paper.
