BJ’s Wholesale Club Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:BJ) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Bob Eddy: Sure, good morning Ed. Thanks for your questions. Maybe I’ll kick it off and Bill and Laura can fill in. I look at our current co-brand program and see it as a tremendous success. As we talked about, it’s grown over tenfold in the year since we launched it. It is a great source of member value. We think it’s the best value prop in the wholesale club space at this point, and it will only get better as we go forward. As we talk about it as a team, we think it will be tremendously valuable to our members, given we will improve the value prop. The question becomes one of lifetime value, right – we are in the value business, we can use this as a vehicle to provide more value to our members. That has shown to come back to us in better purchasing habits and higher renewal rates, so that’s the game that we’re playing and we’ll continue to play it.

I think it could be one of the more valuable things we do in the next set of years, and looking forward to the transition to our new partner. Maybe I’ll hand it over to Bill. He’s the architect of this program and running the transition, so he can give you a few comments as well.

Bill Werner: Thanks Bob. Ed, good to speak with you. I’ll just echo what Bob said – as we think about the co-brand program, we’ve talked about this with the street a little bit, we made the strategic decision back when we launched the current version of the program to invest all the economics back into the members with the goal of driving lifetime value, and we’ve been really pleased with how that’s performed over the last several years. As we think about the transition to Capital One, we’re not going to come away from that point of view in strategy in terms of investment. It’s an unbelievable way for us to give value back to our members, and we’ll take some of the enhanced economics and roll them back through the value prop so we can deliver it back to the members.

We’re really excited about CapOne. The team across the board at CapOne is incredible in everything that they do, and as we think how that plays through to the growth in the next program, we think that there is a substantial leg higher from here in terms of the growth with the membership base, so there will be a little bit–in term of the KPIs, there will be a little bit of a slowdown here–not a slowdown but a pause as we shut off acquisition in the coming days on the current program as we work through the transition, so you’ll likely see a pause in the higher tier membership penetration as we report Q4, and then as we get the program launched in the first half of next year, you’ll see it then reaccelerate from there as we start acquisition with the new program.

Edward Kelly: Okay, great. Just a quick follow-up, if I may – Bob, as we think about 2023, and I know it’s still early and the backdrop is uncertain, but the consensus to me looks a little high, especially given that you have the fuel margin compare. Could you just maybe help us with some puts and takes that we should be thinking about for the out year?

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