Those are the ones that are most visible to me when I walk the clubs. As I said, we saw some nice results, again, a little bit under the covers in that business with comps in GM improving 500 bps quarter-to-quarter. And if you just looked at Q2 versus October, 800 bps. That gives us a lot of confidence in what we’re doing because we’re operating candidly in an environment that’s a little tough to sell general merchandise at this point. It’s a market where folks are buying a little bit closer to need. They are being particularly stubborn in buying big-ticket items still. But when they are faced with compelling assortments at great price points, they are certainly, certainly putting things in their basket. So we’re pretty bullish on our long-term prospects from a general merchandise perspective within Q4, our compares get a little bit easier within general merchandise.
And so we’re hopeful from that standpoint, but we’re operating in a pretty cautious consumer environment as well, and we recognize that. Our grocery business is running strong, right, plus 2 comps in the face of disinflation. Traffic was great, unit trends were okay. Our members are continuing to come to us for that business. And if we can convince them to get into our GM categories as they’re buying their groceries even better. We talked a lot about our market share already in the prepared remarks. And again, that’s a pretty compelling data point, third-party data. So this is not our own data, but we continue to grow in the categories that we care about far in excess of what the rest of the market is growing. And so I think we’ll see continued strength in our grocery business, even though we might see some more disinflation, and hopefully, we can see continued growth in the general merchandise business as we go forward.
It’s one of our biggest strategic initiatives, and it’s critical to our long-term picture of our company.
Peter Benedict: That’s helpful. And then my follow-up would be just around the merchandise margins up again in the third quarter. Maybe an update on two things. One, your CPI efforts that have been ongoing for a long time, but just what’s the latest there? And then secondly, if we’re in an environment where there is more deflation that sits in maybe across more categories, how do you think that impacts your margin going forward?
Bob Eddy: Yes, it’s a great question. thanks for bringing it up. This is a muscle that we have. We’ve developed several years ago. It’s been critical in the reinvigoration of this company over the past 6 or 7 years, is really making sure that we are not only buying the right things but buying them at the right cost in the right margin profile. And that CPI effort has been going on since, about 2016 or ’17 at this point. It ebbed and flowed. Certainly, we saw great initial games. And then in the midst of COVID. We’re spending more time just trying to get inventory to satisfy the humongous growth that we’ve had rather than cost. But as we sit here in the market that we see today, it becomes more important that we manage our margins effectively.
We’ve shown great capacity to do that over the past quarters and years with CPI as a great tool to deploy. We have a big effort underway right now to make sure that we do that. A number of our key categories go through the process every quarter. We have an aim to go through all the categories, all the consumable categories at least every year and make sure that we are designing the right assortment for our members, first and foremost, but also to get the right margin profile. So our merchandising team and our analytics team partner together on that effort. They’ve done a tremendous job. That’s one of the reasons you saw the margin performance that we put up this quarter. That effort will continue. Deflation provides a little bit of — a little bit more opportunity to do that.
And we’re certainly finding success in the categories that we’ve reviewed recently. So glad we developed this muscle several years ago. We are putting it out there at this point in time, and we’re seeing some great results.
Operator: Our next question comes from Edward Kelly with Wells Fargo.
Edward Kelly: Hi. Good morning, everyone. I wanted to ask you about just comp cadence. I wanted to ask you about the comp cadence. How did you see comps playing out during the quarter? We’ve heard about some choppiness elsewhere. I was curious as to how Q4 has started so far in November. And then within the guidance, you open the door to some potential reacceleration with the high end of the comp guide in Q4. I’m curious as to what’s behind that and what you think could potentially drive that?
Bob Eddy: Yes. Thanks for the question. It’s a good one. I don’t think my answer will surprise anybody. Some of the other participants in the market have talked about Q3 being a choppy quarter. For us, it was pretty stable in August and September and October was definitely choppy, particularly in the last couple of weeks in October. I don’t think that statement will make any headlines given what’s out in the market already. So we tended to see the same things that others are seeing. Without getting into what we’re seeing in Q4, our guide is a little bit lower than our previous guide for the quarter, and that’s really reflective of the disinflation trends that we saw during third quarter and the recognition of the last couple of weeks in October, we are operating in a pretty cautious consumer environment, and we took the opportunity to put a little of that caution into our guidance.
