Bobby Lavan: Hi, Jason.
Jason Tilchen: Great, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Just to start, I was curious on Lucky Strike. In the press release, you talked a little bit about how profitability there was ahead of target. Wondering if you could maybe just spend a minute filling down on that a bit, talk about some of the areas we’re already seeing savings and then some of the further areas of improvement that you’ve identified some of that, which could be centered around some of those investments you were just talking about.
Bobby Lavan: Yes. I mean the Bowlero procurement system is very strong. And so ultimately, we put in our systems in Lucky, we only closed on September 15. So it’s that. But on top of that, our events platform just crushed it in December, and we had multiple center buyouts, which are very, very profitable to the business. Center buyouts are great because they take down the center, you know exactly how much staffing you’re doing, how much food you’re doing, how much liquor you’re doing, things like that. And that ultimately sort of drove incremental profitability in those centers. So we’re very happy with where Lucky is coming out.
Jason Tilchen: Great. That’s helpful. And just one quick follow-up. Maybe you can give an update on how sort of the value bundles that you’ve been using during sort of the peak times have performed over recent months as you’ve expanded them to more centers across the country.
Bobby Lavan: Yes. I mean, ultimately, the pizza and pictures in every center, we’re getting good uptake. You’ll see that we’re testing out the alley sampler. A lot of these things take a little bit of a pause in December because December is very focused on events, but we’re pretty happy with the uptake. We’re really focused on what Lev said, is taking best practices from centers that are very good at upselling these products and pushing that to the rest of the portfolio.
Thomas Shannon: This is Tom. I’ll chime in and add. Dave & Buster’s was down 7.8% on a same-store basis in the last reported quarter. We were up 0.2%, right? So we are massively outperforming the leisure and hospitality sector. And so the way you get there is by doing all these things like bundling, value pricing, tinkering with pricing and all these other sort of continuous optimization exercises. And so don’t think of it as one initiative or another initiative that we talk about. It’s really been systematized and it’s getting more optimized and will continue to become more optimized under Lev’s leadership. But we’re playing with pricing and promotion sort of all the time. And I think that the result of being up when everyone, all of our competitors, all of our peers were down, in some cases, down massively, shows you the strength of our model and the strength of how we operate and how we adjust on the fly.
Jason Tilchen: Perfect. Thanks so much.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Matthew Boss from JPMorgan.
Matthew Boss: Great, thanks.
Thomas Shannon: How are you doing?
Matthew Boss: Hey good, how are you? Tom, maybe just to start off, could you speak to performance that you’re seeing from Lucky Strike maybe relative to initial expectations? And then could you just elaborate on the customer response specifically to some of the pricing and promotion changes and how you saw this impact second quarter comps?
Thomas Shannon: I’ll take the first part, and I’ll hand off to Lev on the second part. We’re very pleased with Lucky Strike, it’s outperformed our expectation. They had a very, very strong December, very strong holiday season, and we’re seeing shockingly high revenue numbers out of the Lucky Strike properties. We hired Nielsen to conduct brand survey, and they came and concluded that the strength of the Lucky Strike brand was between 50% and 100% stronger than Bowlero in terms of aided and unaided customer awareness. And so as an experiment, we opened our most recent center in Moorpark, California, which is just northwest of Los Angeles as a Lucky Strike and it has wildly outperformed expectations. So we feel very, very good about the Lucky Strike brand.
We’re about to open our second new Lucky Strike location in Miami. That will open probably this month, if not the beginning of March. We couldn’t be happier with the Lucky Strike brand, Lucky Strike performance. We already saw a 50% increase in profitability in the last quarter versus what Lucky Strike had done a year ago under prior ownership, and we’re just getting started. And I’ll give the second part of that question to Lev.
Lev Ekster: So with regard to our promotions, like Tom mentioned earlier, we just continue to tinker and we try new things, we try new price points, we try new offerings, things that work, we expand. So Tom mentioned the pizza and picture worked really well, or sorry, Bobby mentioned that it’s performing, right? So what did we do? We expanded that to our lead program. So now we actually have a national league program that comes with a pizza and picture for every team. And that’s really resonating as one of our fastest national programs in terms of sign-ups. We’re bringing summer games back. We’re not going to bring it back exactly how we’ve done it in the past. We have some learnings. We’re going to optimize that program. But at the end of the day, none of them operate in a vacuum.
We try to get foot traffic into our centers and now we’re focused on execution once we have that customer. So we’re seeing a really nice improvement in our NPS scores, which is our guest service landscape, right? We’re investing into our people, and I think it’s really showing in those results. And now we get that foot traffic back with these promotions, and we execute, we convert that to revenue, higher F&B attachment for example.
