Alexandra Straton: Great. That’s super helpful. Maybe one more for me is just on the merchandising org part, it sounds like hiring component is mostly complete. But maybe could you talk about the other pieces to that, that could get the business or that part of the business where it needs to be going forward, is there anything maybe outside of just the hiring and the leadership that you’ve already seemingly gotten in place? Thanks.
Michael O’Sullivan: Yes, actually, it’s a really important point. Growing our merchant capability and merchandising capability isn’t just about headcount. Obviously, headcount and bringing in talent is important, but it’s also about processes and tools. We’ve had — we’ve talked about this before, for the last 18 months, 18 to 24 months, we’ve had a project internally at Burlington called Merchandising 2.0 that is focused on our buying processes, our planning processes, making these more nimble, more off-price, and basically putting better tools, better reports, better structure around those processes. I would say that this has been probably the most important project in the company, certainly one of the most important projects in the company.
That project has already started to deliver some improvements. But I would say most of the deliverables from that project, 80% of the benefits, I’m going to say, are still ahead of us and mostly ahead of us in terms of being delivered in 2023. So I think in 2023, we’re going to have a combination of great talent that we’ve hired, plus improved processes, tools, reports, etcetera. So I think that’s going to be that’s going to really put us in a position to take advantage of the investment that we’ve made in our merchandising organization.
Alexandra Straton: That’s great color. Good luck.
Michael O’Sullivan: Thank you.
Operator: Our next question comes from Chuck Grom from Gordon Haskett. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Charles Grom: Hey, good morning. Thanks very much. Michael, as the quarter progressed, I’m curious if you saw any pickup in trade down activity, some of the external factors that have impacted your business intensified and maybe that partially explain the acceleration towards the end of October? And I was also curious if there’s any geographic call outs across the country, particularly at the end of the month and into November?
Michael O’Sullivan: Sure. So let’s start with the trade down. I would say that we don’t yet have any clear evidence of a trade-down customer in our stores. I think I may have said this in August, but with the external promotional environment being what it is, I just think the incentive, the motivation for a trade down is diluted. You don’t need to come to our stores if you can get great deals elsewhere. Now given the changes that we have made in August, I do feel like as we finish Q3, our assortments and our values were a lot more compelling. And again, I want to be careful that there’s much more we need to do and we can do. But I think as we make our assortments more compelling, I think we will see a trade-down customer in our stores.
It’s just I can’t say that we have a lot of evidence of that just yet. On your question about sort of regional variations, and there’s not — there wasn’t a lot to call out in terms of regional performance in Q3. The — I would say that the comp performance on the West Coast has trailed the chain for most of the year, that continued in Q3. But other than that, our regional performance has been fairly broad-based.
