Bobby Griffin: I guess, first, I wanted to maybe talk about have you seen any small change in customer behavior or anything as you start to see gas prices move up sequentially? Still not at the peak levels we saw back last year, but we have started to see them move up. So, just anything curious about if you’re starting to see behavior similar to what was happening in the prior period of very high gas prices?
Darren Rebelez: No, Bobby, we haven’t seen a dramatic shift in that. And gas price is still about $1 a gallon, below where they were last year when we hit the peak. So, the pressure is probably not as acute on gas. Where we do see some changes in behavior is really on the lower-income consumer. As a reminder, we are not overly exposed to that consumer. We only have about a quarter of our guests would fit in that category, about three quarters are — make more than $50,000 a year. And so, they’re out of that lower income. And so, for that lower-income consumer, we do see some shifting around on fuel. They’re buying higher ethanol blended fuels and our E15 offering at about 15% gallon growth in the quarter. So that would be indicative of that.
Private label is purchased more frequently by them, and we are seeing some pressure in some categories that were a little more EBT sensitive like take-home dairy and some edible grocery, but that’s primarily from the lower-income consumer. And obviously, even within that grocery category, with a little bit of pressure in some subcategories, we’re still up 7% year-over-year. So, we think while there is a little bit of that behavior changing at the lower end, overall for the total gas space, it’s not having a big impact.
Bobby Griffin: All right. I appreciate it. That’s helpful. And then maybe secondly for me is just on the ongoing strong performance in OpEx with the store hour reductions and optimization. Just anything more detail on kind of where you are in that journey, kind of what you’re still finding and where areas of the store are getting optimized? And I guess, secondly, is it across the network that you’re seeing these savings, or is it more like, hey, we’ve identified a subset of stores in certain regions that we’re getting better optimization out of? Just any further clarity around there, because the performance has been very strong.
Darren Rebelez: Yeah. Thanks. No, I’m really proud of the continuous improvement team that’s been working on this. And this has been going on for over a year now. And what I’d tell you first is that they’re really taking a scientific approach to where those bottlenecks are in our store operation, where we are spending labor that is just not having an impact on the business and how we can change those processes or employ technology to make them more efficient. And so, I feel really good about the fact that we’ve taken these hours out, but our engagement scores are up among our team members and our OSAT scores are up among our guests. So, it’s an indication that we’re just simply running this business more effectively and not having a negative impact on the guest experience or our team members.
In terms of the sustainability, obviously, whenever you go into one of these exercises, there’s some low-hanging fruit and you get that first. But our team has a pipeline or a roadmap for the next three years of discrete initiatives that they’ve identified that we can implement and continue to take OpEx out of the store or give the store more slack to run the store better. So, we feel this is sustainable, and we still have a few years to go in terms of capturing all these opportunities.
Operator: Thank you. One moment please for our next question. Our next question will come from Irene Nattel of RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.
