And I think the comment I made was something to the effect, we’d probably do it anyway because we’re going to use it to drive greater value in terms of pricing and everything in a big way. And so that really — I think we’ve probably done it in times of lower comps or higher comps or good economy or tougher economy. And I think with the headline in the — I probably mentioned in the last quarter call or even the quarter before that, with the headline being recession question mark and inflation exclamation point, there’s no rush. And first of all, even if we follow the pattern of the last three — over the last 16 or so years, they averaged 5 years and 7 months. And I know now that 5 years and 7 months from June of ’17 is January of ’23. I know on the last call, I said, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be January ’23.
It will be — it’s a question of when, not if. But at this juncture, we’ll just have to wait and see. And I’m not trying to be cute about it, but there’s not a whole lot more I can tell you. There’s no analytical framework we use other than we feel very good about our member loyalty and our strength. And if we wanted to do it yesterday, we could. If we want to do it six months from now, we can. So we’ll wait and see. As it relates to the special dividend, as you know, we’ve said before, it’s certainly an arrow in our quiver that has boded well for us, we believe. We think that’s done well. We’ve done 4 of them. The last one was a couple of years ago, and we certainly do have cash. Mind you, when you look at our cash, about half of it’s U.S. and not cash equivalents.
And so certainly, we have the ability to do it at some point. I think we wanted to wait and see how things are continuing here. I think that, too, is probably a question of when, not if. But again, you’ll be the second to know, after us.
Operator: And we’ll take our final question this evening from Robbie Ohmes of Bank of America.
Robert Ohmes : It will be a real quick one, Richard. Can you just remind us, you’re back to 15 net stores in the U.S., but what has to happen to go back to kind of the years where you would open kind of a net 25 a year in the U.S. and maybe relieve some of the pressure on the over-productive clubs in the U.S. right now?
Richard Galanti : Yes. I think it’s been a few years. I mean when we opened the net of 27 or 28, maybe low 20s or 22 or 23 were there. But we’ve been at maybe 16 or 17 out of 23-ish in the last few years. If you ask Craig, who’s not in the room, but if you ask him, if we’re opening a net of 24 this year, I think I said, what’s the goal five and 10 years from now, probably to get it closer to 30 net. And probably by 5 years from now, it’s 50-50 U.S. elsewhere — versus elsewhere. That’s the same answer I, by the way, said 5 years ago in terms of the split. But we’d like to see add 5 to that 24 in the next few years to go up a little bit higher. Certainly we have a lot of activity going on.
Richard Galanti: Okay. With that, everyone, I’ll thank you. Have a good holiday, and we’re around to answer questions.
Operator: Thank you, Richard. Ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude Costco’s fiscal Q1 2023 Conference Call. Thank you all so much for joining us. I wish you all a great evening. Goodbye.
Richard Galanti : Thank you.
