Richard Galanti: If the lapping stays at 0, yes, there would be no new charge, so it would be comparing to a charge last year. To the extent that, yes, prices were to go down relative to a year ago, you’d actually have a LIFO credit, which would be even a bigger year-over-year delta.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Chuck Grom with Gordon Haskett.
Charles Grom: Richard, just curious if you could talk about the gas business from a competitive standpoint and how that’s changed bigger picture over the years and then, more recently, how gas balance have trended.
Richard Galanti: Yes. Gas has been a relative blessing as well. It’s a profitable business. It is volatilely profitable. Sometimes it’s more. And sometimes, it’s less. But overall, it’s a profitable business. It’s given us an additional competitive advantage of getting people in the door, if you will. I think it was this last summer into early fall where I’ve given some numbers where our gallon sales increases in the U.S. were up in the mid- to high teens compared to darn near flat for the U.S. population as a whole. I announced yesterday on that, and I think that 15-plus percent delta of us versus the U.S. population is still about 10 percentage points. And so we are still taking market share, if you will, and getting people in the parking lot.
And in terms of value, we look at a value compared to average value across our locations where we do comp shops, in some cases, every day in many locations. This year, to date, I’m looking at single-digit number, we feel that we saved a member $0.37. That’s an improvement. Over the last 5 years, it’s gone from the mid-20s to the mid-30s.
Charles Grom: Okay. That’s helpful context. And then just on the inflation, just as prices have started to come down and as you’ve invested in price, too, curious what you’ve seen from a demand perspective and how you’re measuring the success of some of those price actions that you appear to be taking?
Richard Galanti: Well, it’s an art, not a science. We’ll look at high-velocity items where we can make a big difference, pass on some items. On some things, I mean this is just anecdotal because it was from our last budget meeting, with shipping costs coming dramatically down, on a 25- and 50-pound bags of jasmine rice, we’ve seen a big uptick in sales because that’s an item that really skyrocketed because it’s per pound, based on the size of the bag, it was a heavy freight cost. And so as that comes down, we see that going. I think we’re doing more with our suppliers, changing things around with the MVM. Part of that’s based on allocation issues of what we have. But overall, no, we’re firm believer of if you improve the value by lowering the price, you’re going to drive more sales.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Scot Ciccarelli with Truist Securities.
Scot Ciccarelli: So you guys, like many others, have seen a shift away from a bunch of discretionary categories, probably stronger sales strength in the consumable category. But gross margins are actually pretty stable. So I guess the question is, should we start to expect more gross margin pressure on a go-forward basis if we were to kind of see that mix shift continue to lean towards kind of food and consumables?
