Richard Galanti: Yes. By the way, gasoline inventory is very small relative to everything else. And it turns darn near daily. But a lot of the improvement or reduction in inventory year-over-year was all the stuff backed up with the supply chain challenges and the port challenges a year ago. So we feel we’re in good inventory shape. The flow is much better. There’s always going to be anecdotal examples of stuff, we have a little too much of something or a little too less, but we feel pretty good right now about our inventory levels even by category. There’s a few categories, a little over a few categories under, but nothing like when we were 26% up and had a lot of, what I’ll call, in-transit stuff literally on those pictures that you saw on the news, of the ports, on the ships. And so that’s improved a lot.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Oliver Chen with TD Cowen.
Thomas Nass: It’s Tom on for Oliver. On digital, can you guys add some color as to how comps are expected to trend in the near term just given the easing compares in the back half of the year? And additionally, what opportunities lie ahead in terms of digital business from an engagement point of view?
Richard Galanti: Well, we don’t project where we’re going. But I was glad at least that February, while negative, was a little better than January. We’ve got additional marketing activities that we’ve got going on there. We did hire just 5 months ago a new Head of Digital that is in the process of doing a lot of things. So there’ll be more to report over the next several quarters. In my view, there’s a lot of opportunities and low hanging fruit to do that. The biggest thing, the challenge that we’ve had, just looking at our current numbers, was that we’ve been so successful over the last 2 years. Not only did COVID drive huge business on big-ticket things for home, be it furniture, electronics, televisions, you name it, computers, and also the acquisition a couple of years ago or 3 years ago of what’s now called Costco Logistics, those 2 things drove that business in such a big way.
We recognize that’s part of it. But we’re not hanging our hat on that, we want to grow the sales.
Thomas Nass: Great. And as a follow-up on the executive memberships, with the higher penetration there, could you just talk about how those members behave relatively, and additionally, the effects on the business from that higher penetration?
Richard Galanti: Well, they’re more loyal, they spend more and they come more frequently. It’s only good stuff. So look, at the end of the day, if we can get somebody to, in the U.S. as an example, spend $120 instead of $60 at the current rates, and with that, they get the 2% Reward with some other benefits on certain consequential transactions, that definitely drives loyalty and drive frequency. And so the executive member spends more and shops more. And then if we get them also to get the co-branded Citi Visa card, it’s even better than that. So all those things work, in our view, in a positive direction. And so we like the fact that the executive membership penetration helped. We’ve said in the last couple of years, we brought it into a few other smaller countries.
You need a core base of 15 or so locations to do it. And so we’ve provided it in other locations as well. But we’re still seeing increased penetration in the U.S. of that. We do a better job, by the way, when somebody new comes in to sign up, getting them to sign up, we do a better job of explaining the benefits of an executive membership than we did years ago as well.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Kelly Bania with BMO.
