Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc. (NASDAQ:CBRL) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

It just — Q2 just wasn’t a particularly meaningful quarter with the younger cohorts. But overall, we feel good about that. And we do have a lot planned towards the end of the year to continue those efforts to bring in more younger folks, one of the biggest ones being the launch of our loyalty rewards program.

Andrew Wolf: So you remain on track to launch the program in your fiscal fourth quarter, the loyalty program?

Jennifer Tate: We are working very hard to meet that timing, and we certainly do intend to launch in the fourth quarter.

Andrew Wolf: Okay. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from Jon Tower with Citibank. Please go ahead. Jon, your line might be on mute. We’re going get to the next questioner, Todd Brooks with the Benchmark Company. Please go ahead.

Todd Brooks: Hi, thanks. Just a couple of quick follow-ups here. On an earlier question, you were talking about Maple Street and construction frictions. And I just want to start to look out to the forward year. If this is a 15 unit type of year and you’re building a pipeline of sites, a pipeline of talent and then taking the frictions into account, which hopefully will ease going into fiscal ’24 for you. What’s a reasonable growth expectation. If you open 15 next year, you think you can open 20 in the out year? Or how should we start to frame that up?

Craig Pommells: Todd, it’s Craig. At this time, it’s still early enough in the planning process that we’re not prepared to share any — our fiscal ’24 openings as yet.

Todd Brooks: Okay. Fair enough. And then my second follow-up is on the retail gross margins. I know we talked in the quarter that just ended about a normalization in kind of markdown rates, and we saw that in the gross margin. When I look at Q3, because we’ve been so clean the past couple of years from an inventory standpoint, we’ve seen kind of retail gross margins in that 47% range. But I think historically, in a normalized environment, even more in the mid-48% to 49% range. So just wondering how clean are the inventories? Do the markdowns carry over into this quarter? And should we think about that old historical kind of 48% to 49% range? Or is there a shot to do the 47% again? Thanks.

Sandy Cochran: Well, I can — I’ll start on the inventory and then turn it over to Craig to see what he — how specific he wants to get on retail guidance. But the inventories are actually, I’d say, very clean. I think our retail teams did a good job of managing through, particularly our seasonal inventories. First of all, the consumers love them. And so that we went into the season with strong sales. And as we got closer, they really did a good job of managing the markdown. So we were able to clear a lot of inventory at a higher price than I think we would have if we had waited longer, particularly, we had a big storm right at the Christmas weekend. So I feel good about where inventories are now. In terms of margin expectations for the quarter, generally, we’re going to be in more of a normalizing standpoint from now on, which is not as good as last year, but better than ’19 is kind of what I…

Craig Pommells: Exactly. That’s exactly right. We’re — the retail business is doing great. They are on track. We’re very pleased and the margin approach is returning to normal. I think last year’s Q3, we were still lower than normal. And by Q4, we were much closer. So I would say as we go forward, it’s closer to where we’ve been traditionally pre-COVID.

Todd Brooks: Okay. Very helpful. Thank you both.

Operator: Our next question comes from Katherine Griffin with Bank of America. Please go ahead.