Peter Saleh: Great. And then just on the competitive environment as it relates to new restaurant formation, there’s been a lot of discussion around the surge in construction costs. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re seeing more specifically on new restaurant formation from the competition, maybe more specifically independents? Are you seeing more newer restaurants being built? Or is there a pullback in development given the surge in construction costs? Any insight on that would be helpful.
Ricardo Cardenas: Yes, Peter, there are always new restaurants being built. The question is how many are closing to offset the new restaurants being built. As trade areas move, you’re going to see restaurants open. But as we think about the number of units that have closed since pre-COVID, but it’s still double digits. We’re not seeing that number get smaller or bigger, right? So it’s starting to level off a little bit. But some strong competitors still opening restaurants on a net basis. We are opening restaurants on a net basis, but we’re not seeing a whole lot of net unit growth in total for the full-service restaurant space. Now as the construction costs start to weigh and as Raj mentioned, maybe you’ll see a little bit about that. But I think the margins make it a little bit more challenging.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Lauren Silberman with Credit Suisse.
Lauren Silberman: Rick, you mentioned 4 of the brands that are running at all-time high internal guest satisfaction levels. What do you think is driving these record levels? And any sense of how this might compare to guest satisfaction across the industry broadly?
Ricardo Cardenas: Well, Lauren, I would say what’s driving it is the things that we’ve been doing over the last few years. We talk about simplicity and how simplicity makes it easier for our teams to do what they do. And if they don’t have a lot of different things they have to learn and execute, it gets easier. As we streamlined the menu over the last few years, as Gene even mentioned it a year ago, streamlined the menu, you have more items being — fewer items being made more often. That means the team gets better at those items versus having these 1 or 2 items that you sell in a week. So that helps experience. Our team members have left to learn on the selling side because there’s fewer items. So they get — they understand the items more.
Now what we’ve seen in our performance is our performance in our brands are getting stronger. We’re not necessarily seeing the competitor situation move. They might have been flattening out or maybe a couple here or there have gone a little bit on the negative side. But our satisfaction, we’re really proud of it. We’re proud of both the internal measures and the external measures. And then finally, I will say we’ve made significant investments over the last few years in our food and in our people. and that will eventually show up in guest satisfaction, and it has. So we feel really good about what we’re doing. And our brands having — being #1 in all of the categories for Technomic, having a Darden brand being #1 in gets the first time ever.
That’s amazing news for us. And we’re going to continue to do what we’ve done to improve satisfaction, to make it easier for our restaurant teams to do what they do and to invest in our people and invest in our food.
Lauren Silberman: Great. And just a follow-up on the holiday season. Gift card sales are generally pretty important for early calendar ’23. Anything you can share on what you’ve seen with gift card sales so far this season?
Rajesh Vennam: I see they’re pretty consistent with last year. I don’t — I mean, again, there’s also gift card sales, the day before Christmas matters a lot. So there’s still a little bit of time to go. And then we haven’t discounted. We — a lot of — before COVID, we used to have some offers for gift cards. We have stop doing that. So pretty much all of our big brands, we don’t discount. We don’t provide any additional discount to buy gift cards. So for us to see the strength we are seeing without any discounts, we feel pretty good.
Operator: Our next question comes from Sara Senatore with Bank of America.
