It’s also taking longer to get to completion than it was in the past. And so if you think of it at that time it will take to build a restaurant, it’s longer than it was. A lot of that is driven by developers, utilities, hookups and time for permitting and also time for getting certificates of occupancy. So if you think about the time that we have openings, we’ve got a lot of our openings next year towards the end, which could slip. And that’s what we just wanted to make sure that we get the number — that we tell you a number that we’re going to hit. But we want to get closer to that high end over the long-term. And the other thing is I want everybody to remember we do include M&A as part of those new restaurants. And we didn’t talk about that, but Ruth’s Chris, we added 77 restaurants this year.
So it gave us a little bit of a relief valve to not be so aggressive if we didn’t need to be aggressive.
Operator: Thank you. Next question today is coming from David Tarantino from Baird. Your line is now live.
David Tarantino: Hi. Good morning. I want to come back to the question of how you would manage the business if the environment were to get worse from here? And in particular, you mentioned you had some levers to pull on. I know you don’t want to share details around that, but I was wondering if you could just comment on whether anything would change if things got worse? And then specifically on the pricing question, just wondering your pricing philosophy in the current environment and whether you will continue to be conservative relative to your inflation levels?
Rick Cardenas: Yes, David, as we think about the levers we can pull, we have — as we’ve talked over the years, we brought our marketing down. We’ve actually focused more on our core equities. And every year, we might take marketing up a little bit, but we’re not going to strategic — we’re not going to change our strategy. We’re not going to become a discount kind of heavily promotional brand. We worked really hard through COVID and before to get to what we think is a better, stable, stronger business for us for the long-term. And we would be willing to deal with short-term pressures to not change our strategy to get to the long-term. Now again, we have some tactics that we can do, which would still stick to our strategy, but we’re not going to — we don’t plan on getting to be a promotional deep discounting brand.
Again, Olive Garden, which had less marketing in Q3 than it did in Q2, while they had less marketing than last year and in the second quarter, our competitors had more, Olive Garden still gained share. And that’s what our focus is, is to share gain, sales and profit growth over the time. We’re going to continue to focus on execution, our food, our service and our atmosphere to increase frequency with our core guests. And we love our core guests. We think they’re great for us, and we’ll continue to build over time. We’re just not going to fight gravity on what’s going on in the environment. We’re going to stick to what we want to do. And then on the pricing side, we — our strategy is to continue to price below inflation over time. And we’ve taken a lot less pricing than the competitive set.
We’ve taken a lot less pricing than CPI, a lot less pricing than full service, limited service over the last four years. So it gives us some room to continue to price if we need to. But our still — our plan is still over the long term to price below inflation.
David Tarantino: Great. It makes sense.
Operator: Thank you. Next question today is coming from Jeffrey Bernstein from Barclays. Your line is now live.
Jeffrey Bernstein: Great, thank you. My first question, Rick, you mentioned the operating environment tougher than anticipated. Just wondering how would you size up? How much of that is the broader macro versus maybe whether you’d say there were any internal missteps? I mean, I’m assuming your data is showing that the broader industry pullback was not just Darden in February that you’re seeing, the broader industry see the very same directional trend in February. Is that fair to say? Any thoughts there would be great.
Rick Cardenas: Yes, Jeff, I think it’s a broader market versus any specific missteps we had. Our gap increased from January to February, our traffic and sales gap increased, both of those increased between January and February. And as I said, every category in the industry from QSR and up had negative traffic in the quarter. And so I think there’s a little bit of a bigger challenge, at least a year-over-year challenge for our consumer. And we’re going to see how that plays out over the next couple of quarters and see if there’s anything we need to change, but it won’t be a dramatic change.
Jeffrey Bernstein: Understood. And then just to follow-up the February, it sounds like you said it improved, but below plan. Did that underlying consumer weakness persist into March? I mean I know we’re talking about short periods, but February is a short period and now we’re pretty far into March. I’m just wondering whether you’ve seen any change for the better or the worse? And just curious from your perspective because you do have, I believe, up to nine brands now. What do you think drove that change in behavior? Is there anything in particular you’re seeing? Because it does seem like January was weather, but then it really was just February and potentially into March. So I’m just wondering what your perspective is in terms of what drove that pullback? Thank you.
