David Tarantino: Hi. Good morning. Rick, I wanted to ask your thoughts on the current macroenvironment. And I guess your comments that the consumer seems pretty strong right now, don’t actually line up with what the industry is seeing in terms of traffic. I mean, traffic down 7%. We haven’t seen those types of numbers since maybe ’08 and ’09. So I’m just kind of wondering what your thoughts on traffic? And I know Darden’s been outperforming, but I think even your traffic was slightly negative in the quarter. So, I guess what’s your thoughts on what’s weighing on the traffic and the overall environment?
Rick Cardenas: Yeah, David. Thanks for the question. I did say earlier that we have not seen an impact in the consumer as much as maybe our competitors have. And I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. There is a tension between what people want and what they can afford. And even in a slowing economy, consumers really continue to seek value. And it’s not always about low prices, it’s about execution, it’s about what the experience to get in the restaurant or wherever they are. They’re making spending tradeoffs. And as I said before, food away-from-home is really difficult to give up if you’re executing. And so what we think about it is, what it means to our brands. What it means to what we do every day. And we believe that operators that can deliver on their brand promise and the value that appeals to guests, despite economic challenges, is what’s going to get you to win.
And that’s what we’ve been doing. So whatever has been happening to the consumer and the economy and the restaurant space, we’re going to control what we can control and what we can control is the experience that our consumers get in the restaurants every day and the value we provide. And we continue to hope that we’re going to buck the trend of guest counts that the industry has. And we would expect to have a gap to the industry.
David Tarantino: Great. Maybe just one follow-up on that. I mean, do you think pricing for the industry has become one of the issues as it relates to traffic? I know, you’ve priced a little less than the industry. But, I think, do you think that consumers are becoming more price-sensitive in today’s economy?
Rick Cardenas: I think there might be some price sensitivity in consumers overall, whether it’s in the restaurants or what have you. But you think about GDP trends, so over the last four quarters, GDP has continued to tick down and that would mean that traffic would take down everywhere. Whether it’s at a restaurant or it’s in a retail establishment, wherever it is, as GDP continues to tick down, you would expect traffic to tick down. Yes. The industry saw a little bit more of a hit to that. And I do believe part of that was because of the bounce-back from Omicron last year in Q4. I don’t think we were the only ones that benefited from that. I think others did. And so let’s see how this all plays out. We’ve given you our guidance for the year, which does assume negative traffic.
And actually assumes less negative traffic than the industry. So that should tell you we think there is a little bit of softness there. But we’re going to continue to perform and do the things that we do every day to bring guests into our restaurant.
David Tarantino: Great. Thank you.
Rick Cardenas: Thanks.
Operator: Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of Jeffrey Bernstein with Barclays. Please proceed with your questions.
