Dave & Buster’s Entertainment, Inc. (NASDAQ:PLAY) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jake Bartlett: Great. That’s helpful. And I wanted to switch to some questions on margins. You talked about inflationary pressures. Could you just tell us how much was food inflation, Food and Beverage inflation? How much was labor inflation in ’22? And then, what are your expectations for ’23?

Mike Quartieri: Yes. I’ll take that one. So when you’re looking at the — I’m going to start with labor inflation. We are seeing some relief there. I think when you look at the hourly wages quarter sequential, they’ve stayed relatively flat. So we feel that we’ve got that stabilized. And same with the commodities, we’ve actually seen a nice decline. So when you’re looking at, call it, quarter sequential inflation, we went from about 17% versus 21% in Q2, 17% came down to 9% in Q3. And in Q4, we saw that come down to roughly 4%. So the work that the procurement team has done in combination with this as well as the synergies that we were able to achieve, we’ve been able to get commodity inflation down. The biggest component of the commodity inflation that we’ve seen relief on is really around proteins, which is really, call it, both chicken breast and chicken wings.

Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Chris Morris, Chief Executive Officer for any closing remarks.

Chris Morris: All right. Thank you, operator. In closing, we would like to again commend our team for the exceptional results they continue to produce at our stores across the country and for all the hard work that was done at our Dallas support center to integrate the Main Event business and optimize the infrastructure to support the bright future of these two phenomenal brands. Thank you all for joining. We look forward to keeping you apprised of our continued progress on growth initiatives and revealing the more details about our long-term strategic plan at our Investor Day in May. Thank you very much.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.