Navdeep Gupta: Thank you, Lauren, and good morning, everyone. Let’s begin with a brief review of our third quarter results. We are very pleased to report consolidated sales increased 2.8% to $3.04 billion as we continued to gain market share. Comp store sales increased 1.7% on top of a 6.5% increase in the same period last year. Our strong comps were driven by a 1.1% increase in transactions and a 0.6% increase in average ticket. Collectively, our back-to-school categories did very well, and we were pleased with the results from our House of Sport locations. Our non-comp sales growth of roughly 110 basis points this quarter was primarily driven by sales at Moosejaw. On a non-GAAP basis, gross profit in the third quarter was $1.07 billion or 35.1% of net sales, and improved 88 basis points compared to last year.
This improvement was driven by lower supply chain costs, which leveraged 78 basis points. Merchandise margin increased 23 basis points, and as expected this increase was primarily driven by anniversary of our clearance activity from last year and partially offset by higher strength of approximately 50 basis points. To be clear, absent the shrink headwind, our merchandise margin would have increased over 70 basis points. Combating theft remains a top priority and we continue to invest in efforts to keep our stores, team mates and athletes save. On a non-GAAP basis, SG&A expense increased $50.1 million to $729.9 million and deleveraged 102 basis points compared to last year. This was favorable versus our expectation due to better than expected sales, targeted actions to control discretionary costs and benefits from our business optimization actions.
As we have highlighted on prior calls, the year-over-year deleverage this quarter was driven by investments in our wage rate, talent and technology to create a better athlete experience, as well as investments in marketing. These areas of investments were partially offset by $8.2 million of expense reduction or 26 basis points of leverage associated with changes in the investment value of our deferred compensation plan which is fully offset in other income. Interest expense was $14.4 million, a decrease of $11.7 million compared to the same period last year. This decrease was primarily due to the inducement charges incurred in the prior year related to the exchange of our convertible senior notes and the interest savings this year from the retirement of those notes.
Other income totaled $10.1 million compared to $4.8 million in the same period last year. This $5.3 million increase in income was driven by a $13.3 million increase in interest income as a result of higher average interest rates on our cash and cash equivalents. This increase to other income was partially offset by $8.2 million expense increase from change in the value of our deferred compensation plan, which fully offsets the SG&A expense reduction I mentioned earlier. Driven by our strong sales, higher gross margin, along with lower interest expense, non-GAAP EBT was $321.1 million or 10.6% of net sales. This compares to an EBT of $304.2 million or 10.3% of net sales in 2022. In total, we delivered non-GAAP earnings per diluted share of $2.85.
This compares to a non-GAAP earnings per diluted share of $2.60 last year, an increase of 10%. As Lauren said, to continue fueling our long-term growth, we have optimized our organization to better align our talent, organizational design, and spending in support of our most critical strategies, while also streamlining our overall cost structure. First, we are resourcing DICK’S for growth. As we discussed on our last call, during the third quarter we took actions to change our resourcing and organizational structure, primarily at our customer support center. Second, we are taking steps to optimize our outdoor specialty business and are forming one team that will support the operations of Public Lands and Moosejaw. This will allow us to quickly leverage the best practices across our outdoor specialty business to drive growth, while operating more efficiently.
We started to see the SG&A benefits from these actions during the third quarter and expect to see continued benefits into Q4 and 2024. These actions, along with our overall focus on improving productivity and reducing discretionary cost will help enable us to significantly moderate our SG&A expense growth in 2024 as compared to this year. As a result of these actions, we incurred pre-tax charges totaling $52.5 million during the third quarter. This included a $6.3 million of inventory related write-down associated with rationalization of non-go-forward Moosejaw inventory. These charges were included in our GAAP earnings per diluted share of $2.39. For additional details on this, you can refer to our non-GAAP reconciliation table of our press release that we issued this morning.
