Jeremy Hamblin: Congrats on the strong results. I wanted to ask one to see if, first, just clarifying on the cadence trends. If I’m not mistaken, I think the cadence — the compares get easier as we get into the back half of December and into January. So first just confirm that. And then the second question would be just you’ve invested a lot in technology within the stores self-checkout. We’ve had a lot of retailers that have talked about an increase in shrink rates in 2022. I wanted to get a sense for what you’re seeing and particularly as the last couple of quarters here and as we get into the holiday season.
Joel Anderson: Yes. Thanks, Jeremy. Yes, I think you’re thinking about the cadence piece of it, right? If you recall, Q4 last year, January, was up against the stimulus payment from ’20 January of 2021, which was the end of our fiscal ’20. And so that was our hardest compare last year. I do think January is now a more normalized baseline from prior years. And it’s also our smallest month of the year. But clearly, I think — and this is all in our guide, too. We expect November was the toughest. There was a big pull forward last year of buying with the whole concern over supply chain. But that — we factored kind of all that in as we thought about our cadence for the quarter. And then as far as shrink rates, look, there’s been a lot of talk in the industry about that, I think all that started to emerge in ’20 and ’21.
And so I don’t expect ’22 to be significantly different than ’21. And — some of that’s driven by our price points vis-a-vis some of the higher-end retailers, but it’s also kind of already in our — largely in our base from last year.
Operator: Our next question will come from Chuck Grom with Gordon Haskett.
Eric Cohen: This is Eric Cohen on for Chuck. Inventory growth definitely improved a lot this quarter. I was wondering if you could sort of unpack the drivers of improving growth and then also sort of how you’re thinking about inventory as we get to year-end.
Ken Bull: Yes. Thanks, Eric. Yes, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we did see a significant improvement in that year-over-year average store inventory. It actually dropped in half — you recall back in Q2 was I think the growth rate was in the high 40%, I think 47% down to 22%. The overwhelming majority of that was our strategy of accelerating inventory receipts to get prepared for this holiday season. We didn’t want to get caught up in any type of supply chain disruption. And if you move forward, to the end of the year based on our expectations, we think that moderation is going to continue significantly as we get back to the end of the year. And we’ll be — we should be in a very good position at the end of the year. And probably we’re seeing some of the freshest inventory levels that we’ve seen in years. So we feel really good about where inventory is for us right now.
Operator: And our next question will come from Anthony Chukumba with Loop Capital Markets.
Anthony Chukumba: You mentioned that your assisted self-checkout penetration I guess it’s in 70% of your stores. And I was just wondering what’s sort of the long-term target? And are there any kind of limiting factors to get into 100%?
Joel Anderson: Yes. Thanks, Anthony. Look, the long-term targets, it will probably never be exactly 100%. Some of it is a factor of converting old stores. So I would say our really low-volume stores or still our smaller format stores, we probably aren’t going to have the room to put it in. And then our extremely high shrink stores, we tend not to put it in there. So — but for all intents purposes, that number will continue to float up. It will never be 100%, but it’s probably not going to be less than 85%. So somewhere in that range, 85% to 90%. Thanks, Anthony.
Operator: Our next question will come from Brad Thomas with KeyBanc Capital Markets.
Brad Thomas: And best wishes for the holidays here. My question was, Ken, I know it’s early to talk about 2023, but I was wondering if in broad strokes you can give us a little bit more thinking around margins given some of the noise that we’re seeing and given the inflection that you’re guiding for here in gross margin?
