And so while we may have a little choppiness short-term, it doesn’t impact our ability to move, as we need to move, whether it’s in U.S. automotive on M&A or the whole portfolio.
Michael Lasser: Thank you. Sorry for the background.
Bert Nappier: No worries. Thanks, Michael.
Paul D. Donahue: Thanks, Mike.
Operator: The next question comes from Greg Melich of Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.
Greg Melich: Hi, thanks. Some I’d love to go a little deeper in the trend through the quarter and the exit rate and particularly how, inflation may have impacted that.
Bert Nappier: Hey, Greg. It’s Bert. I’ll talk about inflation first, and then we’ll come back to, kind of, our views on guidance and outlook. I think we’ve talked about this a little bit along the way throughout the course of the year. Inflation has really developed almost exactly as we expected with where we thought we would to begin the year. That’s a little bit of a surprise and that we could be, kind of, that consistently, planning and thinking out the way we’re thinking about the trends of inflation. We thought they’d moderate through the course of the year and they have. So, we started the year, with a mid-single-digits, moving to low-single-digits in Q2, all up low-single-digits here again in the third quarter. And we expect to finish out the year in low-single-digit.
So, really has followed how monetary policy has been implemented around the world and tick down as we expected. One thing to call out on inflation, I think it’s important to keep in focus and, Will mentioned it in his prepared remarks, inflation or said differently price, was a significant tailwind in 2022 for the automotive aftermarket. And that’s dissipated in 2023, as I just kind of outlined. In particular, in third quarter a year ago, we were looking at inflation and sales at the high-single-digit level for the Global Automotive segment with the U.S. at nearly 10%. And that’s a pretty tough comp when you think about low-single-digits for this particular period that we’re coming up against. So, I think right now, moving as we expected, we’ll close out the year low-single-digits, across the board.
In terms of the outlook and how we’re thinking about the rest of the year, bringing that up just a level, it’ll start at the highest level and then maybe work down through getting to U.S. automotive. We think we’ve had a great quarter in terms of earnings growth, double-digit earnings here in Q3. That gave us some confidence to narrow our range and lift the bottom up, with a new guidance range of $9.20 to $9.30. As I said in my prepared remarks, we really have a mix of tailwinds and headwinds, tailwinds, solid industry fundamentals for both segments. We’ve improved our gross margin outlook, industrial margin for the full year as a bit better than we thought. There’re some positive trends in industrial production data. I’m not ready to call a new trend, but at least it’s leaning positive of late.
And we’re going to have continued ongoing discipline in costs, and that’s going to lead to our expectations for segment margin expansion for GPC. In terms of headwinds, you guys know most of these. We’ve got a choppy environment out there. We’ve got inflation, geopolitical considerations, a new thing here in October with student loan repayments starting back. That’s probably somewhere near $10 billion a month. So, obviously, something that will impact the consumer. Interest rate environment are up sharply over the last month. And so taken together, we see an increasingly cautious consumer. We’re also going to be prudent about the time that it’s going to take to, to effectuate some of the operational changes and rigor that, Will mentioned. So that taken together, I think, is how we’re thinking about the rest of the year.
