Jeffrey Bernstein: Understood. And then as we look forward, I think I pieced together from an outlook perspective on comps, based on the September-October, it seems like the November was roughly at 6%. And I guess if the pricing was similar, for sure that’s a nice uptick. So I’m just wondering, one, I want to confirm that was right. And then I think on December, I thought you said that you were really pleased. I wasn’t sure if that was a reference to the overall comp or how we should just think about the outlook, whether or not it’s fair to assume a mid-single digit type comp sustains with still positive traffic and the pricing in that 3% range. Just trying to figure out the outlook first on the December and then kind of what we should be thinking about for the rest of the year based on those components.
Hajime Jimmy Uba: [Foreign Language] [Interpreted] So, yeah, in terms of the November coming in at about 6%, your math is right there. Looking at December, we did lap out 7% pricing in the first week. But as we said, we were very pleased with our traffic performance — our overall comp performance. We’re confident that with our ongoing traffic strength, our marketing efforts, the IP pipeline that we have, menu development, that we’ll be able to maintain this very strong momentum through the remainder of the fiscal year. We’re very happy.
Jeffrey Bernstein: Understood. Now that’s encouraging, despite I guess concerns of a slow in consumer. So good to hear. My last question was just on the cost side of things. Just a clarification, I think you said the commodities were 4% deflation in the first quarter. I’m just wondering what the labor was for the first quarter and maybe the expectation for each of those for full year, fiscal ’24.
Hajime Jimmy Uba: [Foreign Language] [Interpreted] In terms of labor, we’ve seen about mid-single digits inflation year-over-year, but we were able to come in 30 basis points below the prior year, 31.6% against last year’s 31.9%. And so we’re feeling that the operational efforts that we’ve made, the — as well as the pricing that we’ve taken all come into play there. And we’re very pleased that we were able to not just stay flat, but actually improve our labor mortgages.
Benjamin Porten: And then in terms of food deflation, you’re right, it’s [Technical Difficulty] from quarter one, fiscal ’23 to this year, quarter one, it was about a 4% deflation. And then sequentially from Q4 of this past fiscal year to Q1, it was about 2%.
Jeffrey Bernstein: Got it. And just to clarify, Ben, did you say, I mean, I know depending on how we look at restaurant margins, it varies, but based on your calculation, it was 130 basis points of expansion. But did you say that you expect the restaurant margins flat in fiscal ’24 with the 3% price for the rest of the year? Or were you referring to the labor line? I think that prior question someone was asking about labor, but I know you — I thought you had mentioned that you were comfortable with restaurant margins flat. So just wanted to clarify if you have any kind of forward-looking thoughts on the remaining three quarters from an overall margin perspective. Thank you.
Benjamin Porten: Yeah. If you look at our historical margins, they tend to lever pretty meaningfully every quarter. And so you can just assume that the same as historically, they’re going to continue to improve as we have greater traffic and we can — and greater sales that we can leverage against our fixed costs. The comment about the 3% pricing that we took, we felt it was enough to offset not just our labor cost, but our — we’ve got a cogstail when we do have some other costs, general inflation, but the 3% that we thought was enough to pretty much offset all those inflationary pressures.
Jeff Uttz: And on the — I’ll also add too, Jeff, on the restaurant-level operating profit as a percentage of sales. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we had 130 basis points of leverage there from 18.2% to 19.5%. So with a lot of tailwinds, our pricing, the commodity deflation, the easing of labor inflation, so the tailwinds have been great this past quarter and we fully expect that to continue for the remainder of the year.
Jeffrey Bernstein: Sounds great. Thank you very much.
Hajime Jimmy Uba: Thank you, Jeff.
Benjamin Porten: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jon Tower with Citigroup. Please proceed with your question.
Jon Tower: Great. Thanks for taking the questions. Just a few, if I may, and I apologize if you might have hit this earlier. I had a hard time hearing some of the stuff. But on the loyalty program, I’m curious, how have registrations hit versus your own expectations? And how is it seems as if, per Ben’s comments earlier, at least around the promotion in December, where you can come in twice and get 20% off in January. One, I don’t know if that was only reserved for loyalty members or not, but how is this working overall the loyalty program to drive frequency ticket and/or frankly, any sort of customer insights that you might not have had previously?
Benjamin Porten: Yeah. So generally speaking, whenever we talk about a promotion, you can assume that it’s limited to our rewards members. I don’t know if you recall, in the last earnings call, it was November. Our rewards program had just been out for a couple of weeks, and we mentioned that the registration rate had doubled as compared to the prior program, and we sort of assumed that would level off. That was due the initial excitement. But I’m not sure if you heard in today’s call because the audio is a little bit garbled, but the registration is actually tripled in comparison to the last program. So it hasn’t leveled off. It’s actually accelerated. So I think it’s very fair to say that it’s far exceeded our expectations.
We’re very pleased with it. I think it’s still a little bit premature to be discussing guest insights, but just engagement is great. The things that we can do, the kind of campaigns that we can deploy are at a completely different level. Certainly, the next earnings call will have a lot of good news that we’ll be able to share with you.
