Mike Egeck: Yes. Good question, Simeon. Look, I believe we’re priced appropriately, and we’re priced in our historical position, right? We’re above mass and home and at or just below specialty. That’s worked for us for a long time to where we’re at now, we’ll obviously react to the market if the market goes lower. But I don’t see us at this time, we need to do that. It would be reaction. It wouldn’t be something we would lead. To your question on market share, though, I have to say, we were expecting a headwind on the credit card data, based on the chemical price changes. As you remember, last quarter, that basis point headwind from the chemicals more than bridged the differential in sales rate. We are frankly surprised this quarter that it didn’t play out the same way.
The chemical price action explained about 40% of the gap doesn’t explain the rest. And it doesn’t line up with our other data checks. And by that, I mean discussions with our vendors, discussions with our store managers, we use similar web for our digital traffic and all of those kind of soft, qualitative and some quantitative measures indicate that our current performance is in line with the industry. So we’re a little surprised by that. The way we’re thinking about it is, first quarter is our smallest quarter. It is — we don’t think it’s a good idea to take that result from Q1 and extrapolate it for the year, not necessarily representative of long-term trends. We ended fiscal year ’23, up 140 basis points versus the industry fiscal year ’22 up 690 basis points.
We feel quite confident we’ll gain share this year as well, but it didn’t play out in the first read from the smallest quarter of the year. Regardless of that, we take this data very seriously. We think it’s important data and we pay attention to it. And we’re taking some actions, like I mentioned in the script. We know that we’ve often been perceived as a premium qualities at a fair price before the chemical price actions of last year that got a little out of whack. And we continue to be head down analyzing how to improve our perception of value with consumers. And we’re doing some very specific things. We’re bringing lower-cost products, smaller sizes of chemical front of the store for that first price and value perception as you come into the store.
And we’re doubling down on an item of the month strategy, which we found to be quite effective and also the increasing messaging around the other value drivers of our business, 5% rewards and free shipping with pool perks or price match guarantee and also our omnichannel capabilities. Those initiatives, all we really started — we started to emphasize all of them really in the second month of the quarter, and we did see improved performance. So we’re going to continue with that, focus of driving value with the consumers, because we believe with our current price positioning, we are a very good and compelling value.
Simeon Gutman: Yes. Thanks for that. Something else we’re thinking about the competitive backdrop, it sounds more stable. You talked about chemical pricing, and then we talked about your pricing. Is there any way — or how do you think about gauging what you’re seeing today as like a precursor for the spring, or you can’t judge the last couple of months and how the spring will shape up once we get the peak selling season.
Mike Egeck: Yes. I think it’s again, it’s the smallest quarter, and then January is our smallest month. So we really need to get into at least February and March when some of the — some belt markets start to percolate that we can see our first look at the velocity going into the season. But we’re encouraged by the different weather forecasting, we use everything from farmers almanac to WTI to NOA to Planalytics, which is our core provider. And we’re pleased to see that for the months of March, April, May, really the kickoff with the season and into June, we’re seeing at least normal, if not favorable weather across most of our key markets. So I think it’s a pretty good setup the pool season. The other thing to take into account is, last year, we saw evidence of people stockpiling our latest survey, which we talked about last quarter.
Consumers are indicating they’re not doing that. We have another survey going out this month to confirm that. But I think we see no stockpiling or significantly less. We see a good weather setup. We’re very pleased with where we are with pricing and our in-stock levels and our NPS scores are all improving. So we feel pretty good about the setup to the season. But to your point, it doesn’t become — there’s not a lot of clarity around that, I would say, until March, April.
Simeon Gutman: Okay. Thanks. Good luck.
Mike Egeck: Thank you.
Operator: Our next question is from Steven Forbes with Guggenheim Securities. Please proceed.
