David Tarantino: Ian, I wanted to follow up on your comments about sales moderating as the year goes on, which is understandable given the starting point here. But specifically, I was hoping you could perhaps break down the guest count growth versus the check growth in the US, and if you have it in IOM as well for the second quarter. And then how do you expect the check growth component to moderate as kind of the inflation environment gets a little bit more moderate? So I guess if you could just frame that up for us that would be helpful.
Ian Borden: Well, look, what I’ll do is, I think, kind of give you the broad brush factors that I think we consider when we talk to kind of our expectation of a moderation in our top line as we kind of work through the back half of the year. I think there are three things there that I’d call out. The first is just we certainly believe from a kind of COVID comparability that the substantive kind of tailwinds are fully behind us as we move into the back half of the year. So I think that’s the first piece. The second piece is just as we’ve talked to in our opening remarks, I mean, we certainly are seeing inflation start to gradually come down. I think that’s been the case in the US business probably starting the end of last year.
It’s obviously still elevated, but I think we are seeing that gradual kind of decline. And I think in the majority of our international markets, we started to see, I think, as we head into the back half of the year, the gradual decline begin there as well. And so I think as inflation begins to come down, I would certainly expect our pricing levels to also start to come down. So that’s the second factor. And I think then the third factor would just be, as Chris touched on previously, I mean, I think there are a number of our top markets where we know the macroeconomic conditions are challenging. We know there continues to be a lot of pressure on consumers. We know consumer sentiment continues to be impacted. And so we do expect the broader sector to kind of begin to kind of decline in those markets as we go through the back half of the year.
And so I think that’s kind of the third broad kind of trend that we think about when we talk about moderation. So if I spoke specifically to the US, I think we’re obviously looking at kind of a one year comparable but also kind of comparing back to 2019, I think that moderation is probably more pronounced in the back half of the second half than the front half. But I think if you step back and you think — you look at the quarter two results, we had positive traffic across each of the three operating segments. We are laser focused on what we certainly feel is the most important metric, which is that we are continuing to gain market share in the majority of our top markets. We know we continue to outperform the competitive set and that’s certainly what we’re laser focused on.
We feel really confident about how our Accelerating the Arches strategy continues to resonate across all the markets we do business with and the strength of our underlying momentum.
Mike Cieplak: Our next question is from Jeff Bernstein with Barclays.
Jeff Bernstein: Just looking at the guidance that you provided. I think you mentioned that operating margins, you’re now expecting at 46% for this full year ex the restructuring charges seemingly raised from the 45% prior. Just wondering if you can maybe offer some color as to what you believe are the primary drivers of that? And just as importantly, how should we think about that operating margin looking out one, two, three years? Is that reasonable to assume that, that continues to grind higher or is there a certain level where you’d expect that would top out whether just naturally or whether based on reinvestment that you might want to make? I’m just wondering how you think about that operating margin, especially in the current environment.
