Ian Borden: Good morning, David. Ian, obviously. So let me try and give you some color there. I mean I think as we said in our guidance at the beginning of the year, we expected G&A as a percentage of sales to be in the range of 2.2 to 2.3. And obviously, we’ve updated that to say more about 2.2. So it’s come down marginally. I think obviously, we’ve had some really strong top line results this year. So obviously, that’s a partial element of the benefits. And I think the other part is just timing of spend. I mean we are kind of a back half weighted spend cycle within the business. I think fourth quarter, more pronounced from a quarterly standpoint. So we do expect to hire level of spending as we get into the fourth quarter. But I think just there’s a timing element of just kind of how the investments that we’re making, I talked about kind of two areas on our last quarterly call where we continue to invest.
One is behind technology and digital, which we believe are – continue to provide strong opportunities for growth, and we’re going to continue to invest when we have those opportunities. I think we’ve got a pretty strong track record in how those investments are delivering for the business. The other area is around our global business service organization, which we stood up earlier this year as part of Accelerating the Organization. We spent a lot of time over the last six months or so looking at what we believe the opportunities are for the business there. And I think we’ve got good line of sight into some things that we think can drive kind of sustainable efficiencies from an operational perspective as we go forward. And we’re certainly investing now behind some of those areas of opportunities.
So what I would call it a little bit more of kind of the timing of spend around those initiatives and more of a focus in the first half of the year on kind of bringing our ATO organizational changes to life.
Mike Cieplak: Our next question is from Jeff Bernstein with Barclays.
Jeffrey Bernstein: Great. Thank you very much. Just focused on the U.S. consumer, I’m just wondering if you talk about any change in behavior, whether there was a change in trend through the quarter or more recently into the fourth quarter. I was wondering if there’s pressure in some areas, maybe benefit from trade down and others. Otherwise, you mentioned in the release, I think that the U.S. comp was driven by strategic menu pricing, no mention of the traffic. So, I’m just wondering if you can maybe give a breakdown of that U.S. comp components, whether the lack of traffic growth is a concern looking at ’24. How you think about those components within that U.S. comp? Thank you.
Chris Kempczinski: Yes. Thanks for the question, Jeff, and I’ll answer, and then if Ian has anything else he wants to pick up on this. But specific to the U.S., we’ve been talking about how the consumer is more discriminating, because of all the price pressures that they’re facing as well as interest rates, things like that. What you end up seeing, is that the pressure is felt more on the lower-income consumer. And so, one of the things that we saw industry-wide is that, that low-income consumer, which we would say is $45,000 and under, was negative from an industry standpoint. If you zoom out and you think about our performance relative to that, we continue to have, on the full year basis, traffic growth. We had a slight dip in traffic.
We went slightly negative in Q3. We expected that because of what we were lapping. But if you look at us on a two-year stack in the quarter, our traffic is up strongly. So, I think we’re just going to need to continue to keep a close eye on that $45,000 and under consumer, because of the pressure that they’re feeling there and make sure that we’re offering value, but hopefully, the industry stays disciplined as well on pricing.
Ian Borden: Maybe just – I’ll just add a bit of a build to Chris’ commentary, which certainly hit the headlines, but just maybe, because I think the texture is really important in the quarter. I mean I think the headline would be on an overall basis that we maintained our QSR traffic market share in the quarter. I think we continue to see really strong share gains in both beef and chicken being the kind of two key elements of the category. We continue to gain share with both the middle- and higher-income consumers, and that speaks a little bit, Jeff, to what you called out, which is that we’re certainly partly benefiting from the trade down from more expensive alternatives within those kind of income or segment levels. We held share with the lower-income consumer in a pretty competitive marketplace.
But I think the headline, is that the comparable, as Chris talked about, industry traffic was down in the quarter as it has been for the last couple of quarters. And so, our comparable traffic was marginally down as a result of that. And I think just – I think I just would want to highlight, I think, the strength of our top line performance overall through our comp sales, which remain industry-leading. As you’ve seen and what we’ve announced for this quarter. And I think that’s a combination of our strategic strengths coming together, which we’ve been working on over the last couple of years. We’ve got a fully modernized estate. We’ve got a digital platform that’s coming to life at scale that’s allowing us to really interact with our consumers on a much more individual basis.
