Peter Keith: Hi, thanks. Good afternoon, everyone. Good to hear from you. John, you talked about some of your pillars of growth. One of them was improve the marketing spend with the data-driven outreach. It seemed like that had kind of been in test mode this past year. And so I’m not sure if you’re indicating you’re kind of ready to push forward on it. But maybe you could give us an update on where you stand and where you see the opportunity?
John Lai: Sure. Hey, thanks. Good to hear from you. So while some folks do A/B testing, we do A, B, C, D, E, F and G testing, and having some fun there. But we €“ to Jed’s earlier comment, from a promotional effectiveness standpoint, we’re very €“ and I’m going to harken back to 20 years plus of €“ in the early days of car washing where there was a lot of very aggressive discounts and promotions that were very dilutive. It didn’t really move the needle and in the end, unnecessarily discounted existing customers and/or members. So we are determined to make sure that we preserve this very profitable and valuable member and customer base, while not giving away the farm while we’re doing that. So in our testing, part of the equation is getting the engine up and running and this is a great time for us to announce that our digital app was just released on the Apple website as of last night.
And so that’s been a long time coming, building out this native app. This is not an off-the-shelf app that you can buy from your point-of-sale provider, and every Tom, Dick and Harry is using the same one with a different face. This is a customized solution that we think is really going to drive member engagement as well as customer acquisition. So bottom line is, we are testing, to Jed’s point. We have yet to determine which one is ultimately going to move the needle. We’re not done testing, and we’re going to continue to experiment so that we can drive retail traffic. But as I mentioned, it is a priority for this company. And to be quite honest with you, as we reflect back again, we have been so successful in that old school word of mouth and taking existing customers and converting them into members that we hadn’t needed to advertise.
We didn’t need to discount. And perhaps in hindsight, we took our foot off the pedal, and we probably should have been perhaps more aggressive knowing that there was going to be some point in the curve where we’re going to experience a slowdown in retail and here we are, but we are pivoting and we’re moving very quickly right now from a marketing standpoint. And there is a lot of things going on behind the scenes. So again, we wish we had more tangible stuff to share with you guys on this call, but we’re not in a position to do so at this time.
Peter Keith: Okay. Fair enough. And then I wanted to also just ask kind of a big picture question around the retail weakness. Certainly, this is not a Mister problem. It’s across the entire car wash industry. But I know that you, John, and others in the industry thought that it was gas prices, lower gas prices would start to drive the retail traffic. And that really hasn’t panned out. I know we can blame the economy although a lot of other goods retailers talk about the shift from goods and services. You guys are a service business. So I guess the heart of the question is, do you think that €“ is it just more competition out there that could be playing a role and maybe do you see pockets of the country where there is a lot of greenfield growth that there is extra retail weakness?
