Melissa Rasmussen : Yeah, sure Zach, related to the dark and dim stores, that number can fluctuate greatly throughout the year and year-to-year. So, it’s difficult to tie a specific comp because you’re not looking at the same store. Now, with that, what we have said is that we do expect to see or we have seen that we have a constant line more in line with our historical performance when it’s staffed at the capacity that we desire. When we’re thinking about the total sales productivity, we can talk about that from the perspective of the dark and dim impact on overall revenue. So with the dark stores that has a productivity drag of about 80% compared to a fully staffed store, and the dim store has about a 50% drag as compared to a fully staffed store.
And with this, we have continued to expand our strategic initiatives and recruiting retention in remote and remote is something that can help the dark and dim situation quite significantly. And that has become a factor in stores that we are looking to open as we expand our fleet, we think about whether or not a remote state will allow us to implement remote as we’re moving in there when we think about our recruiting initiatives. So, overall remote can help and it continues to have a positive impact as we drive forward on dark and dim.
Zach Fadem: I’m going to try to ask that a little bit differently. What is your comp for fully staffed stores?
Melissa Rasmussen : We haven’t spoken specifically to comp on our fully staffed stores. What we did talk about is that we have our dark stores that were a percentage of our fleet as their highest of America’s Best at mid-single digit number of stores. And we’re now low single digit number of dark stores so we haven’t spoken specifically to comp on fully staffed versus not staff.
Reade Fahs: But I believe I said in my comments, though, where we have the capacity, the stores are delivering comps in line with historical norms. So, we didn’t, we are giving a specific number, but it is in line with historical norms, where God knows, where we can execute our model. It works great.
Zach Fadem: Appreciate that Reade. And then just — it looks like the spread between America’s Best and Eyeglass World has widened over the past couple of quarters. And with your initiatives largely focused on America’s Best just curious if you could talk about the state of Eyeglass World as a concept strategically and whether you still expect Eyeglass World to be an accelerating unit growth driver in the years ahead, and how those returns compared to AB?
Reade Fahs: That you’ve got it 100% right, we have been focusing on specific — challenge is primarily the same. It’s primarily a coverage related challenge. We’ve been implementing on our key programs in America’s Best first because it’s bigger, right. And now we’re turning our attention as we’ve been getting the nice success there to taking that same playbook and applying it to Eyeglass World. So, yes, it is a similar challenge. We just focus on America’s Best first, but we’re putting the playbook in place now with Eyeglass World.
Zach Fadem: Got it. Thanks for the time.
Reade Fahs: Thank you.
Operator: My moment for next question. Next question offline of Paul Lejuez from Citi. Your line is open.
Brandon Cheatham: Hi, everyone this is Brandon Cheatham on for Paul. Just want to follow up on that. You mentioned how many stores at America’s Best are dark or dim? Could you unpack that for what that looks like an Eyeglass World versus what’s kind of a normal level?
Reade Fahs: We haven’t shared that we might share that in the future. We just haven’t broken that out yet.
Melissa Rasmussen : Yeah, Brandon, we specifically spoke about the America’s Best fleet, because that’s the larger fleet. And we wanted to quantify what that was doing to the business overall, as we thought about the dark stores, we talked specifically about the improvements that we’ve made related to hiring, retention and remote rollout. And we’ll look to apply that learning and playbook to our Eyeglass World stores.
Brandon Cheatham: Got you. I was wondering, if we could dive in a little bit into margin impact in the first half of ‘24. I believe that the contact business had increased cost to, is impacting the back half of this year. So, can we expect a similar headwind in the first half of next year? And then just the timing of the AC Lens business rolling off, which I believe is a lower margin business than your Walmart stores? So, should we see incremental pressure in the first half of next year? And then, as that rolls off, things improve from there.
Melissa Rasmussen : Yeah, so we’ll talk more specifically about ‘24 as we release our year end guidance. But what we did put out related to AC Lens and Walmart, we did want to quantify what’s the impact of that roll off would be because of the staggered end date. So we put out that the expected revenue would be between $140 million and $150 million with a similar profit profile to what you’re seeing in 2023. We do expect that we’ll continue to have as we go into fourth quarter the gross margin headwinds and tailwind that was spoken about previously, the quarter and the year has played out largely as we’d have expected, we have doctor cost headwinds offset by exam pricing benefits and expanded exam capacity. In addition, we have seen some product favorability from free to expense as well as some additional product favorability.
Brandon Cheatham: Got it? I appreciate it. Good luck.
Operator: And our next question comes from Adrienne Yih from Barclays. Your line is open.
Adrienne Yih: Great, thank you so much. Good morning. Reade. Happy to hear the progress on the remote exam. But I think what would be super helpful at least for me would be sort of more the long-range plan. So, definitely you’re making progress kind of quarter by quarter. Maybe on a three-year basis, could you talk about the pace of remote implementations? Possibly slowing? I think I heard that correctly next year. It just seems like such low. I mean, I’m not going to say low hanging fruit. But it seems like it’s such an impactful when you when you get, the coverage on the exam? Are there — I guess I’ll ask it. Can you share with us your sort of use case kind of status quo? If you don’t, if you kind of do it as planned? And then maybe I’m sure you have an upside sort of accelerated, big goal, right over that same time horizon?
Does that require you just to go faster with what you’re doing? Or are there disruptive technologies that you can implement? I know, it’s very long, long winded question. But it just seems like there’s so much opportunity over the one-, two and three-year horizon to get to that 5% and higher. So, you can speak to that. And then I have a follow up for Melissa. Thank you.
Reade Fahs: Good, Adrian. And first, I’m going to turn it over to Patrick, who’s the captain of our remote initiative here, but I just want to — it was a little hard to hear you. So I’m going to just serve it up. So, it’s understanding the expansion game plan Adrian agrees that it’s a huge opportunity. I think there was a little bit of a why not go faster aftermath to the question. So, Patrick, take — could you have that?
