So, the whole patient journey is, first you start to realize you’re not seeing street signs as well or menus as well, and then you go through a period of denial where you are trying to think it will go away and trying not to think you’re getting older, and then over the course of several weeks, you get to the point where you say, “Wow, I really need to act now,” and then you’re in the mood to act once you get over that denial. And so, what you do is go to our — go to americasbest.com and or for any of our brands, you can make appointments online and you try to find an appointment that convenience for you. Generally, what we find is people would really like to get an appointment in the next few days once they get to that point. And again, it can be online, it can be through calling a store, it’s a nice mix of both those things with our customer base.
But if you’re in the mood to act and you can’t find an appointment near term, you might think of other options. In addition, there is a walk-in piece, because every day there are walk-ins to all of our store brand, almost all of whom are seeking an eye exam, so that they can update their prescription and start the process. And people tend to buy their glass before they get their eye exams. It’s just how that works. So, if one does not have an exam available in the coming few days, then oftentimes there can be people think about — probably think about other options.
Adrienne Yih: Okay. That’s super helpful. Thank you very much.
Operator: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Kate McShane with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Kate McShane: Hi, thanks, good morning. I know a lot has been mentioned about the macroenvironment and exam capacity. But we wondered what you’re thinking about the competitive environment. Do you see any changes there, any increased competition from maybe the mass channel that might be having an impact? And then, we just wondered from a housekeeping standpoint, how many remote locations will be rolled out in fiscal year ’23?
Reade Fahs: So, in terms of big trends since we last spoke or recently, the only big trend is sort of the trend of return to stores, during the pandemic era, there was growth in the e-commerce phase and actually, we’ve been seeing that there has been a return to stores overall and a diminishment of that share. And again, this is a store’s purchase, the vast, vast, majority of all purchases happened in stores, primarily because you need to start with an eye exam, which is why the exam capacity is such an important point. But beyond that, we are not seeing any abnormal or heightened competition. What we’re seeing overall is the trends we’ve been talking about since the IPO, which is the traditional sector of the category that tends to be more expensive, much more expensive is gradually losing market share to the value segment and we are one of the winners in the value segment overtime.
And that trend, which we’ve been talking about for years, we continue to believe is going to be the ongoing trend going forward. Patrick, do you want to add anything there?
Patrick Moore: Yes. Let me take the remote rollout plans. Good morning, Kate. So, we had a great year in 2022. We got this rolled out to over 300 stores. There was lots of good effort, lots of good results and lots of good learnings. This year, similar to last year, we’re starting out the year guiding at least 200 stores. That’s kind of where we started out last year. Things got a little better, we were able to upgrade that. The other thing I’ll mention on the 200, one of our learnings last year was, it’s probably better to not be doing implementations during some of our larger peak volume periods. So, we’ll be dialing back active implementation of remote and EHR during those peak volume periods. So, that will probably taper our numbers down a bit. But we think that’s the right thing to do. Remote is going to be a key unlock. It always — it has been already. The more stores we can get this in, the more flexibility we have.
