Kemper Isely: Well, the thing that we’ve really noticed is the weakening in the lower end — the low end of our consumers that are on SNAP. We’ve seen a 20% decline in our SNAP purchases at our stores. I mean they’re not a significant amount of our sales, but they definitely — the lower end purchasing has definitely moderated substantially. Our regular customer — our primary customers are still really staying pretty consistent in their purchases, except for, like I said, the vacation thing.
Scott Mushkin: So kind of remind us a little bit. Obviously, your products are much better for you, but with that comes a little higher expense. How do you guys think about it? And I agree with what was said, we’re probably headed into a recession at the end of ’23. Remind us how the business performs when unemployment rate goes up and things get a little tighter. And then assuming that, that makes it harder, but remind us how it performs. What can you guys do to mitigate some of that?
Kemper Isely: One of the things that you do is you definitely focus your promotions on staple items so that people understand that you have affordable items that you sell. I mean, for instance, we have our $1.99 free range eggs that essentially is beating everybody’s egg pricing in the market. And then we have organic avocados at $0.99 every day that essentially is beating everybody on that price also. And then one of our big marketing pushes right now are meal deals, where we bundle together several products and have a meal deal for — feed a family of four for under $15 or feed a family of four for under $16 or something of that nature. So we really focus our marketing on those affordable offerings. As far as when a recession happens, it actually can be good for our business to an extent, because people tend to eat out less and tend to go on vacations less.
And so that means that they’re eating more at home, and so that helps us with food fills. They might pull back a little bit on the supplement end and a little bit on the body care end, but on the other two ends it can be very helpful. It just depends on if we can make sure that we get our — the correct promotions out there and make them resonate with the consumers, which I think our marketing department is really good at doing. And also the fact that we have 80% of our sales now out with our {N}power customers who we are able to market to our core customers three or four times a week via our {N}power e-mails.
Scott Mushkin: Yes, very powerful, big increase. So my last question is on new store performance. How are you guys feeling about that? And then I’ll yield.
Kemper Isely: I’m really bullish on our new store performance. I think we’ve fixed some really good exciting sites coming up over the next year, and I think we’ll have some good results from that.
Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I’d like to turn the conference back over to Kemper Isely for any closing remarks.
Kemper Isely: In 2022, we marked the 10 year anniversary of our Initial Public Offering. During the last 10 years, we have nearly tripled our store base and created an increased sales and earnings at an even faster rate. Additionally, we have created over 2,500 jobs. More importantly, we have enabled our over 100 additional communities to have local access to the highest quality, healthy, nutritional products at affordable prices and free science based nutrition education. We are very proud of our achievements over the last decade and equally excited about the opportunities that lie ahead. We look forward to speaking with you on our next call to review our first quarter 2023 results. Thank you and have a great day. Bye.
Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.
