George Holm: Yes. Well, everything we hear concerning the macro can be confusing. But all in all, the industry is not doing real great right now. So we figured that we’re better off to be cautious about what kind of guidance we give for the second half of the year. A little bit to do with the inventory gains, not as much. January, the thing about January in our industry and certainly in our company is we’ve had really good Januaries and just had average Q3s and we’ve had bad Januaries like last year and ended up actually with a good Q3 because about half our earnings occur in March. So yes, definitely an optimistic January, very optimistic actually in all of our businesses. The first week of February, if exclude the parts of the country that were really negatively impacted by weather, also very good.
I look back at last year and it seemed to be that Valentine’s week when we started to really improve and March was a fantastic month. So much more difficult comparisons. So that’s it in a nutshell, Ed. We’re just trying to make sure that we’re giving guidance that we have a strong belief in.
Operator: And we’ll take our next question from Jake Bartlett with Truist Securities.
Jake Bartlett: Mine was just on digging into the strength that you’ve seen in January. And just the underlying momentum of the business. I’m wondering whether you could frame that in terms of pre-COVID — the 3 years. As I look at what you’ve reported for organic independent case growth, there was a slight acceleration on the independent organic growth versus ’19? And so, I’m just wondering whether you can — whether that’s accelerated. I calculate roughly 20% growth. And so wondering whether it’s actually accelerated in January, just so we can kind of take out the noise of Omicron.
George Holm: It’s — that’s why we mentioned earlier that we were encouraged by January — I mean, once again, it’s January. But yes, there was an acceleration over the fiscal ’19 numbers. It wasn’t as extreme as the acceleration over fiscal ’22 numbers. And even, our Q2 where we were slightly less than Q1 for independent growth, we were ahead of it going into those last 2 weeks of the quarter. Something that happens once every 7 years in our business is that the holidays fall on a Sunday and it wipes out Saturday night which is typically a very good night. So even though I’m sure for restaurants, the Saturday night, New Year’s Eve was real good but Saturday night is good, whether it’s New Year’s Eve or not. So we expected that.
It was probably a little bit more than normal but it’s just one of those things that happens in our business. So we feel from Q1 to Q2, that we did have a slight acceleration but from Q1 to Q2 versus the share numbers we get; we had a nice acceleration. So, I think, when we look at kind of that 3-year stack, I think is what you’re referring to, fiscal ’19 to fiscal ’23, we feel excellent about that.
Jake Bartlett: Great, that’s really helpful. And then, I’m wondering in terms of the sales guidance for the third quarter, at the midpoint, it’s a little bit down from the second quarter. I look historically, it looks like Convenience has a seasonally weaker third quarter. I’m just — if you can frame whether that slight deceleration at the midpoint is due to more seasonal factors, or if that’s reflecting some of the challenges that you’re seeing in the macro basis. Trying to kind of judge whether that there’s some kind of unusual deceleration there or whether it’s just more seasonal?
