So, when we start seeing trends like that, I don’t know how it comes all apart. Did anyone see 2008 coming because the way the market reacted, it didn’t seem like it, right? And nobody sees the big implosions. And we’re not greedy. Again, we’re not going to accomplish our goals here based on a buyback. So we’re spending our — we’d rather just go, look, like where is the world going right now? We’ve never pumped this many trillions of dollars into the economy. Now interest rates have never raised — accelerated this fast. Inflation hit numbers that we haven’t seen in 40 years. It seems like Powell kind of sounds relatively confident when he’s up there, but he’s the guy that raised interest rates way too slow. He’s the guy that didn’t start easing.
I mean, he should have raised interest rates and not let the housing bubble happen. Housing prices went up from 2020 to 2022 by 45%. That’s never happened except in the 1970s. The two-year period, housing going up 45%. And so I don’t want to sit here and have all kinds of debt and not have any clarity of what it looks like out there. So let the storm, become clear. Let’s make sure we can see the shore. Does that mean, oh, maybe the stock runs a little bit, and we buy a little less. It’s not — we’re not here spending all our time trying to figure out how to optimize the buyback. We think our stock is under valued today. Could it get worse? I think business will get worse before it gets better. Will our stock get worse before it gets better?
I don’t know. But I haven’t been here for 22 years. I spend all my time thinking about that. We got much more exciting things to focus on. When we have a better view of the shore, that we’ll make the right decisions.
Atul Maheshwari: Got it. That’s fair, Gary. Thank you for that. And as a related follow-up, at this point, how much visibility do you have on some of the planned gallery openings in Europe and even the US over the next 12 to 18 months? And if the macro does turn further worse, would you look to maybe delay some of the openings until when the macro stabilizes so as to get the most customer attention to some of the great work that you and your team have been doing.
Gary Friedman: Yes. It’s a little tough to do that, because when you’re in construction, if you stop, you’re just going to make a gallery cost twice as much. And you’re still paying rents. And you’re still have cost. So I mean, I don’t think we’ve ever opened a gallery that doesn’t make money. So our new galleries, I anticipate will do well. I mean, business goes down 30%, 70% of the people still buy. All our galleries are really productive in the company today. So again, so we opened a little slower and then it just means when we come out of this, those galleries have big comps. So we don’t try to time things like that. I mean we’re not — if we were a company that had like 5% to 8% operating margin or even 10% or 12% operating margin, and you hit a downturn like this, that could be sustainable and it pulls you down and you might have a cash flow problem, yeah, then you’re going to make decisions like that.
