Michael Hartshorn: Laura, obviously, we’ve been tracking up in California for some time with their minimum increases there. It’s been a competitive market for us for a long time. I think in regards to the fast-food workers, we’ll have to see how that spills over but we believe we recruit from a different pool than the fast-food industry.
Laura Champine: That’s helpful. If I could get a clarification of a general sense of what percentage of your employees — of your store-level employees are in California? Will that line up with your store count?
Michael Hartshorn: It will be a little higher than our store count because those tend to be higher-volume stores but slightly above our store count, I would say.
Operator: And the last question comes from the line of Bob Drbul with Guggenheim Securities.
Arian Razai: This is Arian Razai on for Bob. It looks like inventories are up 5 — on a 5% comp increase. Could you please expand on packaways, given the great brand availability, the reason of packaways have been trending down a couple of percentage points below last year and every quarter this year? Any changes in approach, a factor of higher deployment of product? Is it like better inventory productivity at stores? Any additional color would be super helpful.
Barbara Rentler: Really no change to how we’re running packaway. Sometimes when your business is very good and we’ve been chasing a lot of business this year [ph]. So we’ve been in a constant chase. And the thing about packaways, when you’re buying goods that you’re going to hold, you have to be absolutely sure that the values are correct. So the merchants are very discerning in what they buy when they put in packaway because when you’re bringing it back out, we want to make sure that the value is right. So I don’t think there’s any way to look at packaway, there’s a lot of goods out there. It could be packaway, just put more goods into our packaway we could. I think it’s a merchant’s job to really put the best product in there at the best possible values and we’re focused — very focused on value.
And so I don’t think there’s anything to read into it. But We feel — actually, we feel very good about our content in the packaway that we own this shift because there’s been a lot of very good deals and a lot of good products out there. So we have plenty of money to buy packaway if we’d like to buy some but that is really comes to the merchant team. It’s their call on what they believe is the right value. And then that’s why, therefore, can fluctuate that plus the chase that we had in sales in the quarter.
Arian Razai: Got it. Got it. So would you say that the product this year resonates better with the consumer like from the value perspective?
Barbara Rentler: You mean the packaway product or just products in general?
Arian Razai: Just products in general.
Barbara Rentler: I think the customer is really responding to the better values. Clearly, she’s financially pressed. And even though inflation is easing, she’s still under pressure. And so whenever you can give the customer a better branded bargain at an unbelievable value, she’s going to respond which is why we’re highly focused on that and that would therefore take us through stronger market share.
Operator: And ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions at this time. I’d like to pass the call back over to Barbara Rentler for any closing comments.
Barbara Rentler: Thank you for joining us today and for your interest in Ross Stores. Happy holidays.
Operator: And this concludes today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.
