Carl Scibetta: Mitch, I just want to make something clear here. I may have misquoted. The 40% boot business is of our total non-athletic business in the quarter to the total of the boot businesses in the mid-20s when you’re throwing the athletic side of the business. I don’t want to mislead you.
Mitch Kummetz: All right. That makes more sense. Thanks Carl.
Operator: And we will take all the questions from Sam Poser with Williams Trading. Your line is open.
Sam Poser: Thanks again, I have two questions — two more. One, Carl, are you finding — I mean part of what we’ve heard a lot about this year is the sort of event-driven shopping. So you had a good back-to-school, then it softened post back-to-school. So, I mean, are you expecting holiday to be more event driven or do you think that, that sub- $30,000 and arguably maybe sub $50,000 consumer, especially who shops at Shoe Carnival is feeling it more now than he or she may have been feeling it during back-to-school?
Carl Scibetta: Yes, Sam, I believe it’s event driven. I think your dead on there and that customer — that consumer that’s challenged will wait and shop during the event, I think the softness comes in between. We saw it in spring, and then we saw it pop up for back-to-school, which is an essential necessity kind of time frame. I think we’ll see the same thing around holiday as well. I think it will come late but I think in between is where we anticipate the softness.
Sam Poser: And then, I mean, you talked a lot about what you did really well with the kids business and the marketing for back-to-school. So when we look at what happened post back-to-school with the warmer weather and everything else, I guess my question to you is, what could you have done better to lessen the impact of those macro-issues that hurt your business, what are you learning from that and applying it to now or into next year during, let’s say, softer than expected or times?
Mark Worden: It’s a great question. And the thing we need to do is continue to invest in getting that limited customer occasion a shopping trip to choose Shoe Carnival during this down cycle. And said differently, in hindsight, I probably would have invested more marketing dollars during the quarter to continue to try to gain even faster market share. I said it a few times, we gained material share in a down market in family footwear. We’re pleased with that. It’s working. And in hindsight, we’re taking a queue that traffic is not coming organically. So it’s going to be a more expensive period of time to get those customers to choose whoever they choose, and we believe it will continue to be us. We’re going to take that perspective into Q4 and into early next year as economic conditions, as I’ve said, have certainly not improved in Q4.
And we don’t see any signs that in early next year, there’s going to be a rapid improvement in the economic situation. So that’s the key learning we’re going to take the marketing and branding and CRM and engaging with customers is working. We should have done more with it, but we probably balanced the profitability with the sales driving activity, maybe a little too high on the short-term profitability perspective in hindsight.
Sam Poser: And are you — given that you talked about the share gain, can you quantify what the share gain you’ve seen is? You’ve mentioned a number of times that there was share gain. Can you quantify what you’ve picked up?
Mark Worden: Sure. If you look at the family footwear industry, year-to-date, it’s down approximately 10% in dollar sales, and we are down significantly less than that as we have the numbers. We don’t translate to that to an exact share, Sam, but we’re down significantly below what the family footwear industry is right now. We’re going to continue to drive that. We’re in a really good position with good learnings through back-to-school, what worked. And like I said, some good learnings in the Labor Day post period of what we could do even better.
Sam Poser: Thanks for that. Happy holidays.
Mark Worden: Thank you, Sam. And to you.
Operator: And ladies and gentlemen, that is all the time we have for questions today. I will hand the call back over to management for closing remarks.
Steve Alexander: Thanks for joining the call today. We look forward to discussing Q4 results early next year. This is Steve, I’m around all day, so please reach out with any questions or follow-up you might have, and thanks for joining again.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s call, and we thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
