Jack Sinclair: Specifically to the question where, as we said earlier, this has been part of our strategy going forward. How do we move from some of the building of stores going forward? Our plan is to build them at 23,000 square feet. We’ve only really got that moving in the last six months to nine months relative to the strategy that we outlined two years or three years ago. We didn’t, some of these bigger stores that weren’t performing in the way we would want them to. We would probably have closed them before now because of the strategy that we had in place. But it would’ve been the wrong thing to do in the communities that those grocery stores are operating in given what’s happened in the last couple of years. But this is a €“ the intention behind this is, let’s get this out the way.
Now, there’ll always be one or two stores going forward around if the rent goes up or the leases aren’t right or so there’ll always be one or two things going forward in any portfolio. But this is the big analysis of our portfolio that we did early on, and we’re very comfortable that this is a kind of as close to a one and done as it can be without one or two other things. One or two things that might happen around leases or something like that. But it’s not that we are seeing a significant, this is not part of an ongoing exercise. This is a kind of, as I say, a one and done thing. Chip, you want to just share?
Chip Molloy: Yes, I just might be a little bit of a pile on. But if you go back to 2019 and when we started to shift our strategy and thought about it very hard, very hard, we were building boxes at that point. There were over 30,000 square feet. They were very expensive and we felt like it was a better economics to build them smaller. We were convinced and are still convinced that we wouldn’t lose sales by having the smaller box. They were just too big and unproductive. And so we evaluated it all at that point, we also went through the entire list of stores that were where we were going to build them, but yet they were bigger. And in those cases where we could get out of the potential lease, we went ahead and moved away from those in 2019.
And those where we couldn’t, we tried to scale those back as, as much as we could to smaller boxes. So we have a kind of a, I’ll call it, we were sort of in the middle of this strategy where we actually built some boxes that weren’t 32, but we got them to 25. We got them to 24. But now we’re in a place where everything we’re building is our new prototype, very close to our 23,000 square foot, thank goodness we decided to build them smaller given the cost increases that have happened over the last couple years on construction costs, et cetera. So, we feel really good about where we are. We’ve got some prototypes in the ground, they’re doing well. We feel really good about the stores that we’ve just recently opened, the ones that we’ve even opened this quarter.
They’re coming out of the blocks in a really good place. And we feel really good about it. As Jack said, this is sort of the whole portfolio. Of course, we might close, we’re getting to become an old enough retailer and a big enough retailer that you’re, of course, every couple years or every year or so, you might have one or two that you just, where the leases have expired and you don’t really want to renew it or the trade areas moved. But we won’t see any store closings of this magnitude anytime that we know anytime in the near next several years.
