Laxman Narasimhan: I think first of all, let me just clarify something. In your question, I think you suggested — you made a couple of comments about our Starbucks Rewards members. Let me just give you — let me just address that. We have more of them, so we had a 4 million growth year-over-year. It’s a 15% growth. Our Starbucks Rewards members come in more frequently. So they’re not coming in less frequently, they come in more frequently. They buy more after joining the program, right? And as I said, they’re also choosing larger sizes as they come in. The investments we have made in marketing and what we’re doing with digital, in particular, what it tells you is that we are even further increasing the pace at which we are bringing innovation and changes in terms of what we do.
We have a whole list of benefits that we could bring. And we’re taking up the agility in the company in terms of the investments we make, which will help us make this even bigger and stronger. So that’s the way I would address your question about the Starbucks Rewards members. It’s a key area of growth. The other thing you should be aware of is as we have scaled this, we have scaled this to connect, which is all our licensed stores. And I think 40% of our licensed stores today have connect, and we’re seeing growth in our license business as well as a consequence of that. Finally, we’re scaling this globally. You’re seeing us take it to our geographic partners the Starbucks Digital Solutions. There is very strong adoption. And you see the kind of results you see, which our geographic license partners are announcing or are sharing with us.
I mean, very strong results, and Starbucks Digital Solutions is extremely capable of delivering that. In China, we’re seeing real growth there, too. And in fact, that is where we’re making a big investment as well in digital because we see that as a way not just to strengthen our relationship but also to drive results through what we do with digital. So I think overall, this is a big area. It’s a big area of focus for me. And it’s part of the second big priority for us around strengthening and scaling digital. I’ll make a last comment. We have a fundamentally amazing capability called Deep Brew inside the company. It’s where we have made investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence. I think the ability for us to be at the vanguard of this and to early adopt what we do in this area furthermore, given all the innovations that are going on, and the re-platforming that’s going on just gives me greater confidence in what we do in digital.
This will be a key area of growth for us.
Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from John Ivankoe with JPMorgan. Please state your question.
John Ivankoe: Hi. Thank you. I was hoping that if you could address the biggest opportunities to kind of regrow same-store transactions versus 2019? I mean, what those — I guess, as you see kind of the bigger opportunities to be, whether in daypart or specific type of customer. And secondly, with same-store traffic up 1%, do you feel like you are specifically addressing peak hour throughput? In other words, is the factory part of Starbucks, as you would call it, properly set up? I mean, is the engine specifically running such that you can achieve all those peak hour transactions, especially where mobile orders might be coming in at a very short amount of time. Thank you.
