Joshua Long: Got it. That’s helpful. I appreciate that. And then as a follow-up, could appreciate the volatility in the underlying industry trends. It seems like that’s normalize to your point and from what we’re hearing from peers, which is encouraging. But curious, as you think about just the operational muscles and execution capabilities you and your team have, can you talk a little bit more about just how the volatility played out through the quarter in terms of restaurant-level margins. I mean, that’s been an overarching goal of yours as you execute against it. But just curious what can you adjust or make a point at improving upon despite the volatile operating environment that maybe just gets captured in the consolidated number that we see. I mean you mentioned traffic was relatively steady. That helps out at all? Just looking for some additional color there.
Matt Clark: Yes. That’s an interesting question, and I think it’s actually really helpful to understand kind of the consistency of the business. I mean I think I may have alluded to this before, but week-to-week, the P&L the pro forma from the Cheesecake Factory and all of our concepts looks like it’s supposed to, right? All of the elements of that are much more predictable, whether the revenue lines are up or down, the level of flow-through from the concept is at or better than we would have expected it to be. As noted, the wage inflation continues to run slightly better than planned. The commodities that we’ve been able to secure with our supply chain continue to run slightly better than planned. So we monitor all of that week-to-week.
And that volatility has significantly decreased, right? So all of those trends point to the ability to manage the business better. We are seeing overtime and training return back to pre-pandemic levels or slightly better. So those are underpinnings of financial progress and improvements. And I think sort of notably, if you think about the third quarter and the revenue piece, it was probably 1% to 2% of mix that was the gap. We had anticipated a return to normalization. It was slightly more than anticipated, but not material. And really the difference in the profitability is just a flow-through on that. We’ve adjusted our Q4 outlook for that appropriately. And yet if you do the math, we’re probably right in line with where we thought we would be from a profitability standpoint.
So I think that really speaks to the levers that we’re pulling and the ability to execute at these sales levels and still get to the profit margin targets that we’re expecting. Q4, we’re expecting that our profit margins relative to year-over-year are going to expand. We would expect Q1 to expand on top of that. So the trajectory reflects that underlying consistency in operational execution quarter-to-quarter.
Joshua Long: Helpful. Thank you so much.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jon Tower with Citi. Your line is open.
Jon Tower: Great. Thanks for taking the question. And maybe just following up on the mix conversation. Curious if you can elaborate a little bit more on what’s going on there. I believe it might have to do a little bit with the delivery business relative to the on-premise business shifting around a little bit. But if you could elaborate and then I’ve got a follow-up as well.
Matt Clark: Sure, Jon, it’s Matt. About 2%, I mean, give or take, is associated with the to-go business, which continues to be stable, but down slightly on a mix percentage compared to last year. And the other thing that we’re seeing, I think, is very consistent with the others in the industry. Compared to last year, just slightly less alcohol attachment, maybe a little bit less appetizer attachment but compared to 2019, it’s still at or above every one of the categories we look at. And I think also from a daypart perspective and a mix of check, it’s very consistent, right? So those attributes are sort of the guest performance works and feels a lot like 2019 to us.
Jon Tower: Got it. Okay. And then just going back to the discussion earlier regarding loyalty and the plans for, I believe, there is some plans you have to increase customer acquisition strategies in the fourth quarter here. Just curious if you could delve a little bit deeper into that. Are you anticipating perhaps getting a little bit more promotional or giving away more sizes of Cheesecake to incent people to jump into the program. I’m just curious to hear how you’re thinking about going about getting folks into the program.
David Gordon: Sure, Jon. Hi, this is David. This is David Gordon. Well, the good news is when it comes to acquisition, we really have seen a high level of activity and guests are very encouraged to join the program to begin with. Just as a reminder, it’s made up of published offers, which everybody gets when they join and that would be access to reservations, a slice, as you mentioned, a complementary slice on their birthday. And originally, there was a complementary slice upon signing up. We ended that part of the promotion at Labor Day. And then there is unpublished offers, and that’s a little bit more about what you’re talking about as we look at the fourth quarter and doing some segmentation and trying to understand if we can drive guest behaviors to certain dayparts, certain days of the week with potential promotion.
And that might be a slice of Cheesecake on a potential order basket of a certain size or it could be a small discount for a lunch offering. Those are all the things we’re going to test in Q4 and measure their effectiveness to ensure that as we work towards next year that we’re spending our marketing dollars in a very targeted way and getting the best ROI in each one of those promotions.
Jon Tower: I know it’s early in the program, but can you comment on any sort of changes in frequency for the customers that have jumped into the program so far?
David Gordon: We haven’t talked about any of those numbers yet. I think that we feel good on continuing to expand the program. I think that’s something. And we’re also very happy. We were able to measure NPS sentiment for rewards members versus non-reward members. And we see between a 10% to 20% higher score in overall NPS on rewards members. So that would lead to promising results of guests wanting to come back, feeling good about the hospitality and the service they are getting as a rewards member to hopefully drive incrementality there as well.
Jon Tower: Got it. Thanks for taking the questions.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Lauren Silberman with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.
Lauren Silberman: Thank you very much. I wanted to follow-up on the commentary regarding the improvement in trend exiting September and into October relative to ‘19. What do you think is driving the improvement?
