Michael Lasser : Thank you so much.
Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Oliver Wintermantel with Evercore. Your line is now open.
Oliver Wintermantel : Yeah, thanks. I was looking for your guidance for the fourth quarter comp, the low single digits to mid-single digit decline. Kurt, how do you expect transactions versus ticket are performing in that kind of environment in regards of last year’s, the winter storm? Is it mostly in transactions that are going to decline in the fourth quarter?
Kurt Barton: Oliver, yeah, I’d frame it up as it’s going to be a mix of both of those. We had, a slight average ticket decline in Q3. Some of those pressures on average ticket will, we expect to persist into Q4. But transactions are what gets impacted and did get impacted by the monumental winter storm last year. With our expectations, as we mentioned, this is not framing up to be an ideal fourth quarter weather. That demand would play out in transactions, and in our evaluation, it’s going to be a mix of both transactions and ticket. And implied in our guidance would be a negative comp transaction for that reason.
Oliver Wintermantel : Okay. Thanks very much. Good luck.
Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Scott Mushkin with R5 Capital. Your line is now open.
Ryann Mushkin : Good morning. This is Ryan on for Scott. Thanks for taking our question. Our research would suggest that there is an opportunity to have stores get deliveries from the distribution centers more frequently. Do you agree? And if so, what do you think the sales opportunity may be? Thanks.
Hal Lawton: Good morning and thank you for your question. First off, I’d say this is an area that we have been focused on for the last few years. We’ve gone from roughly five mixing centers to 15 mixing centers over the last three years. That has given us the ability to have more replenishment going into the stores of full pallet quantities of our big moving SKUs. The second thing is the expansion of our DCs from eight to nine and the next year 10. Also gives us additional outbound capacity to be able to deliver more frequently to our stores. We now have over, I think it’s 500 or 600 stores now that receive shipments twice a week from our distribution centers. The remaining stores all receive shipments once a week. So it’s not that we have stores receiving it less than that.
But yeah, we’re constantly looking at ways we can drive in stock. What I would leave you with is, our in stock rate right now is the best it’s been, as Kurt said in his prepared remarks, really since the pandemic began. We feel very good about our in stock rates right now. Our team’s done an excellent job, I think, managing inventory. If you look at our inventory growth, it’s in control. If you look at our in stock rates, they are excellent. You look at our shrink numbers below last year and that last year was below two years ago. So I think on all sides of inventory, quality, quantity, in stock rates, we feel very good. But continue to challenge yourself to increase frequency and get smarter and smarter in our tools, like our new RELEX replenishment and allocation system to be able to keep improving our performance on inventory.
But, I feel very good about it. As I said, our in stock rates are the best they’ve been really since the pandemic.
Ryann Mushkin : Thank you so much.
Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Chris Horvers with J.P. Morgan. Your line is now open.
Chris Horvers : Thanks very much. So following up on some of the prior questions, you are assuming comps are down roughly 4% in the fourth quarter. And you also said that your business has a long history of positive comp, sort of alluding that ‘24 would be positive. So, I guess what’s unique to the fourth quarter? I understand there’s two points of weather lap year-over-year. Why wouldn’t the business be positive in that quarter if weather is sort of the only variable that’s been the unknown?
