John Furner: And Walmart – on our membership, consistent growth last few quarters, but we really did have a successful plus event, really good results all across the business. As I said earlier, the core of the offer is the most important thing that we deliver, and that includes perfect order or fill rates and availability. Customers trust us to be able to deliver their food, consumables and general merchandise items consistently and on time. On the question on private brand volume, I would also just repeat consistency over the last couple of quarters, and we’ve talked about growth of private brands really since the beginning of 2022. Again, we don’t have targets on that. We want to be there for customers regardless of what they choose, whether it’s a branded item or a private brand item on private brands.
We stay focused on quality and value. And in some cases, like if you’re in a store today, you would see a rollback on great value mustard, and it’s working really well. It’s a staple that has seen really great growth, because of values that we offer. So getting prices back down, and dry grocery is important for the consumer, and we want to be able to help them, and lead that in any way that we can.
John David Rainey: If I can just say one other thing on private brand. We discussed that because I think it gives a good indication on how the consumer is being pressured right now, but that is not a driver of our margin performance. While the overall margin on private brand may be a little bit higher, the dollar profit is about the same. And if you look at the shift in composition year-over-year, we’re only talking 40 basis points. So this is not a driver of our financial results. So, if we see a reversion there, it’s not going to have any outsized impact on our business.
Operator: Thank you. Our final question comes from the line of Michael Lasser with UBS. Please proceed with your question.
Michael Lasser: Good morning. Thanks so much for taking our question. Doug, is it fair to think that Walmart has more visibility into its gross margin rate heading into next year than it has in recent memory, given the inflection in the profitability of the eCommerce business, the contribution from alternative profits, presumably less of a drag from GLP-1 drugs and the prospect that general merchandise is better. And if that is fair, do you take this as an opportunity to double down and accelerate some of the investments that clearly have been working and translating to share gain? Thank you.
Doug McMillon: Hi, Michael. Thanks for the question. We didn’t see COVID coming, and we didn’t anticipate inflation to be as high as it – has been in the United States. So, if you could tell me what we’re not anticipating right now, I might be able to answer your question about next year, I think your underlying premise that we kind of know what the shape is, and we’re not in this position that we were 12 months ago with inventory has got some truth to it. As it relates to doubling down, I think we are being aggressive. We are currently going through our long-range planning cycle. And as we look at our opportunities to invest next year and over the next five years, we look at that board, and we get excited about it. John David made the point in a meeting earlier this week.
It isn’t it cool to be a part of a company that started in 1962 that sees opportunities to drive strong returns. With today’s investments to help you contemporize the business for the future, and I agree with that. Like it’s a really cool spot to be in. To have cash flow to have this strong business and to have opportunities in front of us that transform the business, and create another level of operational excellence through productivity, for example. So I think we’ve got an aggressive plan. We talked at the investor conference about our capital plan. And we continue to see opportunities to invest to grow top, and bottom line. We expect ROI to go up over time. It may not happen that every quarter, operating income grows faster than sales. But over time, as we said at the investor conference, we expect that to be the case, because of productivity in the business model shape.
