Well, if we look really just at the food area, if you will, we probably actually see a deflation on a year-over-year basis somewhere in the 1% to 2%. If you are talking about through the entire P&L, which includes wage rates and rents and other of those, we do see those moving up still in that 2% to 2.5%, so if you kind of blend all that together, it’s a net inflation that’s probably approaching 1%.
David Tarantino - Robert W. Baird
And just a follow-up to that, I know you have pricing of 2% offset that or more than offset that type of inflation. Is there opportunity beyond the pricing to get some of the cost savings to flow through so that you can push that net inflation or deflation number down a little bit when you include the cost savings?
Brad Richmond
Yeah, I think we are continuing a number of our cost initiatives, particularly in say the first quarter and maybe into September. Our big effort in the past year, what we call business strengthening initiative, that will help us in the first quarter to continue to reduce the costs and when we start lapping on some of that strong improvement, so the opportunity to go further than that is much more limited, although there are some things that we are still pursuing. So if we try to look at on a net cost pressure, if you look historically, forget the prior year, we’ve been able to get generally close to 50 basis points off of that inflation number and we would try to get something close to that again this year as well.
David Tarantino - Robert W. Baird
Okay. Thank you very much.
Operator
Our next question comes from the line of John Glass of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
John Glass - Morgan Stanley
Hi thanks very much. I wanted to go back to the Olive Garden performance in May and I understand the tough comparison issue but historically, you’ve had a pretty strong gap to that Knapp-Track average of 5 or 6 percentage points and it narrowed pretty substantially in May, understanding that everyone probably faced some tough comparisons. So how do you know you are not losing share specifically at that brand versus more active value promotions? And can you maybe in talking about that, talk about how do you plan on approaching value somewhat differently at Olive Garden next year to protect that gap in that value proposition?
Clarence Otis
Well, as we look at, you referenced Olive Garden''s same-restaurant sales out-performance to the casual dining industry, which is certainly true and if you look at the last four years, our fiscal 2006 through 2009, the year we just completed, on average Olive Garden exceeded Knapp-Track by 5.5 points. If you look at our fourth quarter a year ago, it was about 6.4 points in March, about 5.7 in April, so pretty much online but it jumped almost 12 points in May. So the fact that it was more than six full percentage points above what it’s been averaging over the last four years led us to expect some erosion in our gap to Knapp, if you will, in this most recent month of May, which was about, I think it was about two points, yeah, just about 2 percentage points, so still meaningfully superior but not to the same levels. But it didn’t surprise us because of that 12-point gap last May. As we look forward for Olive Garden, the value leadership position that it enjoys already, the breadth of appeal that it enjoys already, and a very meaningful value offers that it’s already been able to incorporate into its marketing plan over the last couple of years, we wouldn’t foresee a meaningful change to that and we think it will continue to allow Olive Garden to outperform and maintain its brand identity and integrity.
Brad Richmond
And I would just say if you look at our performance benchmarked against Knapp-Track, so if you look at blended comp for the three large brands against Knapp-Track, I think our gap increased in the second half of the year compared to the first half of the year, even as the promotional activity intensified. So we are pretty comfortable with where our brands stand. Again, baked into each of our brands is everyday value. I mean, it’s part of the reason why they have the strength that they have and we also we think have done a good job historically of having a range of promotional activity that goes from premium offers to value offers, and so we don’t know that that was necessary for us to do anything additional, especially at the expense potentially of long-term brand and business model health.
John Glass - Morgan Stanley
That’s very helpful. And then in your guidance, you suggested there were some deferred costs in ’09, particularly in SG&A that you have to kind of work back this year. Can you remind us or quantify that? I seem to remember like $0.15, there was some near-term cost-savings in ’09. Does that come back in 2010 or are you just saying you can’t save an additional $0.15, so that’s why SG&A….
Brad Richmond
It’s more of the latter. We don’t see that we can save that much additional as we go into 2010 but what we also did in 2009 is we did defer some investment that would strengthen our foundation as we try to move forward. We saw 2009 is not quite that opportunity to make those investments pay back in the near-term, and so we still have those and as we see an opportunity with environment in 2010, we would make those because as we’ve demonstrated for quite some time now, the ability to grow our sales, to have the high absolutely unit volumes that we have and to continue to grow our gap to the benchmark, we would make those investments. So we are looking for more of the opportune time to do that. That’s part of the deferred spending, if you will, that we’re talking about.
Operator
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