David B. Dillon
We didn’t give any dimension on how it went through the quarter. I think it’s probably enough to make sure you knew that in the first four weeks of the second quarter, we’re about the same as where we were last quarter, which we take as a positive note that things are as steady as they were.
Simeon Gutman - Canaccord Adams
Okay, thanks.
David B. Dillon
Thank you.
Operator
The next question comes from the line of Ed Kelly representing Credit Suisse. Please proceed.
Edward Kelly - Credit Suisse
Good morning and nice quarter in a tough environment. My question for you is on your ID sales and the fact that your ID sales so far in the first four weeks of this quarter are up similar to last quarter to me it would seem encouraging because you are beginning to cycle the stimulus promotion that you had last year. Do you view that as a headwind? Does it make it tougher to cycle that? And then I’d just be curious as to whether you would view the underlying comp as a little bit better because you are cycling a tougher comparison?
David B. Dillon
I would really agree with just about everything you said except that I don’t think I would play up too much the headwind from last year’s tax rebate promotion. It was a good promotion and based on what we know about which customers it targeted, I don’t really feel like we are going to have as much headwind as maybe what you described, even though I liked having the promotion that we had. And I do feel good about the sales trend in this current second quarter. I do take it as a positive picture and I think it’s worth remembering that and so I think you’ve probably sized it up just right.
Edward Kelly - Credit Suisse
Okay. And on the gross margin side, you saw a pretty big benefit it looks like from shrink, advertising, lower warehouse expense. How sustainable are those items? And then, I don’t know if you can maybe break out the diesel impact so we know what doesn’t continue.
David B. Dillon
Well, I’ll see if Rodney and Mike want to give some numbers on that specifically but I’ll tell you on shrink, advertising, and warehousing expenses, I am very pleased with the teams that work on those, both in those particular disciplines but also in our operating divisions who work with those too. Our results were very good and in my opinion, those results are pretty sustainable.
We are trying to do the kinds of things -- we’ve talked about shrink often enough, where we’ve said we try some things and it hurts our sales because we went too far. I think we are very balanced. We are trying to apply better thinking to the way in which we do shrink and I think our organization has responded well and produced great numbers, very pleased with that and I believe that it can continue.
Do you want to comment on --
J. Michael Schlotman
Yes, if you just look at diesel, on a rough basis it’s about 40% of the total improvement is because of that, so 60% we would view as more sustainable.
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