Craig Menear: Demand in the market overall with the current housing environment is down, so it is strictly a supply/demand type of issue.
Eric Bosshard (Cleveland Research): Can you just talk about the rational benefit payback and commitment to continuing with this strategy and how you think that’s going to play out in that market share performance as we move forward?
Craig Menear: We feel pretty strongly that listening to what our customers are saying through various research that we do, the customer is looking for us to simplify their shopping experience.
The promotional activity complicates that for them. It focuses them into periods of time where they need to buy to feel like they’ve got the best deal. It also puts pressure up through the supply chain, through our suppliers when you have that kind of activity.
So we feel pretty strongly that over the long-term, by providing a great value to our customer every day and having them understand that we have that great value every day, it will drive the confidence level for them to shop with us.
Gregory Melich (Morgan Stanley): How should we look at that drop in payables?
Carol B. Tome: The way you should look at it, and our payables ratio at the end of the second quarter was 60%, so that’s pretty good but it is down from about 63% a year ago.
And that is actually because of some transition disruptions we had a year ago. We outsourced all of our payable functions to India and ran into a bit of disruption as a result, which we do not like.
We are back in line now in terms of our service level agreements with a third party, in terms of our on-time payments with our suppliers. And that 60% ratio is the one that we would like to maintain.
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