David B. Dillon

Well, interesting question. Thank you. Average sale actually was down a little bit in the quarter and transaction count, if you look just purely at transaction count, it was up strongly. If you look at our own customer loyalty data, what we see happening is customers are coming in more often but they are buying less in the individual trip than they were buying before. But the combination of the two produces -- generally has produced increases. Now certainly there’s some households that are buying fewer items over the course of a month but there are many households that are actually buying more items from us in the course of a month. It’s just that they are visiting us more often.

What we believe is happening is customers are buying what they need when they need it, closer to when they need to make sure that their dollars stretch further to the end of the month, or to the end of the pay period. I think we have seen that now actually for several quarters, and so to me it’s actually pretty clear what they are doing in that regard. But the net result for us though is it gives you a misleading feeling that we are selling less to people but in fact I think customers are consolidating more of their purchases at Kroger and I think we are actually selling more items to many households than we were before. So that actually bodes well.

Now, at the end of the year if we end up with a little bit more inflation and we’ve commented on some of the commodity costs that we think could sort of reverse themselves and create a little bit higher issue for those items, at least, you could see resistance on those items but I think you may find people shifting to other items. And as a result, I’m fairly bullish about what the rest of this year is going to look like.

Simeon Gutman - Canaccord Adams

And is it possible that -- yeah, sorry.

W. Rodney McMullen

You had also mentioned in your question can units keep going down. I don’t -- just specifically on the units going down; we continue to see very strong unit sales growth. It’s the national brand that is down a little but that’s way more than offset by the strength of our corporate brands.

J. Michael Schlotman

I think corporate brands is double-digits.

David B. Dillon

I’d put that in proper perspective because first, I don’t see units as really doing down. They may be going down on an individual shop basis and most stores would measure that on a per transaction basis. We measure it on a household basis and when you look at it the way we’re looking at it, it’s actually not really declining generally. Now, certainly some households but on the whole it’s not and that double-digit growth in our own Kroger brand is just gigantic and in grocery, it was 35% of the unit sales so you can just do the math yourself how important that was to us. And the national brands were down in tonnage but only slightly down and down at a less of a declining rate than they were in the fourth quarter, so that’s actually an improved position.

Simeon Gutman - Canaccord Adams

And is it possible that maybe the decline in retail fuel prices is not -- well, I guess what you sell and then to customers, is helping the number of visits people are coming around? And I guess at the same time with the competitive environment, I guess you described as not getting materially changing that much, maybe -- is there more of a cherry-picking mentality that you think that your customer has now versus before.

David B. Dillon

No, I don’t see a greater cherry picking mentality at all. In fact, the way we are trying to do our program is based upon winning households over a long period of time and winning their loyalty and that kind of approach doesn’t really target the cherry-pickers. It’s possible that the increased frequency of visits might have some relationship to gas prices but I actually think it has a lot more to do with how people are feeling about their money and how they stretch their money over a longer period of time, and I also do think that lower gas prices tends to put, and in fact it does put, more money in people’s pockets, which of course helps us -- helps every retailer, for that matter.

W. Rodney McMullen

But if you look at recently fuel prices have been going back up and you can hear increasing concern from customers about the price of fuel.

Simeon Gutman - Canaccord Adams

And then lastly just on the pace of IDs through the quarter, and I forget if you comment on this but I’m curious where you ended the quarter and I heard your comments that you are relatively flat with where you left off in the current quarter.