I don’t think the trend really has changed on that, and as you know, we look at a lot of things but we don’t do a whole lot, so -- we want to make sure that it is the right one but I don’t see that this environment really changing that much.

Scott Mushkin - Jefferies & Company

And one final one, if I could, obviously -- I think it was 48 days at this point to selling gross margin investment, kind of large, offset by a lot of great things that were happening. Where do you think your ability going forward if those things -- and this has been asked before but I mean, what do you think your ability is to continue that type of investment the rest of the year with what you know today?

David B. Dillon

Well, I think the investment varies a little bit by the -- maybe a lot, actually -- by the opportunities that we see and -- but directionally, and I tend to look at this more on an annual basis, directionally we expect to continue to invest in our selling gross by investing in pricing but we also expect, and have even in this last quarter, invested in other things that are not price, things that improve the other three keys -- people, the shopping experience, and the products keys. We’ve invested in each of those in the quarter too. Now in this environment, we’ve invested a little bit more on price than -- disproportionately than you might have otherwise done in a normal economy but I think all of them are important. So I expect that we’ll continue that trend through the year and we have a number of things in mind, we have a number of things we’ve put in motion in the first quarter which we think will play out well for the rest of the year.

Scott Mushkin - Jefferies & Company

Perfect. Thanks, guys, thanks for taking my questions. Sorry for the background noise.

David B. Dillon

Thanks, Scott.

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Todd Duvick representing Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. Please proceed.

Todd Duvick - Bank of America/Merrill Lynch

Thank you. Good morning. I appreciate your comments when you were talking about the bias towards debt reduction and away from share buy-backs, and I guess what I’m wondering is you’ve got some short-term debt on the balance sheet but you also have a fair bit of cash. So with all that, it seems like borrowing costs have really come down lately so I’m wondering if you can talk about your views on potentially tapping the debt capital markets to term out some of that short-term debt.

J. Michael Schlotman

Some of that short-term debt, if you look at what’s there, there was a piece of debt that matured June 1, which would be in the short-term category on our balance sheet. I think it was about $360 million or so, which if you recall back last fall, we did a debt offering and said that that was really pre-funding that opportunity. We have paid that off. We did not do an incremental borrowing to do that, so relative to our overall cash position, that would come out of that.

You also have to keep in mind if you look at the cash, there was about $460 million on the balance sheet, so a large chunk of that got used up at the beginning of June when we paid that note off.

Todd Duvick - Bank of America/Merrill Lynch

Okay. And if you can talk kind of big picture, if you -- what signs are you looking for that will make you a little more comfortable going away from debt reduction to share buy-backs? And I understand that I am a debt guy so it may seem odd for me to be asking that but it seems like your balance sheet is in very good shape, so I’m just kind of wondering what signs you are looking for from the economy or from the capital markets to get you a little more comfortable going back to share buy-backs?

J. Michael Schlotman

From a capital market standpoint, I feel comfortable with our ability to access the capital markets when we need to. Clearly from -- if you look forward to our bank credit facility maturing in November of 2011, so that means sometime this time next year, we’ll be sitting down and renegotiating that facility, it would be great if we were a triple B flat with all three agencies so we had broader -- so we had access to the A2/P2 commercial paper market versus the unrated commercial paper market. That would change our view of our ability to get day-to-day liquidity. While it looks like the ability to do a larger bank deal is better today than it was six months ago, it’s still uncertain how big it could be, how long it will be, what it will cost, and how many banks will be, so there’s still a little bit of caution, in our view. We also think we need to improve our credit metrics. Keep in mind the net total debt-to-EBITDA ratio we talk about is the one that’s contained in our bank facility. It’s not necessarily the one the rating agencies use because it doesn’t capitalize the rents and it doesn’t contemplate the multi-employer pension funds. Obviously the way they do it would have gotten better as well.