We have had a great deal of cooperation from our landlord partners in realizing that it is tough out there in a variety of regions and we have worked with them to defer as many refreshes as we can at this point, and we have even been renegotiating certain other things as it relates to new stores and relocations.
And as it relates to closures, we have taken a look to see whether it make any sense to close 100, 150 stores at any particular point but when you consider what would likely be from all indications relative to the demo process we just finished a few months ago and clearing our business partners of what would it take in today’s environment to do anything like that, they’ve estimated it would be at least two years worth of occupancy on each location that the landlord groups would likely want from us to exit the leases early.
And when you take that into account the number of stores that are cash flow negative and there are only a couple of dozen and some of those are very minimally cash flow negative, cash flow performance of the stores as they are relative to that two-year occupancy penalty we’d have to pay to close, it just doesn’t make much sense at all for us to close any stores early.
As a matter of fact, there are only seven in the analysis that we did that you could suggest it would make any cash flow sense to close early. One of those stores closes this month here in November; another closes two months from now in January, just in our normal course of how we are going about things. So that would leave five out of our entire population of 940 that it would make any good cash flow sense to close early.
Kimberly Greenberger (Citigroup): Does it not make sense to take a harder look at those stores and potentially think about getting out of some of those leases without any money due to the landlords?
Michael L. Henry: Certainly and that’s where we have stated previously on several occasions that we would expect to close 30 to 40 stores per year in the normal course of business over each of the next three years because there are approximately 100, 120 stores per year that will come up for consideration for renewal.
There are also refreshes in there, there are new store considerations that we have in there that we need to reevaluate in this current environment -- do we think they are very strong performing locations for us, accretive locations for us?
And so as we have these renewals come up, as we have kick-out clauses come up from stores we even opened two or three years ago, we are taking a very hard look at each and every location.
If it is not accretive to us on a four-wall basis or a cash flow basis to a sufficient level where it would improve the overall performance of the business, then we will be closing those and that’s where we previously said that that population of 30 to 40 a year will come from.
Liz Dunn (Thomas Weisel Partners): On the gain on the sale, last time you provided an update that was expected to be 23 cents and now you are looking for 11 cents, so was the price negotiated down?
Michael L. Henry:The price has come down, since the original communication, the sales actually came down twice. The market conditions have continued to deteriorate and over time the price has come down two different times. The purchase price is now at $26.5 million.
The first time we announced anything about entering into negotiations, it was at $35 million, so that’s the difference that you see. We continue to work very closely with the buyer at this stage.
We do expect the sale of the Anaheim distribution center to close any day now. I’ve had a series of communications every day over the last series of 10 days to two weeks that everything seems to indicate we are moving forward towards getting escrow funded and getting that transaction closed and we do expect that to happen any day now.
Betty Chen (Wedbush Morgan Securities): Are you seeing more cooperation from the vendors or on the private label side?
Sally Frame Kasaks: We did not see a lot of cost pressure going in, though we were beginning to see perhaps towards fall. We are not seeing a lot of prices going down at this point but nothing is really going up and our key suppliers are working very closely with us to adapt our production needs going forward into spring and summer.
Janet Kloppenburg (JJK Research): Comment about the outlook for the West Coast and Pacific Northwest, Rocky Mountain region?
Michael L. Henry: We have not seen any significant improvement in those regions and as a matter of fact, we’ve seen significant deterioration in those regions. October of last year was the first time that we saw California, [inaudible] Southwest really decline and it was in the negative high-single-digit range.
As we went through the third quarter, those regions dropped off to minus 20s, minus 25s, something very, very significant and then all of a sudden, the Pacific Northwest and the great plains, which had been up a bit, down a bit earlier in the year, nothing dramatic, it was never in the top, never in the bottom, suddenly had dropped to minus double-digits and then minus 18 in October.
Janet Kloppenburg (JJK Research): On the pricing, do you think that you can move to greater value or do you need to?
Sally Frame Kasaks: We have seen our customers respond to some of our key opening price points this year. We have seen some good reaction to multiple pricing, so we would continue on that.
The bigger change is the amount of debts we’ve put behind key items and key, sort of more basic styles and we are looking to become a little bit lighter on some of the quantities we have placed behind product.
Dana Telsey (Telsey Advisory Group): Can you talk a little bit about where does private label fit into the merchandise assortment going forward? |