Lawrence P. Molloy – Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Phil. Good afternoon everyone. As Phil mentioned, we delivered earnings of $0.28 per share, which was 21.7% higher than the same period last year and in line with our guidance for the quarter. Revenue for the quarter totaled $1.3 billion, up 12.1% from last year’s third quarter. Our comparable store for sales grew 5.4% on top of 1.4% comp growth for the same period last year. We opened 32 net new stores during the quarter, to finish with 1,107 stores. We also opened 11 new PetsHotels and finished the quarter with 132.

Operating income for the quarter was 5.8% of sales, an improvement of approximately 50 basis points compared to the same period of last year. Gross margin for the quarter declined 110 basis points to 28.6% of sales. Merchandise margins were down 60 basis points from the sales mix shift and services margins were down 10 basis points. Store occupancy was unfavorable by 50 basis points due to the growth in new stores, while our supply chain costs were favorable by 10 basis points as we anniversaried the start up of our new distribution center in Noonan and began to realize the benefit from transportation efficiencies. The leverage of our supply chain was in spite of an increase in fuel rate costs that averaged 35% higher than the same period last year. Operating general and administrative expenses were 22.8% for the quarter, or down 155 basis points when compared to the same period of last year. Positive impacts to expenses included cost savings initiatives, such as new store labor management processes, reduced professional fees, re-negotiated maintenance contracts, and a reduction in supplies.

During the quarter, we generated $46 million in operating cash flow and spent $68 million for capital projects. We ended the quarter with $54 million of total cash and cash equivalents and $50 million of debt on the balance sheet. We’re on track to spend no more than our target of $285 million on capital projects for all of 2008. We ended the quarter with average inventory per store of $553,000, up 3.6% from the same period of last year, driven primarily by inflation. We’re managing the pressure from inflation by bringing down inventory levels to match customer demand. We ended the quarter with 127.1 million shares outstanding and we have 25 million remaining of our current $300 million share purchase authorization. As we look forward to the fourth quarter, we expect to deliver earnings per share between $0.59 and $0.62 and comparable store sales in the low to mid single digits. Through the first two weeks of the quarter, comparable store sales have been 3.7%. We anticipate the inflation benefit in sales to continue through the fourth quarter, along with product margin pressure and ongoing leverage expense.

For fiscal 2009, we’re planning for a very difficult economic environment. We expect to have some continued top line benefit from inflation at least through the first part of the year, but margins will still be pressured from continued weakness in hard goods and slowing services growth. We believe we can mitigate a portion of that pressure through capital and expense management and as Phil mentioned, we’re reducing our capital spend from $285 million this year to between $115 and $125 million next year. We also expect improvements to leverage from improvements in our distribution network, and will continue to work on other non-customer facing expense management. Given the uncertainty in the financial markets, we believe it is critical to create an even stronger balance sheet than we have today. We currently have a $350 million credit facility that expires in August of 2012, through a syndicate of institutions that includes Bank of America, Wells Fargo, General Electric Capital Corporation and Wachovia. Over the last year we’ve kept our cash position to a minimum and distributed excess cash to our shareholders in the form of dividends and share re-purchases. That required us to periodically utilize our credit facility to run daily operations.

Going forward we plan to build our cash position to a minimum $125 million and be essentially self-financing prior to any additional share re-purchases. Given our healthy operating cash flow and reduced capital expenditures, we expect to be self-financing by the middle of next year. Over the last year we’ve attempted to stay ahead of the economic downturn and make adjustments accordingly. We’ll continue to be flexible. Our goal over the next several quarters is to deliver consistent financial performance and position ourselves to take advantage of longer term improvements in the economy.

Now I’ll turn it over to Bob to provide more details on how we plan to deliver on our commitments.

Robert Moran – Chief Operating Officer

Thanks, Chip, and hello everyone. We’re building on our strong basic model with the addition of financial discipline and operational consistency. We think it’s a powerful combination that positions us to deliver returns through good times and bad. So let’s talk about what we have seen on the top line. As Phil mentioned, our ability to pass inflation through to the customer is helping us to mitigate some weakness in traffic. Consumables made up about 52% of our business in the third quarter, up from 49% during the third quarter of last year and we continue to see growth in our channel exclusive categories. Our customer data tells us that we’re not seeing an increase in the rate of food trade down or deflection. In fact, it appears that we’re attracting more new customers than we’re losing. Instead we believe our customers are pulling back on spending as they try to digest what the recent developments in the economy means for them. Our services growth rate dropped to 15.2% for the quarter, and now makes up 10% of our sales.

We have seen a decline in the frequency of trips in grooming. The PetsHotel has started to slow, consistent with trends in the human travel industry and training continues to struggle as new pet acquisition trends soften. We also continue to see weakness in our hard goods business. For the quarter, hard goods penetration was 35%, down from 38% last year, and our live goods business has remained unchanged compared to last year at 3% of the business. To offset some of the weakness in discretionary spending, we’re continuing our work to manage expenses and differentiate ourselves from the competition. I’m happy to report that we have completed the labor management system rollout in all of our U.S. stores and efficiencies in our supply chain are helping us to reduce cost. We recognize that execution is not only important in managing cost, but it is also important in differentiating ourselves from the competition. We believe that our in store experience is an important differentiator and therefore, consistency across the chain makes a difference.

There aren’t many stores that allow you to shop with your pet and there aren’t many companies that understand the pet parent that wants their pets to choose their own toys. Here at PetSmart we have years of experience understanding that passion and we’re working to capture that spirit in everything we do.

We know that differentiation comes from knowing your customer and our PetPerks database allows us to understand how our customer shops and what they are looking for. This allows us to target our efforts and focus on what will drive the greatest returns. During this holiday season we know that value is important. So our merchandising team is focused on the right mix of holiday themed and best selling products at the right value that should sell well during and after the holiday season. Our assortment makes PetSmart a destination for customers looking for solutions to their pet parenting challenges. So our merchants have continued to improve our good, better, best strategy providing solutions at affordable prices and of course a cornerstone of PetSmart differentiation is our ability to gain credibility with our customers through our services offerings.

We don''t just have a place to leave your pet when you travel; we have a PetsHotel where pets can join the happy hour and get a belly-rub and a bedtime story. At PetSmart it’s more than just providing a service. It''s earning the trust of the pet parent by taking great care of their pet each time they visit us. So we have grooming and training academies for our service associates to instill and reinforce the skills that are necessary to provide only the highest quality of care. It''s clear that we''re in a solid industry and that PetSmart is well positioned and we believe that we have the right strategy in place to emerge from this challenging time, the unquestionable leader in our space. But we know that times will be tough and that we have to deliver time and time again to continue to grow this business and drive returns for our shareholders.

With that I will turn the call back over to Phil.

Philip L. Francis

Thanks Bob. Before we finish today, I''d like to thank Tawni Adams for her outstanding work in our investor relations area. Over the next few months she''ll be moving to a key role within our finance organization and will transition IR responsibilities to Dave Cone.

Now let''s open up the call for your questions.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen if you have any questions at this time please press the 1 key on your touchtone telephone. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue please press the pound key. Again if you’d like to ask a question at this time please press the 1 key on your touchtone telephone. Our first question comes from Matthew Fassler from Goldman Sachs, your question please?