Thank you very much.
Karen Short - BMO Capital Markets
A couple of questions. Just on your -- well like a big picture question and then the quarter related question, your new store productivity seemed to improve sequentially, wondering if you could share some thoughts on what drove that and then on your guidance which is also near-term, your original guidance. I think you had said specifically it included 170 million shares which I didn’t understand if you were doing a weighted average by quarter. But what do you assume in the new guidance in terms of total annual share counts and then I had one big picture question.
Glenda J. Chamberlain
I will answer the share count question. We think it is about 168 million for the year because it was lower in the first quarter obviously and will be higher in Q2, Q3 and Q4 subsequent to the conversion of the series I preferred.
Karen Short - BMO Capital Markets
Okay.
Walter Robb
Karen, your second question was about store productivity?
Karen Short - BMO Capital Markets
Yeah. It was my first but that’s okay.
Walter Robb
All right. Could you say again just to make sure…
Karen Short - BMO Capital Markets
I’m just curious, if you look -- if you do the math on new store productivity this quarter you definitely saw a sequential improvement. I’m just wondering if you could add some color as to location specific, anything you are doing differently?
Walter Robb
Probably, the biggest shift is slightly smaller stores, the stores we open in this class is in the script went down to 47,000 square feet and produced higher sales, average weekly sales and it costs less to build the stores. So all of those things added. We actually got leverage on depreciation for the first time in a long time, right, I think in the ident stores. I think it is a combination of smaller stores producing a better result costing less to build.
A.C. Gallo
We are also opening stores in a slightly better economic time than last year. And we saw a lot of our store openings were very -- the customers were very excited and we had very large initial sales in a lot of stores and they have maintained. So it is just a very different environment for opening up a store this year than it was a year ago.
Walter Robb |
