This one is definitely an intangible, Karen, but there’s short of a feeling I think in the company that the company is in a good place and an excitement with the team members and customers about where Whole Foods is right now and I think that translates at some pixie dust that is settling in on the stores right now.
Karen Short - BMO Capital Markets
So looking at the 20,000 class, a little plus, I guess square foot opportunity, you talked about the fact that your Oat stores are now at I think you said $542 in sales per square foot. Do you think if you were to look forward and evaluate the 20,000 plus opportunity, what do you think the sales per square foot would be if you were opening your own stores? Obviously, I am guessing you’d pick slightly better locations.
Glenda J. Chamberlain
Be higher than…
John P. Mackey
It would be higher than -- it would be higher, but we haven’t really tried to project out what sales per square foot would be, but it would be higher for sure. I mean, our smaller stores have higher sales per square foot on average than our larger stores do. But we just haven’t -- we haven’t done that calculation so I can’t say. We are excited to have the Wild Oats stores are comping extremely strongly and well into double digits across the country and their sales per square foot are going up accordingly. We haven’t invested very much capital in them.
We have improved the product selection and the team members are -- feel like they’re doing a great job, but we still haven’t invested very much capital in those Wild Oats stores. We think that as we begin to do so in 2010. We expect to see strong comp growth in those ex Wild Oats stores, actually for many years to come. As we do, we do expect the sales per square foot in those stores to reach Whole Foods Market averages in the next few years.
A.C. Gallo
Over the years, when we have made different acquisitions, we have purchased quite a few companies that have small stores and a lot of those stores that are still around are some of our higher productivity stores. But they weren’t at the time and when we took over the Wild Oats stores I think, it seems like they took a little longer to get going. And some of it was that some of them were in very bad shape and needed a lot of tender care to bring them up to the quality we wanted them to be. But also we were doing it in the middle of a recession when the economy was really slowing down.
I think what we have seen now, now that we’ve had time to operate them for a couple years and the economy is getting better, we are seeing the kind of growth in those stores now that -- as John was saying, I believe that a lot of those stores at some point in the future will be very high productivity stores, very similar to a lot of other stores we have acquired over the years.
Karen Short - BMO Capital Markets
Looking at bigger picture, kind of five years out, do you have any ability to project long-term goals in terms of total number of stores or total sales five years from now? I don’t think you have talked about that number for a while.
John P. Mackey
We have that ability. We do it internally and we are not going to tell you.
Karen Short - BMO Capital Markets
Okay. Fair enough. Thanks.
Operator
We will take our next question from Mark Wiltamuth with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Mark Wiltamuth - Morgan Stanley |
