Meredith Adler - Barclays Capital
I said two to four, but I meant two to five.
Glenda J. Chamberlain
The comps in that category were negative, slightly negative in Q4. So now we are at 4.4% for this quarter.
John P. Mackey
We are showing some progress and…
Glenda J. Chamberlain
We made a lot of progress.
John P. Mackey
… more progress in Q2.
Walter Robb
In terms of what we are doing to create that movement, I can tell you in that group of stores there are some that are underperforming and we have -- we have been pretty disciplined about using best practices within our individual regions to compare the metrics and try to drill down on the P&L and also work aggressively to build sales. There’s no stone being unturned with respect to comparing stores and looking for ways to keep their costs down and to build their sales and that is happening on an ongoing basis.
Meredith Adler - Barclays Capital
Okay. Thank you very much.
Operator
We will take our next question from Neil Currie with UBS. Please go ahead.
Neil Currie - UBS
Thanks. I think most of my questions have been asked, but maybe I can ask one about where you have seen improvement in sales and it seems that you really have turned the corner in the last quarter and particularly the last four weeks. Is there any particular segment of your customer base where you think the turn around has been most pronounced, whether it is the food customer versus the natural foods customer or whether it’s the high end customer relative to maybe the middle income customer who may still be under some financial pressure?
John P. Mackey
I think we are seeing a little bit of change in each category. We have seen, as you saw our transaction counts up quite a bit. And we definitely are seeing a lot of new faces. We saw especially over the holidays, had a lot of regional Presidents tell me that the stores reporting a lot of, either a lot of customers that are new, comments like I usually came here and bought my Thanksgiving turkey, but last year I didn’t because I didn’t think I could afford it and I realize it was a mistake. I am back here this year again. So we think we have had some returning customers or maybe people who stopped shopping with us at the beginning of the recession. They were afraid of what was happening, not sure if they can afford it. |