But nevertheless, it’s working quite well across all of our organization. We share leads, we share thoughts, and we make sure that the customer is well taken care of.
Operator: And our next question comes from Tim Mulrooney from William Blair. Please go ahead, Tim.
Tim Mulrooney: Yeah, good morning. I just wanted to ask one question. Pricing now normalized back to the 2% range. That means your organic growth was comprised of approximately seven points of volume. I was just hoping you could dig into that a little bit more as it was a little stronger than I think most of us were expecting. Did you see an uptick in retention? Did you have a strong quarter with that cross sell? Or maybe new account growth and any details would be helpful.
Todd Schneider: Yeah, good morning Tim. So our new business is robust. As I mentioned, retention levels are very good and our cross-sell is very good. And the pricing is still, it’s lower than last year. It is higher than historical, but it’s certainly getting much closer to historical. So — but when you — so when you think about that, it is — our various inputs to growth are all performing well, and we expect that to continue.
Mike Hansen: And as we talk, we win in a lot of ways. And the momentum in the rental business is still really good. But we also saw in the quarter some really nice acceleration in First Aid and Safety from 11% in the first quarter to 12.7% organically in the second quarter. And we saw some nice improvement in Fire where we went from a little over 14% in the first quarter to 17.8% in the second quarter. So we just see some really good momentum in all of our businesses. And particularly those two had some really nice performance in the second quarter.
Tim Mulrooney: Yeah, I did notice that re-acceleration across both those businesses. That’s helpful color. Thanks, guys. Happy holidays.
Todd Schneider: Thank you, Tim. You as well.
Operator: And our next question comes from Andrew Steinerman from JPMorgan Securities. Please go ahead, Andrew.
Andrew Steinerman: Hi. Could you just mention if your ad stops directionally and the uniform rental business was up, down, or flat recently?
Todd Schneider: Good morning, Andrew. Our ad stop metrics are — have been pretty consistent. We haven’t seen much of a change in our customer base. And so I’d say that’s how I would describe it. We see still positive trends in our ad stop metrics, but that’s pretty consistent as it has been for the last six to twelve months.
Andrew Steinerman: Okay, thank you very much.
Todd Schneider: Yes sir, thank you.
Operator: And our next question comes from Jasper Bibb from Truist Securities. Please go ahead, Jasper.
Jasper Bibb: Hey, good morning guys. You mentioned year-on-year tailwind from energy. But was just hoping to get some additional color on other cost inputs, I guess specifically, labor and materials.
Todd Schneider: Yeah, I’ll start, Jasper. Good morning. Our — we’re seeing — just like you’re seeing with inflation in total, we’re seeing that come down. It’s never coming down as fast as we like, but we are seeing it. Cotton is stabilized. We’re seeing freight come down and that’s important to us. And the labor market is easier. It’s still not easy, but it is easier. So I think that probably the right way to think about it would be as the labor market eases, and that will lessen pressure on wage growth as well.
Jasper Bibb: Thanks. And then I wanted to follow up on first aid. Operating margins there were really strong in the first half. Should we think about these like low 20% levels as sustainable going forward? And would you say there’s anything that’s changed there that’s unlocked another leg of operating margin expansion here today?
Mike Hansen: Sure. Jasper, we have seen some nice performance in that business and I spoke to a few of them where from a margin perspective, first of all, the value that we sell with, nothing is more important than the health and safety of your employees is really still resonating well. And so our growth has been really good in that business. We talked a little bit in the opening comments about sort of the recurring revenue streams of AED rentals, our eyewash stations and our WaterBreak. And these have been great businesses for us. The growth has been really good and the margins are great for us. Many times these are add-on products to existing customers. But in all three of them, we install, and then we have a recurring service program that goes on after that.
And again, it leads to really nice stickiness and also nice margins. The other thing that I’ll point out is we opened a first aid and safety distribution center a couple years ago and that allows us to source more. It allows us to centralize some of our sourcing, and those kind of things lead to a better product cost, and that again drives down the material cost in our first aid and safety business. So the combination of really good sales mix, really good growth in the business, good sourcing, the one I didn’t mention was SmartTruck technology that is also having a benefit there. All of those things are contributing. And so this is not a case of six months of sort of unusual items. This is a little bit of a lot of hard work and execution by our first aid and safety partners to really get this margin going.
Jasper Bibb: Very helpful. Thanks for taking the questions.
Operator: And our next question comes from Faiza Alwy from Deutsche Bank Securities. Please go ahead, Faiza.
