John Swygert: Sure. Jason. We’ve been continuing to work on improvement in productivity in the supply chain and in stores in various ways, investing in process change as well as some lighter investments in systems and in people to ensure that we can execute and ensure that we have — we are consistently executing with a strong foundation. We also made a change as you’re aware to our ads where we are now advertising fewer items in ads and I spoke about it a little bit earlier that’s working out quite well. It’s driving traffic and it’s reducing complexity and the amount of product we need to move through the pipeline to hit a specific date for an ad break. So that’s been a nice improvement as well. We do continue to invest in our DCs and material handling equipment to improve productivity, semi-automation that’s very market established as well.
And then we’ve talked a lot over the last two years about transportation, so I won’t dwell on transportation. We’ve made some structural changes, especially in international transportation to how we approach the market and how we contract for freight. So we’ll go into that in a lot of detail, but that was a pretty big breakthrough for us at kind of the peak of the chaos, the international transportation world. We do continue to have opportunities as we move into next year to enhance productivity, become more efficient and we’ll continue to invest on the store side in particular, the way in which we move product from the truck to the floor. It’s been a focus of attention moving into next year.
Jason Haas: Great color. Really helpful. Thank you. And then as a follow-up, you mentioned that you opened — recently opened a store in Long Island. I recognize that, I don’t know if it’s far out of Long Island or not but curious if you are starting to open stores in higher-cost locations. And if so if that changes how you’re thinking about that long-term 1,050 store target that there could potentially be upside. And then I guess also how those new stores are performing in these if you are going to some higher-cost locations?
Eric van der Valk: Sure, I’ll take that, Jason. Long Island loves Ollie’s. So Selden, New York is where we opened the store and it’s off to a great start. We love Long Island. They love us. So I think the question about long-term, we have contemplated some high-cost market stores in our 1,050 store target. So that’s already contemplated there. So we need the economics to work, but we don’t necessarily kind of blindly look at household income as a driver of whether or not customers don’t like Ollie’s. We’ve seen a trade-down in higher-income customers that’s meaningful. So that’s encouraging, especially over 100,000 in household income. And then when you look at a place like Long Island, discretionary income becomes a factor as well as the cost of living is also very high. There’s maybe a lower discretionary income and customers’ level of love discount retail on Long Island as a result. So we consider that as well.
John Swygert: I think, Jason, just one takeaway from it, there is definitely not a strategic change to our store growth philosophy. But there was an opportunity there that works for our model, when we took it. So we’ll will continue to be opportunistic. Strategically, there has been no change on how we’re going to open stores going forward.
Eric van der Valk: Yeah, I think John makes a good point, our real estate strategy is opportunistic in nature. So we have opportunities to open stores that makes sense whether high cost or rural. We look at them. We consider them and we — lot of qualitative attributes around the store to consider and if it all adds up, we open the store.
Jason Haas: Got it, that’s helpful, thank you.
Eric van der Valk: Thanks, Jason.
Operator: One moment for our next question. Our next question will come from Eric Cohen of Gordon Haskett. Your line is open.
Eric Cohen: Hi. Good morning. Great quarter, guys. You commented earlier in the call that you’re confident you can get back to [an algo] (ph) comp for next year. Just curious as the company gets bigger and bigger and you guys have a lot of momentum, do you have to change the way you approve deals and the deals you accept since you’re going to need larger, bigger deals that you can grow as the business scales?
John Swygert: Eric, we’ve been doing this for a long time and closeouts are closeouts and we do not have any hard fast rule on the size of the deal. If it’s a small deal and it works and it’s the right value for our customer, the right margin for our profile, we’re not afraid to buy it and put it into just one specific region. We look at everything and there’s no set hard, fast rule where merchants saying no to the size of a deal.
Eric Cohen: Great. And this is, typically, you guys have said 50% of categories comp positive. This is another quarter where more than 50% have comped positive. Is this a reflection of that improved value proposition, any change in consumer spending in terms of trading down? Or is this just better execution and deal flow from you guys?
John Swygert: I would say it’s probably all of the above. I think the deal flow has been strong. The offerings we’ve had in our stores have been strong. The customer has been responding. There’s definitely been a trade down and there’s a need for value more so today than it has been. So I think that’s just — our offerings are resonating with the consumer.
Eric Cohen: Great. Appreciate it.
John Swygert: Thanks, Eric.
Operator: And one moment for our next question. Our next question will come from Jeremy Hamblin of Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Your line is open.
