John Swygert: With regards to the overall, Ed, I won’t say too much about deals and how we’re going to comp the comp from prior year from a competition perspective, but we are, and we feel like we’re well positioned and we’ll be able to annualize those special deals we had last year that are out there. So we feel well positioned. I just can’t say much more about it, but the deal flow is strong enough that we feel good. We’re not — obviously consumables is a leading category for, I think, a lot of retailers out there. We’re not much different. I think food and candy is working very, very well for us and obviously the consumable categories that we have in HBA and housewares is obviously a very strong performer and we’re well positioned there. The deal, the outsized deals are what really put us over the top and I think we’re positioned here for this first, second quarter, without a doubt.
Eric van der Valk: And Ed, from a store cadence perspective, we’re opening five in the first quarter. We are planning out of the two closures, one of the closures is planned to occur in the first quarter, but that could push out as we work through the turnover requirements with the landlord.
John Swygert: Yeah, and Ed, just to comment, generally about the cadence, it is back half loaded, very similar to last year and that really reflects momentum in the pipeline as we move through last year. We want to get to a point where we’re not as back half loaded. We know we can execute the back half loaded plan based on what happened in ’23. So we have the confidence that we’ll execute it. As we look out in ’25, we’re going to work hard to get a better balance.
Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Jeremy Hamblin from Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Your question, please.
Jeremy Hamblin: Thanks, and congrats on the strong results. I wanted to get into your Q4 gross margins, I think may have been a record for Q4 certainly and you noted in the commentary that part of that was related to lower shrink year-over-year. Some of it was improved product margins, of course, lower freight, but I wanted to dive in a little bit in terms of thinking about that impact on a go forward basis. One, do you feel like your shrink you now have under control? I know that you’ve noted in the past that it’s a real subset of your stores, maybe 20% or less, that are causing 80% of the issues. So, Eric, do you feel like that is in a much better spot and any other commentary on just kind of loss prevention that would help and then should we be thinking about Q4 gross margins as potentially a little bit higher than what they’ve been in the past? Thank you.
Rob Helm: This is Rob. From a Q4 gross margin perspective, we were very pleased with our performance. It was primarily supply chain fuelled. We feel that the supply chain came in at I think it was in the range of 9% for the fourth quarter. That’s pretty consistent where we thought it was going to be maybe slightly better and we’ll be able to improve upon that for next year, planning supply chain costs for the full year in the range of, say, 9%. From a shrink perspective, shrink was a nice contributor to our Q4 gross margin. We started to see some improvement in shrink in the second half of the year. As we’ve discussed in the past, shrink is a trailing indicator. We count each one of our stores annually. So we only get a snapshot of how shrink is performing after those counts and it’s nice to see that some of the additional efforts and resources we put against it have started to make some progress.
That being said, we still are not back to where we were in the past from a shrink perspective, and we still have more work to do, but given where we landed Q4 in terms of gross margin, we’re very confident with our 40% gross margin guide for next year.
Rob Helm: Jeremy, just to add a little bit more on shrink, as Rob indicated, our heightened focus on shrink over the past year. We did upgrade the team in various ways. We’re much more focused on internal theft in addition to external theft and we’ve deployed a disproportionate amount of our resource on the 20% you referred to that’s creating kind of most of our issue. We would never say with 100% confidence that it’s totally under control as it pertains to shrink, but we feel pretty good about heading into ’24.
John Swygert: And, Jeremy, this is Sean. Just one last addition on margin, just so no one gets ahead of us, because we did have a very strong Q4, we’re working to get back to a 40% gross margin from a long-term algo for 2024, so I just want to make sure no one runs away from that number. It’s not that easy to always hit exactly where we’re trying to hit for the quarter. With the changing costs we had and the overall buying environment we’ve been in, I still would ask everyone to stick with us on the 40% gross margin for 2024 at a minimum.
Jeremy Hamblin: Understood and then just one other. The new one to get an update on the new DC in Illinois and progress on the York expansion and just understand the potential financial impact of that this year, timing on when you may have any drag related to that opening of the new DC in Illinois.
Eric van der Valk: Jeremy, it’s Eric. I’ll take the first part of the question. We are on track, on time to begin full operations in Q3 of this year. We actually begin receiving in that building in Q2. All is going well. We have confidence that the start-up will be successful. So feeling very good about this in this moment.
