That that’s not to say that, that within the service space that I see comments that some shops may be a little bit slower than other shops. But it’s just hard for us to say with our results and what we hear and see on the street every day that there’s an overall slowdown, we’re just not seeing that. Again, there’s times you see that some shops may be seeing a little less car count than others. And just like on the service side, or excuse me, just like on the, the aftermarket part side of our industry, there’s some service providers that are taking more share and there could be some that are losing some share. So it’s just hard to parse all that out and say that we’re seeing an overall slowdown when we’re really just not seeing that.
Brent Kirby: Yes, and Zach, I would add to, I mean, just to echo Brad’s comments, but it’s really a tremendous testament to the culture and to the execution of our teams out there, our sales teams, our distribution center teams, I mean, they have just executed to an outstandingly high level and continue to and not that we’re immune from any of those things that may happen in the greater macroeconomic, background, but, but we just have not seen the effect of that, through the Q3 results and we’re not seeing it as we get into Q4 at this point. So we’re going to continue to stay focused on executing, serving the need and meeting the demand out there. And we feel like good things will continue to follow.
Jeremy Fletcher: Yes, that may be the only thing I would add to that. I’m sorry, just one more thing. I know you kind of talked to how do we think about that moving forward. I think from a long term perspective, our view on the resiliency of our industry is unchanged. We’ve been, we’ve been through different cycles of challenges to the consumer in the past. And there are always the potential for short term shocks and impacts and fluctuations that might last a quarter or two. And we’re always cautious in how we think about that near term outlook. But the underlying core drivers of demand within the aftermarket continue to be resilient and strong. The value proposition that, that investing in your existing vehicle has for, for a consumer is very attractive.
We think it continues to get more attractive with the vehicle dynamic. And, and people are still, using their cars for, for so much of what encompasses daily life with miles driven, steadily expected increase. So those things are all I think positive as we think about, about really the longer term. And that’s really where our focus is as we think about building our business.
Zach Fadem: Okay, great. That’s great color. And with respect to competition, it seems like the WDs had been operating with one hand tied behind their back in the early days post the pandemic. But with those businesses now back in stock and ready to recapture some of the share that they lost, do you think we could be entering a period of choppier pricing, particularly as we lap the double digit inflation in the industry?
Brad Beckham: Yes, Zach, it’s Brad. Well, the first thing I would say is I know we all in the industry anecdotally, felt like potentially some of the smaller players could have had a little bit more adversity when it came to supply, during the pandemic. And I think that was probably true. And I think it’s probably accurate, for the most part, looking across the market that they’re probably healthier than ever. I think the key with that, though, is that is that we had our opportunities to, we, Brent and I, and none of us were totally happy with how we performed during the pandemic, everything from merchandising to inventory control, purchasing down to the distribution operations, our bar at O’Reilly, knowing how important availability and replenishment is high.
And so, we weren’t totally happy with where with where we were. And, we’ve made incremental improvement as well. But I think the key to remember, Zach, on, when we had opportunities to pick up share, and we were able to, maybe move from third call to second, or we got the opportunity through, lack of supply from somebody else, and we were able to step in there with relationship service and back that up with availability, that that business, as Zach, especially on the professional side, is incredibly sticky, those relationships and that trust, it takes time to build that and to gain that business. It takes a long time to gain that business. And it would be challenging, or excuse me, it would be, it would be out of the norm to lose that business very quickly when you’ve really stepped in when somebody else fell down.
And so, I think we just got to remember that that business is very sticky, the relationships are sticky and once that’s built, it’s very stable. On the pricing, no, we don’t feel that way. We’re not seeing that, and we really don’t see that as an issue moving forward. I mean, time will tell, but as Zach, when we rolled out our pro pricing initiative, for example, that was very rifle approach, strategically geared toward some of the lines that maybe some of the WDs and two steppers were more aggressive than we were, and we purposely moved down and still stayed north of where a lot of those price points were. We didn’t come down to really compete, knowing that they can move further down, and a lot of those folks live off volume anyway, and so we just don’t see that as a near-term threat.
Jeremy Fletcher: Yes, and Zach, maybe to add a couple of comments to what Brad’s already said on the pricing, especially from a WD perspective, if you think about what some of the things we did do to get stronger through some of the challenges that COVID that Brad talked about, we’ve continued to diversify our supply chain across multiple suppliers for various lines, especially in our proprietary brands. We continue to see our proprietary brands grow, so we continue to be pleased with what that is yielding in terms of our gross margins and how we’re able to continue to enhance those moving forward. I feel like we’re in a much better strategic position, probably, than we were going into COVID if there is something irrational that does come up out there, but we’re just not seeing it at this point.
Zach Fadem: Appreciate the thoughts, guys. Thanks for the time.
Jeremy Fletcher: Yes, thank you.
Jeremy Fletcher: Thanks, Zach.
Operator: Your next question for today is coming from Simeon Gutman from Morgan Stanley.
Simeon Gutman: Hey, good morning, everyone. First question is on a gross margin. It stepped back a bit from price investments, and we’ve come to accept that. It probably won’t snap back anytime soon. Anything new on that as you get leverage over some of the distribution costs? Are you reinvesting those? Is there any reason we can see gross margin click back up?
Jeremy Fletcher: Yes, hey, Simeon, it’s Jeremy. We continue to focus on gross profit dollar growth, so obviously in a few months here, we’ll speak to where we think ’24 might look, but at this stage, in our hope, I think from a longer-term perspective, as we think about our gross margins, really kind of comes to what we can do incrementally to improve the volume amount of our storage, which helps us leverage DC expenses. I think that obviously during the course of the pandemic was pressured as the supply chain’s got more challenging and feel like that we’ve got an opportunity from a more normalized standpoint to do a bit better there as we take market share. Certainly, I think the value that we have as a partner to our suppliers to be an excellent way for them to grow their business and to, in the game, market share themselves is high, it continues to be, I think, kind of a favorite nation status for us, and obviously that’s important for us as we work to manage our costs over the course of time, and I think what we’ve seen during the course of some of our pauses this year have been the ability to do incrementally better on the acquisition cost perspective, but our focus has always been how do we partner well with the supplier base and their communities, how do we improve availability so that we can drive top-line sales growth and then grow as proper dollars that flow from that.
