Howard Schultz: I would just add one thing that I think we both said in our prepared remarks, but I think it’s worth repeating. At a time when people are generally trading down, and there’s a lot of discounting going on, we had the highest average ticket, I believe, in our history in the month of December. And so we don’t see ourselves in a situation where we need to discount heavily, and we don’t see a situation where our customers are trading down. And I think the strategic advantage we have, which we talked about in the last call is customization and how our customers are creating their own proprietary beverage and that adds to the ticket and obviously adds to the value perception that customers believe they’re getting at Starbucks.
David Palmer: Thank you.
Operator: And our next question comes from John Ivankoe with JPMorgan. Please state your question.
John Ivankoe: Hi, thank you very much. Obviously, three years for the China consumer dealing with COVID is a very, very long time. And there’s at least some concern that consumers’ behavior maybe slightly beyond the short-term, it may be affected in terms of how people kind of interact and gather and what have you. So I wanted you to kind of comment on what you think about that? Or if you think you’ll be busier than even ever. And if there’s any types of leading indicators or green shoots, maybe talk about Macau or talk about Hong Kong or maybe even some markets, small markets or big ones within China that have largely dealt with this last COVID wave, again, not just looking at the aggregate numbers, but specific end market numbers where you can talk about how the consumer now that the infection is going to be over for them for quite some time is now using your brand. Thank you so much.
Howard Schultz: Again, I’ll yield to Belinda. But before I do, I think between myself and Rachel, we’ve been very clear that we want to take a very conservative view, especially in the near-term. In the back half of the year is where we see the return to some level of normalcy. Listen, we don’t have line of sight, and I don’t think anyone does on how quick things are going to respond. We just have pattern recognition for many other markets. And also, Belinda has shared with us, and we’ve seen the numbers of what’s happened to the run-up and during Chinese New Year, which was quite robust. And so I think, John, I think we’re going to be very careful, very sensitive. We are going to be on the ground in China and see for ourselves in the next month or two.
And we have been very directly involved with our Chinese team trying to support them, but they’ve been under a lot of pressure. We just don’t know. So Belinda, I think you should just give your color and what you believe is going to happen from your perspective.
Belinda Wong: Thank you, Howard. Yes, I’d love to give some colors on what’s going on in China right now. What we’re seeing is that we’re seeing very encouraging recovery momentum starting January, with strong sequential weekly improvement as Howard has said, and fantastic traffic during Chinese New Year holiday, and that traffic really is covering all cities, all dayparts and all trade zones. That’s including transportation and tourism, and that’s the trade zones that we’ve been suffering quite a bit in the last three years. So that’s revised again. But bear in mind, and like what Howard just said, we’re still in the very early stages of our recovery journey and then the country has just opened up. So we do have short-term uncertainties, and we need to be cautious and the recovery may remain nonlinear.
