Jay Sole: Jane, can you just talk a little bit more about the promotional environment? How much is it being driven by traffic maybe slowing and the consumer being weaker? And how much is it being amplified by just the unusual levels of inventory at all of your competitors and what they’re doing and how much more promotions you have to do to get your inventory back to where you want it to be?
Jane Elfers: Yes. I think, Jay, that we really saw a drop-off in business in the last 2 weeks of October. We had a really nice trend going from the mid-September to mid-October when the colder weather hit and also driven by the marketing campaigns. And then like we said, we saw a pretty precipitous drop off in end of October. And we got more promotional. If you go on our website, you can see we’re in a 60 off event, which we haven’t been in all year. There is definitely heightened promotions from our competitors that we’re aware of. I think at the end of the day, when you look at the last 2 weeks of October and the first 2 weeks of November and what’s happened to business, you just — it’s undeniable that for our customer, at least, that dealing with the 40-year record high inflation is definitely eroding our core customer spending power, if you will.
Our customer is in a position now where they’re going to have to make choices between discretionary spend and essential spend. Food’s up, gas is up. You guys know that. They have less savings than they did a year ago, and they have less money to allocate. So she’s in a different place than she was last year when she had stimulus, there was pent-up demand, supply chain shortages, none of that is really happening this year. Savings are leaner, and we’ve really seen her curtail discretionary spend. So our focus in Q4 is to really end clean. We have high AUC goods right now, which you know. And you can see that’s showing up quarter after quarter in the supply chain pressure. So our focus is to really to deal with the challenge of the inflation, is to ramp up our promotions to stay competitive, number 1 and stimulate more discretionary spend, if you will, from what is now an extremely price-sensitive consumer.
So we see the balance of Q4 being very promotional. We’ll know a lot more when we get to next year and we start to see what happens on those real promotional days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we anticipate going into December and seeing a low, particularly in the first part of the month and we’ll see what happens in Christmas and then particularly post Christmas when the sales are on. But we are not — hope is not a strategy, and we are not feeling that the customer is going to come roaring back this quarter. So we are going to get those inventories clean. You can see it in our guidance. We’re going to move through it. We’re going to stay competitive, and we’re going to do what we can to, like we said, kind of see if we can get some more discretionary spend out of what is a very strapped consumer at the moment.
Operator: We’ll move next to Marni Shapiro of Retail Tracker.
