Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Jim Barrett - CL King.
Jim Barrett - CL King
On pricing, there was some mention that there was incremental improvement. Is that more a function of the competition easing back, or do you attribute that to your new rate system or combination of the above, and is it continuing into the summer?
Edward J. Shoen
It’s a combination of the above. It should continue into the summer. We are still learning our rate system. It’s quite a little learning experience. We are still learning it. And as we learn it, we find little pockets of opportunity. I think that the Budget organization has backed off a little bit on just less than full cost of the pricing. I think they backed off on that a little bit. And we have been trying to communicate that to them very strongly because we believe that, of course, it serves no one including the customer.
I don’t have any pipeline to them particularly and there are a lot of prices up there. But I worked real hard starting about in January to tell my field people float the price up and give them at least a month to match the price, just in case they don’t get it, in other words. And so, my field force thought that they gave away a little bit of transactions by doing that.
But I think that if we communicated we have a genuine willingness to see a little bit of price increase that it would benefit everybody including ultimately the customer. I think it’s a little bit of everything, but not one thing that I could give you a benchmark or something that would be easy for you to ascertain.
At the same time, given this whole fuel thing in the news and everything, and of course, our trucks burn fuel. In immeasurable way that probably made consumers possibly more price sensitive. I don’t have anything cost concrete on that.
And we are, of course, every day talking with customers to ask about fuel economy or MPG and I think I reported to that group, we began putting fuel economy gauges in our new production trucks about this time last year. This thing was obvious this was coming. And that has been reasonably well received by customers.
I hear anecdotally in the last two weeks of who drove his truck and had his young son in the front seat with him. In the whole trip, his son kept goading him every time he got out of the green field economy place. Hope that drives our customers, that’s why the kids talking to him or in fact they appreciate it, but the father reported in a positive manner. In other words, he thought we were trying to at least be on his side in this deal.
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