Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Randy Hugen Piper Jaffray.
Randy Hugen Piper Jaffray
It was good to see the samebranch sales continue to move up. Could you go into some of the drivers behind the increase? Is it largely a function of the surcharges?
Joseph Chalhoub
Well, the sales increases that we experienced this quarter and last quarter, there are a lot of factors that go into sales increases. The surcharges are only a very, very small piece of that increase. The majority of the increase is organic, different lines of businesses, and price increase, including the surcharge, is not a big factor in that increase.
Randy Hugen Piper Jaffray
So it's not a big driver of the continued increases in your samestore sales metric?
Joseph Chalhoub
Definitely not the surcharge, definitely not.
Gregory Ray
On a longterm basis, when we think about samebranch sales growth, and you have seen our statistics over several quarters now where we've been running at the doubledigit rate for samebranch sales growth. Typically, on a yearoveryear basis, that statistic almost always has in it one regular price increase.
Over the last several years, while we've raised parts cleaning prices a little bit more than other services, the average blended price increase has probably been in the neighborhood of 5%, plus or minus 1% across the board. The remainder of that would be volume growth in samebranch sales. I think that in the latest quarter it's possible that because of the surcharge, we could have picked up another 1%. I am just shooting from the hip here, but it wasn't a big number in terms of driving a higher rate of samebranch sales growth.
Randy Hugen Piper Jaffray
Could you remind us how this industry overall has faired during previous recessions? And then also comment on if you have seen any impacts with your clients from the economic slowdown?
Gregory Ray
Historically, the industry through recession has been resilient. As you know, our management team has been in the industry for 30 years now. We don't recall having seen substantial negative impact on our business when the general U.S. economy has been in a slowdown mode. That may partly be a factor of serving many small customers. There's a significant turn rate in that customer base. But we've never seen major impacts from that.
Certainly, at HeritageCrystal Clean, where we've got this high growth rate for us in the last several years, we don't expect there to be a major impact due to a kind of modest U.S. recession. I am sorry, your second point? I forgot.
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