Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from [Clint Funley - Davenport].
[Clint Funley - Davenport]
Good news here on the litigation development. Do you anticipate that this will have any near-term effect on the run rate for your litigation costs?
Kenneth A. Camp
That’s a great question. Since this hit last night very late, we haven’t had time to digest this at all. At this point we have a lot of work yet to do and we’re not making any cost estimates going forward. As we do of course and it’s appropriate, we’ll let folks know.
[Clint Funley - Davenport]
I guess we just wait to see if there’s an appeal then within the next 10 days or so?
Kenneth A. Camp
A number of steps have to take place and we’ll let them play out, but we are cautiously optimistic.
[Clint Funley - Davenport]
Can you remind us what the penetration rate is on your merchandising systems?
Kenneth A. Camp
Far too low in my opinion. I don’t know that we’ve put out numbers on that to any great degree but remember there are several levels of the merchandising.
The first and most basic is where the funeral director does the analytic work, and he and our sales rep determine where the opportunities are and what the funeral director’s goals are. If you go up a level which involves a bit more, it’s just basic work we call the template plus the assist system. That’s the multi-lingual touch screen that enables families to make their selections and in a way customize their choices. The third level is those two things plus the information center. The penetration in the highest level takes a migration for customers to do one step and then adapt to the next.
So after that preamble, the reality is if you look at the number of firms that have assist plans in place, you’re looking at somewhere of our 16,000 or so customers I think in the 10% to 15% range for those that have assist and a much smaller percentage for those that have migrated yet to the highest level.
[Clint Funley - Davenport]
So still lots of opportunity there then?
Kenneth A. Camp
As I remind our sales force on a regular basis.
[Clint Funley - Davenport]
Can you talk maybe for a minute on just how your price changes have been received? Obviously you’ve had a lot of costs that you’ve absorbed during the last year. How might we expect the receptivity of some of the recent changes to be felt there?
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