Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) The first question comes from the line of Will Hamilton - SMH Capital.
Will Hamilton - SMH Capital
With the Sears business I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the walk in portion of the business. How much is that typically for you? Can you tell us maybe how much it was down in this period?
Dale Heins
It is difficult to quantify it exactly. At different times of the year it is at different levels. It could be as much as 8-10% of our business. What we have seen particularly in the last six months to a year is that on any given Saturday if you typically would get 1,000 sittings, and I am just speaking hypothetically here, if you get 1,000 sittings that we consider walk ins. Walk ins we characterize as a customer who wakes up Saturday morning. The kids are in a good mood. They just got their hair cut the day before. They decide to go to a Sears Portrait Studio and get their pictures taken. They weren’t responding to necessarily a marketing piece we had sent them; it is just a decision they made kind of spur of the moment.
Those folks we consider walk ins. There are others as well but truly walk ins, coming through Sears or WalMart location or the mall or whatever. As you take those customers, at 1,000 they are down probably 50% year-over-year in terms of how many people are coming in. It can have a fairly significant impact on our sittings. As to mall to mall, obviously mall traffic is down and it is all impacting that walk in business.
Will Hamilton - SMH Capital
You mentioned the loyalty programs are seeing some improvement to help offset the walk in and the overall studio sales. Are you still seeing the effect of not having the contract in place from last year impacting the sales trends?
Dale Heins
I think what you are seeing now is our loyalty program conversion and that backlog of customers in that program are building. We are optimistic we will start to see the impact of that in the second half of the year. If you look at where we were on year-over-year we have got in the Sears business a very significant improvement, a 100% increase in loyalty plan conversions year-over-year. WalMart has substantially more than that because they didn’t really have a loyalty program last year. Both of them are getting into the 30+% conversion range for the plan. That just helps you build your future sittings and what people can get in those programs.
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