Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Anthony Cristello – BB&T Capital Markets.
Anthony Cristello – BB&T Capital Markets
One question, Rob your same store sales are up 5% year-to-date, October same store sales running plus 4% but your guidance is only 3% to 4% for the year. Are you anticipating a deceleration in trends even with easing year-over-year comparisons? Or, are you just trying to be conservative? I’m just trying to gage you here a little bit.
Robert G. Gross
Well, I guess the answer Tony would be I hope we’re being conservative but with what’s going on in the marketplace and the consumer leading in to Christmas, some other macro things going on we felt we got a good seven months under our belt. If things continue as they currently are great for us and our shareholders but we didn’t want to do anything to get too far ahead of ourselves and thought being conservative in this environment would be prudent.
Anthony Cristello – BB&T Capital Markets
When you look at what you’ve done on the gross margin side and still been able to keep the cost side in check, is that something that going forward the next few quarters and even in to next year we should think that there’s no reason to believe that gross margin improvement isn’t sustainable?
Robert G. Gross
Certainly for the upcoming two quarters the gross margin improvement is sustainable. What we would hope would occur for 2010 then starting in April is with some of the commodity costs coming down the cost to us for oil, tires and steel come down and that might be the next tranche of margin improvement going in to next year. But, certainly we would expect to see about 100 basis points gross margin improvement year-over-year for the next two quarters and that’s incorporated in to our numbers.
Anthony Cristello – BB&T Capital Markets
One of the things that, ProCare the first quarter of same store sales up over 8%, this quarter nicely a solid 6.6%. I’m just wondering when you look at the sustainability here in ProCare you talk about increasing sales volumes, reducing costs and improving margins. Can you maybe talk to each of those three aspects and kind of tell us where you think you are in this stage of the game? And, where is the most opportunity yet to come on the ProCare side of things?
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