Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Gary Balter with Credit Suisse.
Greg Henslee
Good morning Gary.
Gary Balter - Credit Suisse
Hi. Yes, sorry. It was on mute.
Greg Henslee
Good morning.
Gary Balter - Credit Suisse
First of all, a very strong quarter; could you walk us through, you kind of talked about Murray’s and the problems of Murray’s and how you’re dealing with it? So essentially are we looking at two more quarters of pretty strong negative comps and then you think you get back to positives or you turn it to positives or is this an ongoing problem?
Greg Henslee
Well, we’re doing everything we can to rollout, the way we do business in the Murray’s stores and we’ve seen significant improvement in the Chicago market and not as much improvement in Detroit, probably related to the economy and probably related to the fact that the Detroit stores were more established under the Murray’s business model, but, yes, I think what we’ll see Gary, it’s an estimation on our part at this point.
I know that’s what you’re asking for, but we would say that we’ll see incremental improvement. I don’t know really at what point we would get into positive territory, but we are actively pursuing establishing our sales as a commercial provider there as we transition the retail business to more of a auto parts business as opposed to some of the other things that Murray’s and CSK sold.
Items are less reliant on promotions to drive the sales dollars. So, yes, I would say over the next couple of quarters we’ll move into positive territory, but it’s yet to be seen exactly when we’ll accomplish that.
Gary Balter - Credit Suisse
On the other stores, just to kind of explain the difference between the CSK’s kind of not converted and CSK’s converted, both at price too because it’s just like with the Checkers, as you start putting in the DC’s in Seattle in November and then as you roll them out, as Ted described, for the rest of the year, and next year. When do you think that we start seeing the big pickup in commercial like as you start calling on clients? Because that’s a process I assume you’re not really doing until you’ve the distribution centers in place to a big degree.
Tom McFall
Well, we’re doing it to some degree now. A good portion of the increase that we reflected in the western stores and in the Checker converted stores in the center of the country is commercial business, because even without the full support of our distribution center, we wanted to go out and start incrementally building relationships with customers. It’s a relatively long road to become the first call with a commercial customer.
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