Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Meredith Fowler, - Wachovia Securities.
Meredith Fowler – Wachovia Securities
Can you outline your cash priorities going forward? Do you continue to see your focus on share repurchase activity? Or could it maybe shift to paying down debt going forward?
Lawrence E. Hyatt
We have repurchased a total of 2.2 million shares of our stock since, since the beginning of the year. And a total of four million shares since we began buying back shares in 2007. This total represents almost 17% of the shares outstanding as of the end of the 2006 fiscal year.
Under our existing share repurchase authorization, and the restricted payments basket and our bond indenture and revolving line of credit agreement, we can repurchase approximately $15 million worth of additional shares, although under the restricted payments basket, any dividend payments would reduce that.
Decisions on future share repurchases, of pay down of the revolver, or other uses of our cash flow will be based on our financial performance, expected cash position, and cash requirements and conditions in the capital market.
Meredith Fowler – Wachovia Securities
Can you talk about any new actions you're taking to help reduce the labor and food costs going forward?
Gregory L. Burns
As I said earlier, obviously this is a difficult environment for everyone, but during these difficult times we've got to still look for opportunities. If you start from top to bottom, certainly pricing is an opportunity. We feel like we can add price to our menus, but we're very sensitive to our guests today and sensitive that they have in their every day life. So we're being very careful about that.
And we see opportunities on the food side. Certainly we're delivering the best food that we've ever had in all three concepts. But we believe there's opportunity in portion sizing or the opportunity in plate and presentation and things like that. We're looking at a lot of those things in our everyday R&D process.
From a labor side, we put in some pretty good tools in place over the last year. Certainly this quarter will be a difficult one because of the erratic sales that we saw. And certainly in particular Ninety Nine we saw some pretty strong sales reductions in the second half of the quarter. But there's no doubt that we can do better controlling our labor, overtime hours and our labor productivity. And we're in process.
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