Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Robert Derrington - Morgan Keegan.
Robert Derrington - Morgan Keegan
I’ve got a couple different questions; first off, I am not sure who to direct the question to, and I’ll pick on you Mike. There are number things that clearly drove sales during the quarter, one of which were the fundraisers. You had great increase, great growth there, and also in the birthday party program, but obviously with comps being as they were, obviously there were weakness in the base business. Can you kind of give us a little bit of color of where that weakness is? Is that the daily walkup business you might see Mike? Or how would you describe it?
Mike Magusiak
Yes, Bob I’ll take that and Chris may add to it. I think first of all as we look throughout the quarter each of our periods were positive in comparable store sales for both period seven, period eight and period nine, if you back out the hurricanes. So, relatively speaking, we had strong sales performance across the quarter, but then if you break it out a little bit deeper than that, on a yearly basis, every region of the company is positive in sales.
With that being said, if you look at the third quarter, our California western region was down almost 2% and so we saw the west coast drop off in sales. If you dig even a little bit deeper than that and you just look across United States, we still had an awful strong quarter in the southwest, it was up about 4% in the east it and was up about 3.4% for the quarter. So, more than anything else what we saw was some regional variability to our comparable store sales in the third quarter.
Robert Derrington – Morgan Keegan
Okay and the other thing that kind of was a little bit different color than you’ve typically given us, was the wording about the fact that your free cash flow, you may be using it to reduce borrowings on the outstanding credit facility or to build cash reserves. Can you give us some color; have you had conversations with the banks, which have asked you to be a little bit more conservative with your plan?
Chris Morris
I’ll take that. Bob, this is Chris. We have had conversations with most of our large banks and our banks continue to be very supportive of our initiatives. They are very pleased with the ability to grow sales at a very difficult time. At this point in time, they have not indicated any concern whatsoever with respect to our ability to continue to comply with all the terms of their credit agreements as well as they haven’t indicated any concerns at all as to the banks continuing to fund our line of credit.
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