Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Your first question comes from Matt Difrisco – Oppenheimer & Co.
Matt Difrisco – Oppenheimer & Co.
Given the incremental advertising spend that you are doing, do you think this is the environment if we’re doing a negative comp this significantly? Do you think there is a – as a response could we pull back the advertising for the fourth quarter or anything that might be planned for the first quarter to defend margins a little bit and wait for a day when the consumer might have some more dollars in his pocket to respond to the advertising?
Dennis B. Mullen
Matt, good points or good questions. The fourth quarter advertising is over next week so there’s no opportunity clearly on the national plan to pull that out. That was purchased in ’07. In terms of the ’08 plans we’re currently looking at that. We’re talking to our franchise partners. We’re looking at the environment. We’ll talk about our plans consistent as we have in the past on the February call. That’ll include whatever we’re doing in the marketing arena.
Matt Difrisco – Oppenheimer & Co.
And then also just thinking about G&A in the fourth quarter, is that still going to be a significant point of leverage in your guidance assumptions or has that also obviously with the sales still coming down, I mean I could figure that out, but as far as has anything changed as far as absolute dollar terms potentially being flat to maybe even down than a year ago?
Katherine L. Scherping
We estimate that full year will get 60 basis points of leverage over last year’s percentage so that includes the $2 million – or the $1.6 million we’ll reverse on the marketing spend that we already had forecasted. So that plus some bonus reversals in Q4 that we are just newly forecasting will help gain that EPS.
Matt Difrisco – Oppenheimer & Co.
Can you just remind us on was that pricing consistent in the quarter with your assumption for the embedded in the fourth quarter comp?
Katherine L. Scherping
The fourth quarter – the previous price that we had embedded was 4.0. We’ve revised that to a price mix of 3.6 for the full year.
Matt Difrisco – Oppenheimer & Co.
Can you tell us – just help me with the math, what is that for the fourth quarter?
Katherine L. Scherping
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