Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) And we first go to line of David Palmer with UBS. Please go ahead.
David Palmer - UBS Securities
Thanks. Congratulations on a greater question guys. Wanted to ask you about what you see going on in calendar 2009 to-date, obviously the two year deterioration and one year deterioration in same-store sales in January and February isn't quite what it was in the fourth quarter. I know you guys are obviously very much the students of the industry and I wondered what you think is causing that slowing of same store sales decline industry-wide and perhaps for you, obviously a lot of folks out there are doing lot of value but there seems to be something else out there as well even things like movie going is up that perhaps we're getting some sort of level where casual dining is a cheap entertainment, almost the trade down in that sort of way but again more or less speculating because it seems not that bad, so any sort of thoughts about that would be helpful? Thanks.
Clarence Otis, Jr.
Thanks, John. This is Clarence, I'll start and it's difficult to say with certainty, so a lot of what we're about to say is really scary as much as anything else. We do think, as we look at the fourth quarter last year, we are looking at an environment that as lot of people have said, was unprecedented in lot of ways and so, when you think about the financial crisis, you think about the wealth deterioration, how quickly it happened. Our sense is that, people hit the pause button and said, I need to really hunker down and understand what's going on here.
Stability started to come back in a little bit as we got past what at this point appears to be the worst of the concern about the basic financial institutions, deposits those sorts of things and so we think some of that got passed even though the job-loss continued and headlines around job-loss were there.
I think people felt it wasn't... this crisis that they were unfamiliar with, we were back to economic cycles and sorts of things. And so we think people hunkered down a lot. It culminated in December where sales really fell off a cliff not just in casual dining but across every consumer category. And we think as people got a little bit more confident that we started to see them return in January and February; what we've seen also in prior recessions is that as people get their minds around the fact that we are in a slowdown, it’s going to last for a while. They tend to make that decision about the big ticket item and put those off and so car and appliances and those sorts of things and as a consequence to that, they start to treat themselves with the smaller ticket items and in the past that has included movies for sure but also dinning out.
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