Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from David Palmer - UBS.
David Palmer - UBS
Quick just a financial question, just with regard to the swap that you’re doing on the $360 million of debt, how much might that reduce your interest cost on that debt? Secondly, with regard to the marketing in November and December, are you talking about the Baconator for Wendy’s and dollar menu at Arby’s?
Could you perhaps give us a sense of that and perhaps if that’s a change of what you were going to be doing based on how tough the environment is, and the fact that, a $5.01 combo might not have the response that you want. In other words, the only way to go value these days is to go lower than that with the $1 price point. Any thoughts on that would be helpful.
Steve Hare
Let me go first and on the interest rate swap the effect of the swaps for this quarter was $1 million of interest rate savings compared to what we would have paid and then on the swaps were not fully in place for the whole quarter. So had they been in place the quarterly impact you could anticipate would be $1.6 million of course that assumes rates stay where they are today, but that’s a good ballpark for the quarterly savings until rates move.
Roland Smith
I want to answer your question about the fourth quarter as it relates to marketing. As I mentioned, yes, from a Wendy’s perspective, we do plan on re-launching the Baconator. We do also have a new value offering that we will be launching late in the quarter. I’m not prepared to talk about that obviously from a competitive standpoint.
At Arby’s, as I also mentioned we did launched the $5.01 combos, worth every penny. They are mixing incredibly well so the consumer response has been very good. We expect that traction will pick up a little bit overtime. As you know the advertising levels at Arby’s are significantly below many of our competitors so it takes a little longer for that message to get out. Sometimes that message has to get out by customers actually coming into the store and seeing it and participating and that’s a little bit where we haven’t seen transactions improve in October based on the launch of that.
We will add to that kind of the other end of our value Barbell, so to speak, a more, kind of aggressive dollar menu, which I mentioned on the call that has had excellent results in the southeast where we’ve tested it and we think the combination of those two value offerings from our new Arby’s strategy will begin to rebound transactions and grow sales.
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