Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Emily Shanks with Lehman Brothers.
Emily Shanks – Lehman Brothers
Can you give us a little bit of color around traffic versus ticket trends during the quarter?
Arthur Reiner
Traffic has been off in the malls both in our specialty stores where we have traffic counts; we have noted that traffic is off in those malls: we believe, from what we’ve heard, is often department stores also and our check has moved up in total about 5%.
Emily Shanks – Lehman Brothers
Then can you speak to any geographical trends that you may have seen?
Arthur Reiner
Geographical trends the strongest region in the country for it is Texas. That has been the best and Baileys has a concentration of stores there as does Macys. The northeast has been maybe the second best. I would say the weakest areas have been Florida or northeast and southeast have been reasonably good. California in the Bloomingdales group has performed well for us in the second quarter and seems to be coming back, although I believe California’s business in total is not good. I think the mid-west business still remains challenging and difficult and that’s pretty much it. In August I think the Florida business has been hurt by Faye last week and that closed a number of locations for a period of time, so we had that on top of the Florida business in addition to whatever a challenging trend in Florida has been.
Emily Shanks – Lehman Brothers
Also this is a question on comps, can you just give us the color around what the free standing comps are doing specifically?
Arthur Reiner
We don’t split our comps out by group.
Operator
Your last question comes from Bernie Wong with Symphony [ph] Assets.
James Kim - Symphony [ph] Assets
Hi this is actually James Kim. Can you guys maybe shed some light on what you expect the low point of your revolver availability to be from now to the end of the year?
Arthur Reiner
What we had said previously, James, is that we had expected the low point of availability to be approximately $50 million, which really falls in the middle of the year based on the advance rates that are in our revolving credit agreement and as Art indicated earlier, at this point in time in the month of August we were somewhat better than that in our mid-month availability.
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