Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Christopher Svezia - Susquehanna Financial Group.
Christopher Svezia - Susquehanna Financial Group
First of all Mark if you could just quantify maybe what the impact was from the tax rebates during the quarter? You mentioned it did benefit you during June and July. Could you just maybe quantify what that impact was and was that meaningful?
Mark L. Lemond
From a sales standpoint, no I can’t. But we saw traffic that was in the high single digit declines in the first part of the quarter turn into traffic declines that were low single digits, even break-even for a couple of weeks really until the last two weeks of July and like most people saw traffic turn way off in the last two weeks of July. So I think in June and the early part of July it really resulted in traffic counts that were a whole lot better than May; significantly better than May.
Christopher Svezia - Susquehanna Financial Group
On the SG&A costs you guys have done a tremendous job so far in the first half and I know Kerry you had talked about third quarter seeing an increase in SG&A dollars year-over-year. I guess just maybe talk about what the driver to that increase is. Why during the third quarter? Are you doing something different from a marketing perspective or is it just switches in terms of what happened in the first half to the second half? Why don’t you maybe just quantify what’s happening there during the third quarter.
W. Kerry Jackson
In the first two quarters we controlled a lot of expenses but one of the big things that we could affect was rationalizing our advertising a little bit and making what we thought were more prudent buys in the first half. Now given that, we have such an important period in the third quarter for back-to-school and in the start of fall season we have not reduced our advertising expense near to the extent we did in the other two quarters prior. We felt we need to be out there advertising. So that’s why we’re not seeing as big a reduction on a year-over-year basis. We will continue to control those other costs though.
Mark L. Lemond
Let me add one thing. We expect to open about nine stores in the third quarter so with the additional stores that we’re going to be operating, which are significant, selling costs at store level are inherently going to go up. So that’s probably a bigger piece of it than any kind of reduction in advertising.
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