Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) Your first question comes from Budd Bugatch – Raymond James.
Analyst for Budd Bugatch - Raymond James
This is actually TJ [McCondle] filling in for Budd, he’s on the road traveling. A couple questions here, first the strong comp performance in May, one of the things that we were wondering was if you would be able to breakout what last year’s comps looked like on maybe a monthly basis so we could get a good comparison there. And then see if you had any comments on what June has looked like so far.
Alex Smith
What we look at of course if the, we look at trends. So we’re looking at the trends for the year compared to last year and the year before.
Cary Turner
When we take a look at and what we do is we look at a two year cumulative comp and when we take a look at what happened in March, April and May, we’re seeing that the trend is definitely improving. As we’ve said, we saw traffic moving up in May and so therefore we felt pretty good about the May comp, especially given the margins that we got.
Alex Smith
As far as June, we’re only, this is a five week month, we’ve got two weeks to go. For the month so far, we’re sort of flattish. But we expect a very strong couple of weeks as we go into the Pier 1 sale.
Analyst for Budd Bugatch - Raymond James
And then on the merchandise margin, the 53%, just to clarify, that’s your full year number, not just from here on out?
Cary Turner
That’s correct.
Analyst for Budd Bugatch - Raymond James
How do you think we get there, is it, it’s obviously you commented on the increasing cost pressures, so it’s more weighted towards less of the store being on sale, but any quantification there of what the mix is between better buying and less of the store on sale?
Alex Smith
I think those two, better buying and less of the store on sale are kind of linked, really. The way we will get the increased margin is very simple. We’re spending very much less on promotional markdowns as we’ve talked about in many of the calls. And we expect to see our markdown percentage fall in the second half as the benefit of the smaller buys really starts to have an impact.
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