Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator instructions). First question comes from the line of Tom Filandro of SID, please go ahead.
Tom Filandro – Susquehanna Financial Group
Thank you I actually have a couple of questions. First congratulations on just a tremendous job. Are you guys seeing, I mean look most feel we’re in a recession, are you guys seeing any regional variance in the business? That’s my first question. My second question is given the strong gross margin experience in 07 what opportunities are there or do you see to grow gross margins in 08? And then my third question is I see you increased the dividend, you’re buying a little bit of stock back, I mean the stocks been up a lot but you have over $8.00 in cash per share, is there a comfort level of cash that you like to have on the balance sheet? Thank you.
Dennis Nelson
This is Dennis. On the regional variance, you know we see most of our areas as pretty strong. We get questioned about Florida and several of our new stores have just opened recently in Florida so we don’t have a long experience there. For the most part we’ve been happy to very happy with all our new openings and we see maybe a little bit of sales off in Michigan a little bit in a couple areas and then some areas are strong. So overall our variance is mainly due to the performance of our store managers.
On the opportunity for gross margin growth, the team has been doing a very good job of eliminating mistakes and improving opportunities on the gross margin. It’s at a point that we’re probably not promising improvement there although we won’t give up trying to improve it. And on the strong balance sheet of cash, you know we review that quarterly at our Board meetings but we feel especially at this time, having a very strong balance sheet and working with our developers and our vendors, there’s a lot of advantage to having their comfort of how strong we are. So we will keep that in mind as we review.
Tom Filandro – Susquehanna Financial Group
Thanks Dennis.
Operator
Okay thank you. And the next question comes from Shaun Smolarz of Sidoti, please go ahead.
Shaun Smolarz – Sidoti & Co.
Hi, good morning everyone. My first question is how surprised were you with the fourth quarter same store sales results and also with February, were they like much better than you even imagined?
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