Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Matthew Fassler. Your line is open and please state your company name.
Matthew Fassler - Goldman Sachs
I guess my first question is looking at your balance sheet, where is the urgency on the fundraising side? What did you see happening over the course of this year that led you to think that liquidity would be a significant barrier? Is it the tone of business today? Is it your working capital needs going forward because you didn’t get there this past year and looking at the fixed charge coverage numbers, et cetera, that are part of your line, it looks like it’s close but not over the line. So what is it that had you as concerned as you apparently were that you needed to make the moves you made today?
George L. Jones
Okay, well listen -- I’ll go back a little history on this, I guess. I came here about a year and eight months ago and the company had a lot of debt at that point in time, so we knew that we really needed to something financially to address that and we started last year with a -- we first put out the announcement of doing a convertible and we had adverse reactions from shareholders on that, so we said okay. We go down the road of a term loan. Went down the road of a term loan and that was in July and the week that we were going to close on that is when the bottom of the market dropped out on the credit market, so our need for financing really didn’t go away, so to speak, but we worked through it.
Our sales were better than we thought they would be and we controlled our inventories well and we made it through within our existing availability on that too. And our sales were trending pretty well and we were feeling pretty good about things all the way through. As a matter of fact, even coming into the fourth quarter, as we looked at the early part of the fourth quarter, our sales were quite robust. We were running well above plan and looking quite good and frankly, when we hit into the fourth quarter, we hit December, as they did I think for a lot of other retailers, it’s like a faucet they sort of cut off. Now, we still ended up with a positive comp for the fourth quarter, as you saw, 2%, but frankly that isn’t as much as we expected. And we were expecting to do better than that and we thought that the things we were doing were getting results and we’re still pleased with a lot of things that are happening.
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