Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time please press the 1 key on your touch tone telephone. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, you may press the # key.
Our first question comes from Betty Chen from Wedbush Morgan Securities.
Betty Chen - Wedbush Morgan Securities
Thank you. Good morning. I was wondering if you can help us maybe give some clarification on your guidance for the fourth quarter – or implied guidance – relative to the quarter to date trend. Has the improvement in terms of comps increasing 7.1% so far been primarily driven because of weather or has there been a change in your promotional cadence during this time frame and is that why you have mentioned that part of the Q4 and the full year change in guidance is reflecting some anticipated higher markdowns?
Thank you.
David Levin
For us, our perspective, it was clearly weather. If we really start to break down our comp sales by market area, region of the country, it is very easy to see – even in November we have markets that are doing double-digit comps in markets that are flat based on the weather patterns that are going on. When we announced October 18, 2007, that our comp at that point was up .2 the last two week of October were probably the worst two weeks we have had in several years. It was also the warmest two weeks on record for the month of October.
What we are seeing (a come-back) is really driven by traffic in the stores from weather. Our promotional cadence is very consistent with last year in Casual Male. In fact, I punched it up – exactly Rochester we did run a Thanksgiving weekend promotion which was very positive.
Getting back to the anticipated markdowns: it is really coming out of Rochester - we need to accelerate clearing up some problem inventory that has accumulated over the last several quarters and get them repositioned, but we are watching our inventories very closely. On the seasonal product, certainly in Casual Male where the bulk of our inventory is, and we are comfortable that we are going to have good sell-throughs through the fourth quarter. Again, we are up against a very weak December a year ago for us (one of the mildest Decembers on record), so if we get any kind of weather we think we will be able to maintain the comps that we are delivering right now.
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