Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Bill Sims - Citigroup.
Bill Sims - Citigroup
Mike, I want to wish you well on your future endeavors. This is for Phil. It looks like throughout the quarter you struggled to balance sales growth versus gross margin improvement, where early in the quarter it looks like sales came at the expense of margins and toward the tail end of the quarter it seems to be quite the opposite. Do you feel like you found that right balance between sales and margin improvement? What should we look for as we go forward from a promotional standpoint?
Phil Schoonover
A lot of moving parts in the sort of changing nature of the CE business. We did learn a lot from the ups and downs. In general, we had some tough decisions to make around our expense structure which impacted some of the traffic, particularly later in the third quarter and throughout the fourth quarter. We made some decisions on labor spend to try to hold the bottom line profitability, which in the end may not have been the most prudent decision. So on the demand side, we had to make some tough decisions and we learned from those decisions, kind of a mixed bag.
Obviously you heard a lot in the conference call script about learnings about the basket of products and services that we can sell with TVs. While the TVs are a better value than ever, there is an opportunity for us to grow the basket and frankly, from an executional standpoint to manage the gap between our best performing stores and the most opportunistic stores. We've made some investments there as well as some changes that should help us bring some accountability and better training and development to the people that need help.
Finally, I think that we were up against some difficult comp numbers for these quarters. We did gain overall CE market share and we held the predicted share on the TV business that we thought we would be able to attain. So we did not give our customers up to our core competitors during this period. So I think from a unit standpoint, the TV business in particular, but overall the stake in the ground categories for CE, we feel pretty good about holding our customers. Now we just have to refine the profit model.
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