Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Eric Bosshard with Cleveland Research Company. Please proceed with your question.
Eric Bosshard - Cleveland Research Company
Good morning. Thank you.
Bob Wells
Good morning Eric
Eric Bosshard - Cleveland Research Company
Just a couple of things, in terms of the progress on the SG&A looks quite impressive, on the gross margin line the deterioration looks like it was a little worse in 3Q than we saw in 2Q on a year-over-year basis. Can you help us understand; number one, the incremental progress with price and contribution of price in the quarter versus what we saw in 2Q. And then secondly, can you help us understand why gross margins behaved as they did and how we should expect that going forward in the current price cost?
Sean Hennessy
Okay, couple of things there Eric. First on the pricing, when we look at the pricing progress that we are making with the price increases, we feel pretty good. I would say that the third quarter on the stores group we continue to show the improvement that we have expected in the past. And it's really in line. I would tell you that the reason why the margin was a little short. In the last quarter someone asked me and I said that the margin would be in the 42 to 43 to range.
And really the LIFO expense was a little higher than expected in the third quarter and our margin also reflected the cost of closing some logistics operations that Bob mentioned during his comments. So without that we would have been right in that range. We would have been just short of that range. So, pricing is doing just like we had expected and so forth.
When you look at the fourth quarter margins, we expect that the margin will be down in the fourth quarter. So we are probably not going to give you guidance this quarter as exactly where we are going to be. We are not going to give that kind of a range, but it will be below last year, but the pricing we are pretty comfortable is going well.
Eric Bosshard - Cleveland Research Company
In terms of putting some numbers around that can you give us a sense of what either in total or in the stores group the contribution from price was in the quarter. And also can you give us any sense of the one time costs that you ran through the P&L in both stores and consumers --
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