Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first call comes from Jeffrey Klinefelter – Piper Jaffrey.
Jeffrey Klinefelter – Piper Jaffrey
A couple of questions for you. The first would be the online business or direct business versus the store business, it sounds like you had a very strong momentum through the year both of Journeys and Hat World and just curious how you think about that relative to stores, store sizes and ultimate number of stores or your footprint domestically. It seems like in some cases, the bigger that your online business, the more of an opportunity you might have to actually contain the size of your store footprint and maybe you can just help us understand how you think about that on a longer term basis.
Bob Dennis
I don't think we view our internet business as a reason to not open more stores. There's very different kinds of customers out there. There's the mall shopper and then there's the internet customer, and obviously the internet is gaining a bit of share. And so you could argue with a margin that might say that marginal store might have opened looks different because more sales flow over to the internet.
We actually see the internet as a nicely integrated piece with the stores. In the Journeys stores we're making some technology changes that will allow the customer to actually see our full range of inventory in stores that don't carry it and that might actually enhance sales in the stores.
Hat World is a very special situation because as you know, no store comes even close to carrying the skew count of Hat World. So we always say if you're down in Florida, that you're unlikely to find a Purdue hat in a hat store anywhere. So the internet fills that very special need. And once again, we run that integrated with the store so you could buy your Purdue hat at our store and have it shipped there for free.
I'm not sure it's going to impinge too much on the footprint. It's more an integrated activity and we'll still look at every store on it's own merits.
Jeffrey Klinefelter – Piper Jaffrey
So you look at it more as a way ultimately to control or contain the size of the store and still represent the full assortment of products.
Bob Dennis
That's probably a better way of looking at it.
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