Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of David Magee – Sun Trust Robinson Humphrey
David Magee – Sun Trust Robinson Humphrey
Can you talk about the relative demand you see right now for credit within the stores and does that enable you the fact that you’re in that business too, enable you to be even more price competitive and therefore, you were saying the product margins might be reflective of that as well.
Timothy Frank
I think the demand is consistent with what it has been historically. That may change as credit continues to tighten but we have not seen that as yet. We see a consistent trend at that and as far as our pricing goes, we learned a long time ago that our pricing, we really have to be very competitive regardless of the strength that we have in this credit and so we have to make sure that we’re competitive so they really are two separate items in our mind.
David Magee – Sun Trust Robinson Humphrey
But if you get the credit sale though does that not lessen the pain of the product margin being squeezed?
Timothy Frank
Yes, certainly.
David Magee – Sun Trust Robinson Humphrey
You talked about the $2.9 million impact because of the hurricanes and you mentioned some other items in there too, can you just hit on those again from the quarter that, if you add all that back you get $0.24.
Michael Poppe
There were three items I mentioned, one and the $2.9 was the net of tax, I’m going to give you the pre-tax numbers here. The hurricane expenses net of the insurance proceeds was $1.3 million in the quarter, the bad debt expense now that we’re recording this allowance where is if everything were still being transferred to the QSPE we wouldn’t be recording this provision, that was $2.5 million.
And then because of higher claims, credit insurance claims related to the hurricane, there was a $700,000 impact and so those total $4.5 million pre-tax or about $2.9 net and that’s the $0.13, on a diluted EPS basis.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Anthony Lebiedzinski – Sidoti & Company
Anthony Lebiedzinski – Sidoti & Company
As far as store openings, did I hear correctly that you’re not planning to open any new stores next year?
Timothy Frank
At this time it’s a wait and see attitude. We want to be as judicious with our capital and our liquidity as we can right now. We’ve got some opportunities to update some stores that will allow us to display more furniture, appliance vignettes, any of the flat panel TVs, so hopefully that will drive more same store sales.
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