Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question is from Deborah Weinswig with Citigroup.
Deborah Weinswig - Citigroup
Thanks. Blake, can you please give a little bit of color -- I think on the third quarter earnings call you had talked about lowering the regular price in over 800 styles. Can you talk about how that works and how we should think about 2009 in terms of pricing and your offering at different price points?
Blake W. Nordstrom
I think I’ll take a moment to comment on those remarks I made then, and then also maybe have Pete weigh in if I don’t cover it all. I did comment on the November call that at that time, we took roughly 800 styles in on average, reduced them 22% and that was in response to the times that we were facing then and trying to address the quality/value relationship right in the middle of our half yearly sale as well. And so we are trying not to be prescriptive on that but our merchants are working hard with our vendors to ensure that we have the right balanced offering.
Pete, what would you maybe add to that?
Peter E. Nordstrom
The only thing I would add to that is our desire is to be a full-priced retailer, and what that means is getting the price right up front. And so that was really an attempt to make sure that we are being as sharp as we can be right up front and not have to sell things through any kind of promotional activities or gimmicks, I guess. It’s a little hard to say exactly what that did for us because we don’t have the ability to contrast if we did nothing.
I think how it really played out is it really is just an extension of the philosophy we’ve always had and that’s to try to be a regular priced retailer with the best possible value up-front and not be undersold, so it’s really a continuation of that.
I would say the tangible benefit of this is it really created a good platform for our sales people to have a conversation starter with our customers, to be able to entice them about an item that they had on the floor that was really a great value as we had it really spread throughout the whole store.
So we’re going to continue to work with our vendors and to scrutinize all of this internally to make sure that we are being -- offering the kind of value that sells something at the first price.
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