Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Adrianne Shapira - Goldman Sachs.
Adrianne Shapira - Goldman Sachs
Bob, I’m just wondering, in the beginning of the call you had talked about, you know, obviously there was a weather impact calendar and it sounded as if there was a rebound in comps post the weather impact. You talked about a good start in ’09 with some impressive best Valentine’s Day in years. Can you just maybe elaborate a little bit in terms of what we’re seeing in terms of the underlying comp trend? Maybe explain a little bit in terms of the comp performance during the quarter.
Bob Sasser
Sure, Adrianne. You know we don’t report the monthly, but I’ll give you some color on that. We came into the quarter knowing that there was a calendar shift and we planned for it. As everyone knows, November – Thanksgiving moved to a week later, so it basically moved out the Thanksgiving to Christmas sales. We lost a week of sales, Christmas selling in November. We knew that and we planned for it and we thought that was about a $25 million bogey. We also thought some of that was going to move into December so it wasn’t going to be lost and we had plans to overcome that.
What we didn’t know was that the succession of winter storms from mid-December through Christmas was going to impact our northern stores as it did. Holiday sales were very strong despite the weather, but as these storms swept across from the Pacific Northwest all the way to the East, you could track the sales and the comps across the northern part along with the storm. We think that the weather – the severe weather – by the way, when sales were being negatively impacted in the North, our sales in the South and the warmer weather stores were doing just fine, according to plan. Maybe a little better in some places.
The stores as the weather passed through rebounded. So the underlying strength of the comp was there. We think the weather – it’s an estimate, the weather cost us $20 to $25 million of sales in the fourth quarter. But we still posted a respectable 2.2% comp and as the weather passed so did our comps rebound.
We’re only three weeks into the year so too early to declare victory but we’re off to a good start. We had a terrific Valentine’s season. It was – I was very proud of our stores and the transition they made from Christmas and then to big game in January and then into Valentine’s. And if you had a chance to go to any of our stores, you would have seen Valentine balloons covering the ceilings the week before Valentine’s Day. Our stores did a terrific job and we had a really good, strong result for our Valentine’s season.
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