Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Gary Balter - Credit Suisse.
Gary Balter - Credit Suisse
A number of questions just to fill in some of the holes. Could you mention again why inventory was up as much as it was? You mentioned forward buys. How much of the increase is forward buys and why did you decide to do forward buys this time?
Lawrence P. (Chip) Molloy
A couple hundred basis points are forward buys, but why we do it is in the time environment where we are, we're being offered some discounts that help gross margin if we go ahead and do that. We've been doing it all along the year, helping us along the way. And it's usually consumable products with fast turns, so it doesn't put us in an inventory risk perspective.
Gary Balter - Credit Suisse
Could you talk about inflation, how much you're seeing in inflation?
Lawrence P. (Chip) Molloy
Yes, inflation was not as high as it was in Q3, but still higher than historical levels of 2% to 2.5%. We weren't going to actually quantify the number this quarter.
Gary Balter - Credit Suisse
In your assumption for positive comps for next year, is there an assumption that there is slight inflation?
Lawrence P. (Chip) Molloy
We'll continue to see inflation, especially through the first half of the year, and then that inflation will slow.
Gary Balter - Credit Suisse
And then the last question is just when you look at the guidance and it looks like conservative guidance, why would you not be able to get leverage off expenses with the comp that you're assuming, given that you're slowing the store growth so dramatically?
Lawrence P. (Chip) Molloy
We will, but if you think about the store growth, we're still building, call it 27 stores in Q1, so we're still on a run rate of 100 plus stores in the first part of the year. We'll start to get those benefits on the back half of the year as we really start to monetize that slowing of the growth.
Gary Balter - Credit Suisse
But you gave us no expense leverage for the year.
Lawrence P. (Chip) Molloy
We didn't. We have low single-digit comps as our guidance for the year, so we've come down quite a bit from an expense structure than where we were relative to - we needed a 4plus comp before; we're now in a place where it's a much lower comp.
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