Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Jeffrey Stein – Soleil Securities.
Jeffrey Stein – Soleil Securities
Kerry, I joined the call a little bit late and I want to make sure I have something straight here. SG&A, you said there were $2.4 million in store closing costs which included $1.9 million of non-cash charges. How does that tie in to the $1.1 million of store closing costs? I guess I’m a little bit confused on how much is impairment and how much would be other?
W. Kerry Jackson
I’m lost on the $1.1. What we incurred, let me just repeat for the full quarter all store closing costs were $2.4 million. Now, included in that $2.4 million was a non-cash impairment charge of $1.9 million. So the remainder $500,000 were cash based store closing costs that represented various items.
Jeffrey Stein – Soleil Securities
Question with regard to your assumption, if you’re modeling a low single digit negative comp, what kind of buying and occupancy deleverage would you see on that type of number?
W. Kerry Jackson
It’s going to deleverage. We’re going to do a good job of controlling our costs from the standpoint of while we incurred additional occupancy costs without a doubt because we’ll have more stores opened, we’ll get the full year effect of the occupancy costs on stores we opened last year plus the new stores this year, the net new stores. But, we should be able to reduce our buying and distribution costs.
However, we’re still going to incur 1% to 1.5% increase in actual costs year-over-year. Given a low single digit you should see some deleverage 10, 15, 20 basis points depending upon your comp assumption.
Jeffrey Stein – Soleil Securities
So 10 to 20 basis points and you saw 80 in the fourth quarter on an 8% plus comp decline, correct?
W. Kerry Jackson
Yes.
Jeffrey Stein – Soleil Securities
Now, you mentioned that February was a very good month for you but you also said it was a clearance month and I just want to make sure I understand, were you very promotional in February because it sounded like you did everything you could to clear your inventories by the end of January. Did you end up having some carryover or were there other factors that we should be considering here?
Mark L. Lemond
Certainly we continued to clear product in February, you’re always going to clear boots and two primary months for clearing boots are January and February. So, definitely we continue to clear product in February of 2009. Absolutely. And, it was very promotional.
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