I'm Dan Wehrer. I cover the hardline retailers for Raymond James. Thanks for attending the AutoZone presentation. AutoZone leads the do it yourself market with the medical share, which is currently at about 2%. We have 2 members of management from AutoZone with us today, Ryan Campbell, who is our Vice President, Treasurer and Investor Relations and Bill Giles, Chief Financial Officer.
Following this meeting, we'll have a breakout session in the Cordova 1 room downstairs. Thanks, Dan. Thanks, everybody, for being here this morning. I'm going to walk you through our presentation, some of which you may have seen before. I'll give you a little bit of an overview of AutoZone for those of you who may a little less familiar with AutoZone, talk a little bit about some of the industry trends, strengths on the growth initiatives, etcetera.
So from a company overview perspective, you can see that we operate over 5,500 stores here in the United States and we've got about 500 or so stores in Mexico as well. And for the trailing 12 months we're at about $11,100,000,000 I think from this slide what's really important is the consistency of the sales growth overall. And so we've been growing somewhere between that 4% 5% kind of growth rate for the last several years. And then from an EPS growth rate perspective, we've been growing double digit certainly over 10 years in the last 3 years or so, a little bit lower than that, but around 12%, still solid growth, double digit growth, etcetera. From a footprint perspective, clearly, we're in all 50 states for the United States.
So we probably have one of the broadest footprints of anybody in our industry and certainly any of our competitors as well. And in spite of that, we still believe that there's opportunity for us to continue to grow. There is no market for which we can compete in today that we would consider to be saturated, so that we continue to have opportunity for us to expand and grow our footprint. A DIY perspective, it's a fairly large industry. It's about a $57,000,000,000 industry.
It's got a compound annual growth rate of about 3.3% or so. And as you saw from the original slides, clearly, we've been taking market share throughout that time period, growing at about 5% overall growth. And as Dan said early at the beginning, we were number one market share on the DIY side. On the do it for me side, the commercial side of the business, that is a much larger industry. So, DIY being $57,000,000,000 Commercial side of the business industry.
So DIY being $57,000,000,000 commercial side of the business is actually $74,000,000,000 And again, fairly consistent growth rate over time at about 3.4% and we have about a 3% market share. So we have a much lower market share on the do it for me side of the business, which we believe will be a continue to be a real opportunity for us to continue to grow. And you can see over time but again, we're continuing to take market share on this segment of the industry as well as our growth rates have been certainly well in excess of 3.4%, but it represents about a $2,000,000,000 business for us today. One thing I'll just take pause and take a second on is really the AutoZone pledge. And I know that for all of you long term fans of AutoZone, you've seen this before, but it's a relevant thing.
I always like to spend a few minutes when I'm making a presentation to talk about it. This is our pledge. We do this at the beginning of every meeting. It's an opportunity for us to get everybody in the organization grounded on one particular mission and that is always that we're putting our customers first. We know our parts and products that's going to feed towards training, knowledge, what are we doing in the catalog in order to make sure that we've got the right information to be able to help our AutoZoners provide great customer service.
Our stores look great. We're relatively disciplined about capital deployment and our ability to continue to maintain our stores and ensure that they always look great. And we've got best merchandise at the right price, specifically saying not necessarily will always be the lowest price, it will be the right price and we'll have the best quality merchandise. So, Q2, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this next slide. This is really kind of you've already seen this, we released our earnings just last week.
And so there's what I would consider to be a lot of activity and noise, if you will, in the P and L. But let me just take a second to kind of walk you through some of the highlights here in terms of adjusting this for our GAAP numbers. So comp store sales were at 2.2%. That's what we delivered. Gross margin rate was actually up about 13 basis points or so.
We did have 2 adjustments. 1 was the impairment charge of $193,000,000 and we excluded IMC and Auto Anything, both of those divisions relatively small. We're in the process of selling or sold those divisions. So our operating profit actually was up for the quarter when you kind of carve out some of the one time noise was up about 3.8%. So relatively solid quarter.
You can see that bleeding over to net income. And then when we adjust EPS for both the impairment charge as well as the Tax Reform Act, since that's new this year, our EPS grew at about 9.3%. So 2.2% comp store sales growth rate, operating margin at about a 3.8% growth and EPS at about a 9.3% growth rate. So, overall, relatively solid quarter. I'm going to skip through the year to date stuff because it's all kind of the same.
So let's talk a little bit about growth priorities. U. S. Retail, obviously, which is about 80% of our overall business first. As we talked about, we've got about 5,400 stores throughout the United States.
We're averaging around 6,000 square feet of store and you've got IMC which will no longer be in there. And again, the point here is that relatively consistent growth rate. We're growing about 3% square footage growth rate on an annualized basis. So, we're opening about 150 stores in the United States. On the commercial side of the business, again, we believe there's a significant opportunity for us to continue to gain market share and inventory availability.
You'll hear me talk a little bit more about that. We have about 188 hub stores in our chain today. Now think about this from the standpoint that we've got 5,500 stores carrying about 25,000 SKUs today. And then the hub stores, which are about 188 hub stores carrying about 40,000 SKUs today. So again, harder to find parts and the hub stores are delivering to the satellite stores at about 3 times a day.
So, if you have a part that you're looking for that's above that 25,000 SKUs between that 25,000 and 40,000, you're able to get it on a same day basis. We also talk about multiple frequency tests that you may have heard us talk about over the last couple of years. That really is about ensuring that our in stock position within the satellite stores, those individual retail stores are as high as we need it to be. So, what we're doing is we're delivering to those stores 3 times a week. We did a lot of testing over the last year or so.
What we've come to the conclusion is, is that there's a certain level of volume store that it makes sense in. So for those volume stores, we're going to be delivering 3 times a week going forward and that will pay for itself and be able to help generate sales. So that's one thing we've been working on. Great people, great service. This is one of our initiatives really focused on training predominantly.
So we're focused on training and improving the customer shopping experience overall as well as increased availability of product. And that's the hub stores and the mega hub stores on top of that. Commercial highlights, we've grown about 4.7% number of programs that we have out there. Overall sales increased for the quarter at about 5.7%. Now in this past quarter, there were we lost maybe 2 selling days due to the holiday shift, Christmas and New Year's Day fell on Monday versus Sunday last year.
So that impacted our overall sales performance by about 150 basis points or so. So we had good performance in commercial and actually when you account for the holiday shift, an acceleration over Q1. We have opportunity to continue to open more and more commercial programs and really our focus is going to be on availability. Our ability to be able to put more inventory into the marketplace through the hub stores and the mega hubs so that we've got an ability to say yes on a more frequent basis to our commercial customers. And keep in mind, we're delivering product to our commercial customers in about 30 minutes.
So it's real time delivery. From an international perspective, again, we've got about 500 stores in Mexico. It represents almost 9% of our overall total store count today. Brazil, we only have about 16 stores. I think we announced that we're going to get to about 24 stores by the end of the fiscal year.
In Brazil, again, relatively small, but huge opportunity for us on a long term basis. We believe that that market can be every bit as big as Mexico, if not bigger. And the Mexico business, we actually, I think, celebrated our 20th year anniversary just this past year in Mexico. So that business has been good and strong for us overall. From an omnichannel perspective, Alldata, I don't know how many of you are familiar with Alldata, but that is a software company that basically sells repair.
It's a subscription based business selling repair diagnostic information to garages, so that they're able to get OE information in order to help them repair their cars. We've got about 80,000 customers. It's a good tie in with our commercial business by the way. And then autozone.com where we've got significant number of customers that come to autozone.com, we don't track an enormous amount of commerce business on our.com on autozone.com. So our ship to home, buy online, pick up in store and buy online, pick up in store is the fastest growing channel of distribution that we have.
That's growing very fast. Both of those combined are not significant overall, but what is significant is the number of eyeballs that we're getting to the website on a daily and weekly basis. We think that there is a majority of the customers that come into the store have already visited the website, etcetera, which is why we're continuing to invest in our omni channel. From a cash flow perspective, we continue to generate strong cash flow. Obviously, clearly, the tax reform act is going to be able to help us generate even more cash flow overall.
Very healthy balance sheet. Our inventory has grown about 5% overall, but on a per location basis only grew about 1% or so. And then our AP to inventory ratio continues to remain over 100%. I think we finished the quarter at around 108% for the quarter. So, really strong cash flow.
And then just lastly, I would just tell you overall from a retail perspective, again, we're continuing to invest in our AutoZoners. We are continuing to invest in inventory availability in the marketplace, getting more inventory closer to the customer, either more frequent delivery to the existing stores, increasing the number of hubs that we have at 188 hubs. Keep in mind, those hubs have SKUs between 25,041,000 SKUs. And then we have about 16 mega hubs and the mega hubs have between 4,100,000 SKUs. And so today with about 16 mega hubs, we can get a SKU to that customer within a day about one next day at worst case scenario.
We plan to expand that to about 40 mega hubs and then at that point we'll be have same day coverage on 100,000 SKUs in the marketplace. And that will benefit both the retail side of the business as well as the commercial side of the business. And then from an international perspective, we continue to grow international at a pretty good prudent pace. Both Mexico has been a great business for us and now we kind of embarked on Brazil and expect to continue to grow that out over the next 10 to 15 years. That's going to be my quick pitch because I wanted to leave some time for questions so that we could Brian and I could take some questions from the audience.
So, I'm going to stop there because I know you know most of the story and you've heard it before. Yes, sir? Sure. Yes. Let me just repeat it a little bit, so in case you didn't hear.
So the question was really about Amazon. If you recall last year, there was a lot of noise in the marketplace about it. Obviously, it had a fairly significant impact on the stock throughout that period. And the question really is, what are you seeing? How is it impacting your business overall?
And in some cases, we're seeing people buy product from Amazon, have it delivered to their neighborhood garage for their car to be repaired and what are you seeing? So, we haven't seen anything really differently necessarily out of Amazon over the last 2 years, I would say, necessarily. They're increasing their SKU count on the website, etcetera. But we're not seeing necessarily an impact to our business per se, nor are we seeing them go to market differently necessarily than they have over time. What I would say is that from our perspective, our value proposition is really the service that transfers into the store.
So when you're shopping for an item and you think about batteries, rotating electric starters, alternators, etcetera, those are things you can come in and we can test that equipment for you. Because at the end of the day, we don't want to sell you a $120 battery when you need a $3 cable in order to be able to really fix the problem that you have. So, we're all about ensuring that we do what it takes to do the job right and we want to be able to help you get through that process. So, when you think about rotating electric and you're thinking about buying wiper blades and want to be able to put those wipers on your car, and always not the easiest thing to do, I can tell you from experience. Light bulbs having somebody come out to the car looking at what you got.
There's a process and an experience that takes place in the store that is just very different than what you'll get online. So, I we are conscious of certainly the online threat and what it can mean, etcetera. We're not seeing an impact per se and we're not necessarily seeing it impact our business. It doesn't mean that we're immune to it. It doesn't mean that we don't watch it.
It doesn't mean that we don't react at some level. But we believe that our customer service is what's going to differentiate us on a long term basis, not to mention that we have Duralast product. Over 50% of our product is private label product. And many of these products also have a core attach. So there's a two way transaction going back and forth.
So we respect that it is a threat. Amazon is a great competitor and a great retailer. But we believe that the value proposition that we have continues to drive our business and continues to allow us to take market share. Does that answer it? Yes.
Okay. That's a good question. Anything else we have, Brian? I certainly haven't stumped the audience. Yes, the penetration of online sales overall in our category?
Yes, I think it's probably in the I don't quote me exactly on it, but I think it's probably in that 8% to 9% kind of range, maybe it's pushing 10% or so. I suspect that some form or another over time catalog business had similar type of penetration. It might be a little bit higher today than it might have been 10 years ago from between catalog and online sales overall. So it is growing. This clearly is growing overall.
And you also have to think about the type of products that like performance and accessories is a good category. We don't have a huge penetration in performance and accessories per se, but that's probably a good category that may lend itself more to online sales. It's very SKU intensive. It can be customizable, etcetera. But for items like batteries, which you can't mail, wash and wax that are typically chemical based and are usually hazardous and are unable to be mailed as well or products that have cores attached where we need the old product back or at least the manufacturer needs the old product back and we like to facilitate that for them are less susceptible to it.
We have. We've looked at it from a category perspective to see what's susceptible and what isn't susceptible and other things that we want to change. We're not seeing necessarily a change in our sales trends relative to those categories. So, we don't believe that we're getting necessarily impacted from that. But you're right about things like brakes, etcetera, which is a bigger job.
And that's not one that you have to do today. You could order today and do it this weekend, etcetera. But with 75% of the population living within 5 miles of an auto zone, there is value and convenience to that as well. And keep in mind also that we have a loan a tool program. So if you're a weekend warrior and you may not have all the tools necessary to do certain jobs, we have those jobs that we're happy to loan to you just so that you don't have to go out and spend $60 to $70 on a tool that you're just going to use once for.
You had a question? Yes. I was going to ask about the windfall from tax reforms. Do you have a plan of exactly how you can try to allocate the Yes. So, the question really was around tax reform.
And on our call, one of the things we said, which I'm glad you asked the question was is that we are estimating that we will generate about $200,000,000 from the Tax Reform Act, no more complicated than the 35% rate on the 24% and $2,000,000,000 worth of pretax income. And so from our perspective, we're looking at reallocating about 60 to 90 basis points into reinvesting back into the business. So less than half of what the tax reform bill would be generating for us. And our viewpoint on that is that and our message really was is that, look, we're going to get probably a one time $200,000,000 well, be uninfinitum $200,000,000 benefit. We recognize that there's an opportunity.
We want to reinvest a portion of that amount. We have yet to finalize what we're going to invest and where we're going to invest in it and what period of time. But from a transparency perspective, we wanted to acknowledge the fact that we will reinvest some of it. We gave an estimate of 60 to 90 basis points, which equates to just less than half of the $200,000,000 And we said it would probably be somewhere over 12 to 18 months. Probably wages and benefits may be one that seems to be one that we're hearing from a lot of other retailers and competitors.
So, we're sensitive to the fact that that may take place in the marketplace and we need to be able to react to that and be able to respond to it. And so, if we can ensure that we're getting the right people and continue the tenure, probably some at a lesser degree, some technology things that we could be doing over the next few years that maybe we can accelerate and pull in and be able to do them on a sooner basis, so that we can be able to get the value of those investments sooner than we would have otherwise gotten. So that's roughly how we're thinking about it from a tax reform perspective. Yes, let me so the question really was is that on how you're thinking about mega hubs and is that really more efficient than adding distribution centers. And so just to go backwards for a second, if I may, we're adding 2 distribution centers in the last 12 to 15 months.
I didn't mention that, I should have. So we have a distribution center in the northwest part of the United States that opened up about 6 to 8 months ago And we have another distribution center that is within about 40 miles of here that we'll be opening up in the next month or so. And that will give us about 10 distribution centers, which we think is the right footprint for the United States for us in terms of being able to deliver out to the stores, etcetera. And the purpose of those distribution centers is really driving those 25,000 SKUs and ensuring that we're in stock on those. From a mega hub perspective, mega hubs is really about getting that longer tail, providing an ability to say, yes, they're not really replenishing the retail stores.
They're really adding an additional in terms of the retail store 80,000 SKUs or in terms of comparing it to a mega hub 60,000 SKUs into the marketplace, but those 2 don't carry. So it's really about adding choice and availability and that's the purpose of the mega hubs. And we think that getting to somewhere close to 40 will allow us a footprint across the United States that will provide us an ability to say yes to a customer on the same day. Today, it may be next day, but it will allow us the ability to say yes on the same day. Does that help?
I think that over time one of the things we talked about is I think we've averaged around a 1.9% comp over the last 4, 5 years or so. The industry is growing at around 3% or so. So, we had a great winter from our perspective. We had a harsh winter this year. So, I think that will give us some tailwind as we move forward.
But from a comp store perspective, I mean, the last history may be a way to think about it over a longer period of time. There will always be fluctuations, but it's hard for me to give you an exact number. It's certainly not more harder to focus on it. If there's some aspects of the cost that are a little bit harder and I think wages and benefits have been one that we recognize that we'll probably invest a little bit more in that, but that one has been one that has done there over the last year or so. So that's one that we continue to address and want to be proactive about.
From a technology perspective, obviously, all corporations are investing more and more in technology because the customers demand it. Everyone is being much more mobile, etcetera. So, for us to be able to communicate and interact with our customer, we're going to have to have more technology introduced into the stores as well as online. Those are the two areas that I would say I think there's always opportunities for us to continue to reduce cost. I think on the wage side of it, the one good byproduct of that is that the beneficiary of a lot of the wage increases is really the lower end consumer, which is our customer.
So we believe that a lot of the actions that are taking place in terms of salary and wages are actually going to wind up benefiting our customers. We'll see if that translate into sales improvement over time, but it certainly is going to be beneficial to our customer base. And not because they're not a great company and they're a threat and so on and so forth. We just have a different value proposition. I think the weather, we had 2 mild winters in a row leading up to this year and that seemed to have even more impact than I might have thought it would have, but it certainly had a lingering impact.
So I think that weather is a short term event even though we're talking 3 years. But so we had a very harsh winter this year. So I think that's going to be beneficial over the next 12 months or so. The car park is in good shape. It is 11.7 years with average age of a vehicle and that has been relatively steady over time, but it continues to grow and that's a good thing for us.
What was the other one? I think it would be a slight acceleration. I mean, the one good thing about the industry is it has relatively consistent growth. And so it's on the edges. You know what I mean?
It's a 2 and a half to 3 and a half kind of a growth rate between high and low. So, the good news is the industry remains relatively healthy. The car park is healthy. Miles driven continues to grow. Even new car sales, which don't really impact us short term, we're selling they're selling a lot more SUVs and pickup trucks today than ever before.
That's going to be beneficial to our business on a long term basis. So there's a lot it's a healthy industry even getting healthier. But I would think about it from those stratospheres. Thanks. Good question.
We need to complete the presentation. We'll continue to break out the financial quarter over the year. Thank you.