Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Stephens Nashville Conference 2025. I'm Thomas Winnler, and I'll be hosting this fireside this morning. We have Monro, ticker MNRL. Peter, Brian, maybe you want to kick things off with a quick introduction of the company?
Sure. Brian, why don't you introduce yourself, and then I'll comment on the company?
Absolutely. I'm Brian D'Ambrosia. I'm the company's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.
My name is Peter Fitzsimmons, and I'm the company's CEO. Monro is an auto aftermarket service business. We have over 1,100 stores nationally. We're in 32 states. The company has been around for over 60 years, been public since 1991, I think. I would describe our business as a service business, meaning what really engages our customers is the combination of being able to buy replacement tires, which is 50% of our revenue, and also get service on their vehicle, ranging from oil changes to brake jobs to ride control to anything that would be preventive maintenance to keep your vehicle safe. Maybe a little bit about myself. Also, I've now been at the company for close to 8 months. I've worked in this industry for 20 or 30 years.
I have an affiliation with the consulting firm Alex Partners, but I often take roles with companies for an extended period of time sometimes. And I've worked many, many industries, but a lot in the auto aftermarket and retail space. 20 years ago, I was the CFO for an auto parts business. More recently, I was the CEO for a service collision business. So I really know this industry well. And I was thrilled when the board decided that they might like to make a change to drive performance improvement faster because I know this company. I know its potential. And I'm really excited about being here and working with the management team, including Brian and many others. Tom, I'll stop there.
Yeah, perfect. That's a good reminder. If you guys have any questions, feel free to interrupt me at any time. So before we dig a little bit further into Monro, maybe hit on a couple of the industry dynamics that have been impacting both tire sales and your additional services you offer.
Sure. So in the last couple of years, I think there have been headwinds post-COVID when there were tailwinds that have affected a number of companies in this industry. And they include people's caution around investing in a lot of things, including their vehicles. Traffic has been down. And so I think there has been a general concern about is this going to continue or not. My personal view is there are going to be tailwinds for this industry for a while. And I say that because there are 280 or 290 million vehicles on the road. Many of them are internal combustion engine vehicles. Based on where we are today, I think that's going to continue to be the trend. The average age of vehicles is 12 and a half years. I can remember when 10 years seemed like a long time.
And so I would also say the quality of cars has improved over the decades, as we all know. And so there are 10s of millions of vehicles out there that have the characteristics that are attractive to us and others in the industry, which includes miles of over 50,000 on your vehicle. And many vehicles are now lasting for 200,000, 300,000 miles. And certainly, the price of a new vehicle has always been rising faster than inflation. And as a result, I think so many customers are going to need to continue to take care of their existing vehicle that I think there are going to be some tailwinds for a period of time.
Other than the aging car park and growing ice vehicle number, what's going to kind of drive the shift in consumer behavior, trading up in tire quality? We can see trade downs. If you were to defer roles, higher attachment rates, what do we need to see to make that happen?
So many have experienced a trade down in tires, and there are 4 tiers of tires: 1, 2, 3, and 4, with one being the highest tier and 4 the lowest. We haven't experienced as much of a trade down in the last year or 2 as others. And I want to emphasize that one of the things that we're working on right now is making sure that the market knows we have tires for everybody. And I think in the current economy, there are certain customers who are feeling a little bit more stretched as a result of inflation and rising costs in the supermarket and insurance and utilities. But I also have noticed with our business in particular that we are gaining in share in the tier 1 through 3 categories.
And I think that we will continue to be able to serve across our 32-store network, 32-state network, sorry, a wide range of customers who are looking for a variety of things. I would say we've had no change in the number of tier 1 and 2 tier 2 traffic in the last couple of quarters. And I still feel that we're going to be able to sell the right tires and services. You mentioned services. I'll touch on that in a 2nd to all of our customers, which range from very high income or higher income, I would say, customers down to people who are really watching the dollars closely.
In terms of services, we have been increasingly effective, and I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, Tom, but with an inspection tool that enables you to show the customer exactly what they might want to think about doing to keep their car safe. And as you will remember from our recent quarterly earnings announcements, we've had an increase in uptake in key service categories like brakes, like ride control. And so even if the economy is a bit challenging, as the next quarter's going, to be honest with you, I can't think of a time in the last 10 years when it hasn't been challenged. I think we're going to be able to do just fine serving our millions of customers with the right replacement tires and services that they need.
Sure.
That's just on healthcare for that.
So obviously, and we've talked previously about our focus on tariffs and our concern about tariffs. And when we put our plan together back in April and May, which we've been performing against just like clockwork since, we were expecting that tariffs would be a bit more of an impact than they've actually been. Prices have not risen as much as we would have thought. Our costs have not risen as much we would have thought. Yes, they've increased. Our ARO is up. We're pretty happy that we're able to drive a good-sized ticket with many of our customers. But I think we're still watchful, not overconfident, but of the view that we've designed a plan that will. And inflation ticks up. But at the moment, it hasn't been as much of an issue for us as we would have thought.
And evidence of that, I would say, in the 2nd quarter was our gross margin rate was about 40 basis points higher than the prior year. We were satisfied with that. And I also think that it's likely we'll continue to have gross margin rates in the mid-30s. And if we have the sort of comp store sales increases I think we're going to see and gross margin rates in the mid-30s, we're going to do just fine. So tariffs have not been as big of an impact as we would have thought. And again, I want to repeat, we're watchful and we'll adjust accordingly.
Well, I would say that the nature of the tariffs has been global, right? So tier 1 through 3 tires are also manufactured in non-U.S. jurisdictions, maybe not as heavily concentrated in China where tier 4 is. So there is a slight extra tariff being placed on the China tires, which is primarily the fentanyl tariff, the IEPA tariff, which has now come under scrutiny. But what I would say is that the manufacturers have, I think, done their part in terms of absorbing some of those costs. That's why some of the impact has been less. I think price adjustments have happened at all tiers. And maybe marginally, tier 4 has closed the gap a little bit to tier 3, but nothing that we've seen as meaningfully changing economic behavior by the consumer.
Okay, maybe shifting gears a bit here then. Earlier this year, you completed the closing of 145 underperforming stores. Would you like to go over the rationale of closing the stores and then have you been able to recapture some of that revenue in nearby stores?
Thanks, Tom. Sure. So the 1st thing that we did back in April and May was a 2 month diagnostic, which I would always do when joining a new company. And the objective was to determine what are the most important things we can do to improve operating income this year. We ended up with 4 things. One was to look at our store portfolio and decide whether we should close some stores. 2nd was to think about driving incremental traffic. We've already touched on that. We'll come to that later. 3rd was to improve performance across all of our stores. And the 4th was to strengthen our merchandising capability. We, in April, looked at every single store performance conveniently. The year had ended at the end of March, so we had a full year's worth of fiscal data to look at. We looked at the prior year.
We looked at trends. And there were about 100 stores that it was very clear we should close because their cost structures were out of line. Their gross margins were very low. And it was unlikely that they would ever achieve the sort of profitability that we were looking for. And I would tell you that from many years of working in retail and in the aftermarket, you're always going to have a change in what the right locations are. Monro hadn't really closed that many stores, maybe 20 or 30 in prior years, but not a lot. And so it was quite easy to see 100 stores that no brainers. There were probably another 100 that were questionable. And so we spent a lot of time with our store operations team to decide, are there trends that we can reverse, or should we also close some more stores?
We ended up with 145. And as I think you know by now, we had them all closed by the end of May. We had moved all of the inventory by the end of June. The vast majority of the inventory was either returned to vendors. We had terrific support from our tire vendors or recirculated in our continuing 1,116 stores where we needed it. And so our objective, Tom, as I know we've said in the past, was to get beyond the store closing piece of the value creation puzzle right away so we could focus on the continuing stores. And I can tell you for sure that we were there by the end of June. I would also say that the monetization of those closed stores, I know everybody's thinking about, well, how about those stores, has gone really well.
And maybe Brian could comment on that for just a minute or two.
Yeah, we have been active in monetizing the real estate associated with both our lease locations through assignments as well as our own locations through sales. So we announced in the quarter that 24 locations we were able to divest of the real estate. That included 21 lease locations and 3 owned locations, resulting in about $5.5 million of proceeds in the quarter. A slightly larger gain that we adjusted for in our adjusted earnings due to the termination of the lease liabilities also associated with those locations. So we continue to see a path forward to continue to get those types of transactions completed and achieve our cash flow positive goal related to the monetization of those 145 stores.
Tom, I'd like.
Yeah, it really is. It varies by location. I would say that we will have more to talk about in Q3 related to some other transactions we expect to close in the quarter. But nothing that I would say I would extrapolate from this 21 across the remaining 145 is there really are unique elements to each transaction. We've said over the next few quarters, we think we'll be substantially complete.
Sorry.
No, that's all right. Don't keep asking questions. Thanks.
Maybe shifting gears a little bit here to merchandising. In June, you hired Kathy Chang as SVP of merchandising. Maybe hit on the rationale there, the success that you've already seen.
So when I started right around the 1st of April, we had had a couple of departures in the merchandising area. Austin Phillips had been the lead, and Mike Broderick, the former CEO, certainly knew the tire space and vendors pretty well. Parts too, for sure. And I immediately, with the rest of the senior management team, felt that we should be recruiting a very good resource to lead our merchandising effort. And so we had that search. In a very short period of time, we had a number of qualified candidates. And I think we've been fortunate to have Katie join us in early June. And her experience really was ideal for us. She had worked previously at American Tire Distributors, ATD, who remains an important supplier to us. But she had also worked at Lowe's.
And what we really loved about that is she understands the retail space and understands how you maximize your profitability in the retail space. So she joined us in June. Immediately, we together went and met with all of our vendors. One thing I really love about this industry is there aren't that many vendors that you have to work with, probably 8 or 12 for us. A majority of those are tire vendors. She was very well known by all the tire vendors because of her most recent prior job. And by the end of the summer, I think every vendor knew that we were interested in being a good partner. It was very clear to me, Tom, that they all saw us as an attractive customer and wanted to find, if they were a tire vendor, a place in our screen.
And so the discussions we've had with all of our tire vendors and parts vendors since have been really constructive. I would also say that, and there are other departments where we've upgraded our leadership team, but we've also been able to attract a couple of other executives to the merchandising team. Tom Holland, who now leads our tire effort, also known in the tire industry for over 25 or 30 years. And then Brandon Paris has joined us as the leader of our pricing effort. And perhaps we'll get to pricing a little bit later in this conversation. But as a result, I think we have a very solid merchandising team led by somebody who's extremely well qualified to be a good partner for all of our suppliers.
Maybe sticking with that, you've previously mentioned working on narrowing your inventory assortment. What are we looking at doing for that?
Sure. So I think in the aggregate, given where we are in the supply chain, which I love, with both parts and tire vendors through the distribution network able to deliver whatever we need within 12 or 24 hours, I think we have an opportunity to narrow the overall assortment, reduce our overall inventory, and have the right number of vendors as the priority assorted vendors in each of our 4 tire categories: 1, 2, 3, and 4. I think that when I started, we already had pretty good relationships with some of our key vendors. But I think the process that we've undertaken over the last 6 months will enable us to reduce inventory and make it more clear to the customer what we stand for in each of the 4 tire tiers.
I would add that we can sell any tire anybody wants because even if it's not included in our narrow assortment, but you want an X tire, we'll get it for you within a day or 2. So if you've noticed, our overall inventory levels have declined by about $21 million from approximately $180 million to approximately $160 million in the last 2 quarters. So I think we've been successful in reducing our overall inventory. And as we enter the new year, I think it will be very clear that our assortment is narrower and geared towards what all of our customers are looking for.
On that, any inventory restored?
No. You know, we have plenty of liquidity. I'd like to lower the inventory and raise sales because I think our inventory turns could be better. But I think we have the flexibility to stock our stores with the right amount of inventory. And I say it that way because you don't want to be too lean if you have all the liquidity that's available to us because you want to have something for that walk-in customer who says, "Gee, I'm looking for a mid-tier tire. I don't really know what I'm looking for. Maybe you could give me some advice." And so you want to always have a little bit of safety stock in all your stores. And when you have 1,116 stores, that means you can carry a little bit of safety stock. So there's no real inventory target.
But I think you'll continue to see that we're balancing the right level of inventory with the opportunity to be more efficient with the overall level.
You speak a lot to vendor support. Can you maybe give us some comment on how that's changed versus last year and your expectations from the vendors moving forward?
Well, every vendor, and let me start with the tire vendors, every vendor has their own preferences for how they want to provide you with marketing support. It changes. It might be on volume buy-in. It might be on volume sell-out. I think with some of our vendors, we've moved from buy-in to sell-out because everybody's interested in what tires can we get in the hands of the actual end user, not what tires can you stock in your inventory. There are promotions coming from many of our vendors. I absolutely can tell you there's competition for being part of our narrower assortment. As we've systematically talked to every vendor, we've discussed different types of combinations on marketing support. Is it front-end? Is it back-end? Is it seasonal?
And in the aggregate, I think we're doing slightly better than I would have expected in terms of getting marketing support on a go-forward basis.
Okay. Last quarter, I think you might have had a little bit of lower cost inventory. You spoke to the tariffs probably weren't as large as you were expecting. Is it possible that supported margins a little bit last quarter? And then how should we think about those margin dynamics here in this quarter?
So I think we felt in April and May, when we put our plan together, that there was going to be tariff pressure. And we were able to buy quite a bit of tire inventory, some parts inventory too, I would add. I can think of a few vendors where we took advantage of that. And as a result, we had a very good stock of inventory going into the summer. I think we still have a significant amount of pre-tariff acquisition cost inventory. And also because of the process that we've undertaken in order to drive the right product for our customers and the right marketing support from our vendors, I think we're going to have pretty good margins on a go-forward basis, better than I would have thought 6 months ago.
I would also say that when you're looking at our overall results, don't forget that almost half of our revenue comes from some sort of service. And service is a higher margin category than tires are. In the 1st and 2nd quarters, as I've referenced, I think briefly already today, we had increase in high margin service areas like brakes, like ride control. And so I think our all-in margin is going to continue to be pretty solid for the foreseeable future.
Perfect.
On.
On.
I asked the target for those margin or not.
Mid-30s. Now, some people had said, "Well, would you get back to where you were like 6 or 8 years ago?" And the answer is, "Well, we're a different business than we were 6 or 8 years ago." 6 or 8 years ago, we had a distribution business that was higher margin. I think if we're in the mid-30s and we have the sort of sales growth that I anticipate, we're going to do just fine in terms of increasing operating income. Where it depends on what the mix of tires and services are. So at the moment, we don't have any target for a gross margin rate. What I would say you should all focus on is gross margin dollars. And if we talk a little bit about our marketing effort going forward, the focus has been on driving gross margin dollars as opposed to rate.
I'll take a little higher revenue at a slightly lower gross margin rate level if I can drive more gross margin dollars. Because again, the goal is to drive this year meaningfully higher operating income. Service is about 70%. Tires are about 40%. Now, that's parts-oriented. It doesn't include the labor. But all-in, there's no question services is a higher margin than tires.
Service.
40. Brian, you're welcome to jump in any further.
No, the only thing I would add is we did say around gross margins for expectations for FY26, which is our current fiscal year, that we expected our gross margin to be consistent with prior year. Prior to this past quarter, we used language like we thought it would be pressured, but we really see a path to achieving at least prior year gross margins. And to do that, because we were below prior year in Q1, we expect obviously Q2, Q3, Q2 was higher than prior year. Q3 and Q4, back half would also be higher than prior year to achieve that full year. So to answer the or to come back to the original question, don't see that there was a significant benefit of that low-cost inventory that artificially supported gross margins in the 1st part of the year.
Don't believe that any benefit from that is something that we don't have actions in place to overcome in the 2nd part of the year. So we're continuing, as Peter said, to expect better gross margins than prior year as we move through the back half.
Now, faster. Tire cover?
I like them both. I mean, right now, I think we're doing well with tires. And service, when we get to what I think we stand for, which is providing our customers with a range of services that include tires and other preventive maintenance, I think both are going to grow. You know, it'll be uneven. For example, this time of year is pretty good for tires. It's getting cold. People are worried about having their car safe. Maybe they're driving to visit relatives at Thanksgiving or Christmas. So tires is in season right now. But certainly in the summer, we did very well with services.
Okay. You've touched on marketing a moment ago. Can you maybe focus, give us some idea of the reaching more profitable customer base that are focused on additional services?
Sure. So I would say it's very clear to all of us on the senior management team that the company had underinvested in marketing in the last few years. And so by the end of April, we knew we were going to do something different in marketing. Last year, one of the focal points was in promoting oil through a certain type of marketing. And it was successful. It drove incremental oil units, but they were not at the profit level that we are looking for.
And so by the end of May, we had decided that what we were going to do was introduce a digital marketing approach, which would enable us to, through a combination of tools, which I would start with Google Search as a critical component, but also streaming and YouTube, geared to attract the type of customer that we think is our preferred customer into our stores. And we tested that in the first quarter, so May and June mainly. And then we launched it in July with this digital approach for about 125 stores. We've talked about this before. Each month since, we've added another 125 or 150 stores. By the end of September, we had approximately a 3rd of our stores covered.
And in every tranche, so think of it as we added stores to this digital marketing support in July and then August and then September, pretty much monthly, right into November, every single tranche drove incremental calls to the store, incremental revenue, and positive comp store sales for every tranche, and incremental gross margin dollars. We were just chatting a minute ago about the focus on gross margin dollars. What we've done since the end of September is we've continued to add more stores. We have approximately 2-3rd's of our stores covered now. I would expect to add even more stores to this digital marketing approach because we've been very systematic about this through the end of the year. And as a result, I think we're going to get similar results in terms of positive comp store sales over the next period of time, including this quarter.
And so that digital marketing approach has really been critical. 2 other things to mention. One would be we have strengthened our executive leadership in marketing by adding Tim Ferrell. He joined us in September. He has a terrific background too in that he had been at Valvoline, where's one of the places we'd like to make sure that we're providing our guests with what they're looking for, oil, and also at Sun Auto. So he understands the service business. And he started his career probably 2 or 3 decades ago, but for 15 years, he's been a digital marketing guy. And so the things that Alex Partners helped the company develop are now tools that Tim is very well equipped to drive on a go-forward basis. The last thing I would mention as a feature would be in the summer, we did a customer segmentation.
And all members of the management team were looking at the sort of data that we had collected to think about what is our customer segmentation. We developed 4. And I'll point out 2 to you. One key customer segment, which is only 15% of our customers right now, are what we would describe as value-oriented bundlers, meaning they're looking for a range of services: tires, oil change, brake jobs. They want to be able to go to one location to buy all of their preventive maintenance services. And so as we've enhanced our CRM, our customer relationship management services, we're targeting those types of customers, both new customers and existing customers, with the sorts of content that would be attractive to them.
So right now, we are using our CRM to reach out to them and offering them, at this time of year when they're working on their vehicles, a range of services. On the other side of the coin, we have another segment, which is actually bigger than what I would say is a very attractive segment, who are higher-income vehicle owners with newer cars. They're looking for a trusted service resource. Maybe not any particular service, but they want to know where can they go and get the honest truth from the folks at the counter about what their vehicle needs. It's a different sort of content when we're reaching out to those customers.
So the segmentation, I think, gives us an opportunity over the next couple of years to drive the best customers into our stores, but also to serve all of our customers because we understand them better than we did just 6 months ago.
And maybe just to add that an important point on the back half of FY26 related to that is for the first half of the year that marketing spend was really driven by a reallocation of dollars away from some of the programs that Peter alluded to that we were running in the prior year that maybe were delivering a lower-value customer and redeploying those to our current-year marketing strategy. As we move into the back half of the year and with our confidence in the results that we're seeing across the stores that we've deployed it against, we will be having some incremental marketing over the prior year. That will show up in G&A levels. But at the same time, the returns that we're seeing in terms of incremental gross margin dollars outpacing the incremental dollar investment will be EPS and net income accretive.
All right. And then maybe if you could just touch on the rollout of the customer call centers. Maybe highlight the successes you've seen at the rollout and then when you're expecting to complete it.
So we've had a call center for a couple of years, and it's currently serving about 70% of our stores. It's a good tool because it enables the guys and gals in the stores to do what they're best at, which is taking care of the vehicle. And it allows a guest with a question or a prospective guest to talk to someone who can then screen that level of interest and schedule an appointment. With every single store that's on the call center, we've had an increase in calls and an increase in sales compared to the rest of the chain. Our focus has been on customer acquisition and on CRM for much of this year, and we just discussed that. But we're going to add the rest of the stores to the call center, and we're doing that right now.
And so I would expect a little bit more of a boost over the next few months now that all the stores will be on the call center. There's actually a little bit of finesse required to do this right because you have to get the stores ready to accept the calls. Some of the guys and gals in the stores would like to answer the phone themselves all the time. But if you look at the data, it's so clear that it's better to have somebody else take the 1st call and then provide the store with a warm handoff. If I'm calling you and saying, "Gee, you know, I'd like 2 tires, and can I schedule an appointment on Saturday at 10:30?" And of course, the call center takes the call and makes the appointment, but they say, "Would you like to talk to Brian?
He's in the store right now. Maybe he can help you before you even come into the store." So there's a partnership between the call center and the store that you want to make sure you've got right before you launch all those final stores. There's a cost to it. There's a need to sort of pace it right. We made sure that the stores that went on 1st were the stores that needed it most. So some of the stores that aren't on it now are doing better than maybe the average store in the chain was. And then, again, we've focused so much of our attention in the last 8 months on new customer acquisition that we felt, "Let's make sure we wait until we're ready to bring the rest of the stores on to the call center."
Can you provide a little bit of color on the number of customers you kind of see at these stores once you roll out the call center?
You know, it's probably a call or 2 more a day. But it's hard to say whether it was the call center or the digital marketing effort that drove that incremental call. I think the better way to measure it, and it's hard to quantify it, would be that you've just got somebody else who's receiving inbound interest, who's an expert at converting that interest into an appointment. But when you look at the stores that were on it, it was probably a call a day better than the stores that weren't on it.
Okay. All right. And then you spent some time right-sizing the field management and introducing your district manager toolkit. You know, what did you see that need to be changed, and how have the changes impacted operations?
Sure. So we've talked about 3 of the 4 initiatives that we had back in April and May, which were closing stores, driving traffic, and enhancing the merchandising team. The 4th was raising the level of performance at all of our stores, the stores that needed it most and the stores that were already doing pretty well but could do even better. And so when we closed the 145 stores, which is the start of your question, it was clear we needed to realign the field. And so in the last 6 months, we've reduced the field district manager count by probably about 20. We now have 70, 75 district managers. We have developed a better regional vice president level. There are now 8 RVPs across the country who oversee fairly large regions measured by a number of states in each of the regions.
And as a result, we've reduced our field cost and improved the quality of the district managers. I would add one of the things that we've worked on in the last 2 months is developing what we call a district manager toolkit that is right now being implemented that enables every district manager to look at all of the metrics within the store that then enables them to work with the store managers. You know, a typical DM would have probably 12 or 18 stores to oversee without actually being in the store. So that when they go to the store, they can already see that there's a labor productivity issue. There's an attachment opportunity. You can be much more precise based on the data that's available now offline, so away from the store, but in the system to help the store drive increased performance.
You've mentioned, and we've talked at length about the inspection tool. That's an important part of the improvement. And I've touched on it a couple of times already this morning. It was a tool that was put into place probably 15, 18 months ago. Last year, the company was pretty successful with getting the locations to appreciate the value of that. But this year, we've been much better at doing full inspections and then continuing to improve the way we present the results of the inspection to the guest so that when you're in the store, we can say, "You know, I noticed after putting on the 2 tires that you could use a couple of new brake pads. They're pretty thin. You might be busy today, but love to be able to do that for you.
Can I do it for you right now or schedule another appointment for you?" Using that inspection tool drives incremental revenue both on the ticket in the day, but also in return, which is almost better because then you've got the guest in the pattern of coming back to you for a variety of services. So the inspection tool and using it better was an important part of our improvement in the stores. Another thing that we had the opportunity to do, and all of these tools, well, not all the tools, there are a number of new tools that we've developed: forecasting for the merchants, the district manager tool, pricing, and I'd love it if you'd ask me a question about pricing. All of those tools are new, but the company had pretty good tools in place already in terms of looking at what happens every day.
Brian and I wake up at 6:10 A.M. or earlier every morning and look and see what happened yesterday. We know. Every day, we know exactly what's happening. That tool was already in place. The inspection tool was already in place. And so using the tools that the company had recently developed better is a key to, I think, improving performance in the store.
Another feature would be with the call center and with more of our customers making their appointments to come to the location online, we can reach out to you before you even come into the store and make sure we know what you're looking for so that when you come in, if you had a specific type of tire that you were looking for, if we've reached out to you, we know, as opposed to you're coming in and are saying, "Hey, Tom, you need to come back on Monday because we'll get that tire for you, but we don't have it in store right now." So being able to communicate effectively with the customer using the tools that we have is another way that will increase performance across the network.
All right. I'll hit you with the pricing question.
Okay. I'm sorry if there was a big lead-up on this, but you know, so many companies today say they're thinking about AI. They're using AI. They're investing billions of dollars in capital expenditures on AI. We're not investing billion dollars in AI. We've developed a pricing tool that depends on machine learning and enables us to price tactically across our network. It costs relatively little money to do this. It's a skill that we brought into the company through AlixPartners and is now embedded in the company through people like Brandon Parris, who also has some experience with using machine learning to price better. It's a tool that is gaining momentum. I don't want to make it seem as if it is going to be perfect.
It never is, but it enables us to look at every region, every market, and think about where is our competition priced. We can update this every week, by the way. What is the price that we're offering at different tiers of tire? What is the price that we're offering for brake packages? We can adjust, and our system allows this, our pricing in each market to address what it is we're trying to accomplish, which is to attract more profitable revenue. As a result, after we developed this tool, late summer, we tested it a little bit. We raised some prices on certain products, and we lowered some prices on other products in certain markets. Some of it worked. Some of it didn't work. Again, it's an iterative process, so we updated it the next week and the next week and the next week.
And within the last month, we've been much more tactical in the way we adjust prices by market. We had a very interesting debate internally about a month ago. Some said, "Hey, we should make these changes." And we said, "You know what? The whole pricing model is geared around driving incremental unit sales and gross margin dollars. Let's go with what the machine learning suggests." We did. And as a result, we've had an increase in unit sales and gross margin dollars, just as we did with the digital marketing. It's a tool that's machine learning-based that's always going to be iterative. I mean, the competition may raise or lower prices next week, and we have the ability to take a look and see what's happening and make adjustments.
What we don't want to do is drive our customers crazy with prices changing every week, but it is another way that we can get that incremental sale and more gross margin dollars into the business.
Could you maybe speak to how you're positioning yourself in the price versus quality of service relative to your competition?
I think we've always wanted to be competitively priced, and we want to be compensated for the service that we provide to the guest. Some guests are demanding a certain service, and we're going to use our CRM to promote something, maybe a little bit of an extra benefit for a service that could affect our margin unfavorably, but get that extra sale in. And I think we'll continue to be priced competitively. And I think we should expect that in different markets, competition will do certain things. They're trying to grab market share. So are we. And so I think all of these initiatives are going to collectively enable us to get the revenue up and make sure that we're competitively priced, but fairly priced for the services that we're offering to our guests.
I would add that the machine learning certainly takes competitive set into account, competitive pricing, where that may have been the sole or 1 of the few attributes that we were looking at how we were priced historically. The machine learning model takes that as an attribute with a certain weighting, but also looks at things like elasticity, historical elasticity, projected elasticity, looking at relative step-ups within our assortment to see where there may be compression or need for expansion in the price steps between a tier 1 or a tier 2 in a certain size and segment, as well as a number of other attributes that are all looked at in terms of coming back with recommendations around pricing to drive those 3: traffic, sales, and gross profit dollars.
And the tool is one of those tools along with the marketing that really gives us the confidence for some of the earlier comments around, even as weighted average cost of inventory may be increasing in the back half as we work through some of the pre-term costs and have more post-term costs, our ability to manage against that and deliver that back half gross margin expansion is really the confidence we have is really based on what we're seeing in the rollout of these tools from pilot to scaling.
Sure. Any questions for me as well? Peter, Brian, any closing remarks?
Thank you again, Tom, for including us in the day. Look forward to talking to anybody who has more questions, anytime you'd like to ask questions. Thanks again.
Thank you.
Thank you.