Earnings Call: Q2 2012

Jul 26, 2012

Good morning. My name is Melissa, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the O’Reilly Automotive second quarter 2012 earnings release. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. Thank you. Mr. Tom McFall, you may begin your conference. Thank you, Melissa. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our conference call. Before I introduce Greg Henslee, our CEO, we have a brief statement. The company claims the protection of the safe harbor for forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. You can identify these statements by forward-looking words such as expect, believe, anticipate, should, plan, intend, estimate, project, will, or similar words. In addition, statements contained within this conference call that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements, such as statements discussing, among other things, expected growth, store development, integration and expansion strategy, business strategies, future revenue, future performance. These forward-looking statements are based on estimates, projections, beliefs, and assumptions that are not guarantees of future events and results. Such statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, assumptions, including, but not limited to, competition, product demand, the market for auto parts, the economy in general, inflation, consumer debt levels, governmental regulations, the company's increased debt levels, credit ratings on the company's public debt, the company's ability to hire and retain qualified employees, risks associated with the performance of acquired businesses such as CSK Auto Corporation, weather, terrorist activities, war, and the threat of war. Actual results may materially differ from anticipated results described or implied in these forward-looking statements. Please refer to the Risk Factors section of the annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2011 for additional factors that could materially affect the company's financial performance. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. At this time, I'd like to introduce Greg Henslee. Thanks, Tom. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the O’Reilly Auto Parts second quarter conference call. Participating on the call with me this morning is, of course, Tom McFall, our Chief Financial Officer, and Ted Wise, our Chief Operating Officer. David O’Reilly, our Executive Chairman, is also present. First, I'd like to congratulate Team O’Reilly for our continuing success at providing the highest levels of customer service in our industry. Despite the pull forward of a portion of the spring business into the first quarter, along with a difficult consumer spending environment, we are able to achieve a respectable 2.5% comparable store sales increase and generate a 20% increase in earnings per share. This marks our 14th straight quarter of increasing adjusted earnings per share in excess of 15%. Each and every one of us plays an important role in our company's success. On to some details about our quarterly performance. As most of you know, our original comparable store sales guidance for the second quarter was 3%-5%. When it became clear that we wouldn't achieve the bottom end of that range, we updated our guidance. Based on these softer than expected results, I'll go into a little more detail than we typically disclose concerning the progression and composition of our quarterly comparable store sales increase and give some color on our rationale for the third quarter comparable store sales guidance. As we discussed on our first quarter conference call, the beginning of the second quarter got off to a slow start as we suspect a good amount of the spring cleanup business was pulled forward from April into the first quarter as a result of the earlier than normal mild temperatures. We expected May sales to return to a more normal seasonal pattern, and they did. Through May, our comparable store sales results were within our expectations. However, business was significantly softer than we expected in the first three weeks of June. This slowdown was chain-wide, and we cannot point to any specific cause other than to cite that most of retail seemed to have a tough June. After a strong increase in miles driven in May of 2.3%, we suspect June's number, when reported, will be down. The end of June finished up somewhat better, resulting in our 2.5% comparable store sales increase coming in at the top end of our revised guidance. From the first quarter to the second quarter, we saw the biggest deceleration in comparable store sales in cold weather markets, where the early spring weather shifted more business into the first quarter. Since the core stores have a significantly higher percentage of cold weather market stores, we saw the biggest sequential impact in the core stores. Although these stores did generate positive comparable store sales for the second quarter. The acquired markets continue to generate strong comparable store results with our build-out of the professional business. Looking from the first quarter to the second quarter, both our DIY and our professional business comparable store sales increases slowed at approximately the same rate. However, both contributed to our positive comparable store sales gains. DIY comparable ticket count continues to be under pressure, with growth in the DIFM ticket count mostly offsetting the pressure. We continue to work hard to drive more DIY traffic into our stores, and Ted will talk more about that in a moment. As we look forward to the third quarter, we remain cautious regarding the sales environment and are setting our comparable store sales guidance at the 1% to 3% range. The modest improvement we saw in sales at the end of June has continued into July, and we are currently running within the range of our guidance for the third quarter. However, we face several headwinds in the third quarter, which include an extra Sunday during the quarter, which creates an approximate 50 basis point drag on overall comps, as most professional shops are closed on Sunday. The comparisons for the third quarter are very difficult as we face a 15.9% two-year stack for comparable store sales. Finally, we believe consumers continue to be impacted by constraints on their pocketbooks with a backdrop of economic uncertainty. Despite the difficult sales environment, we continue to focus on growing our sales profitably, and we're able to maintain our momentum on the gross profit line with gross margins sequentially up 10 basis points over the first quarter. Compared to last year, gross profit as a percent of sales increased 132 basis points. This improvement was the result of improved merchandise margins driven by acquisition cost improvements and our continued conservative and more focused advertised price strategy, and strong improvements in the productivity of our distribution centers, which Ted will discuss in more detail here in a moment. Based on our year-to-date results, we now believe we will be in the top half of our full-year gross margin guidance of 49.4% to 49.8% of sales. Now I'd like to switch gears and update you on a few of our key initiatives. First, I'm pleased to report we have completed the rollout of our proprietary electronic catalog to all of our stores. The electronic catalog is a critical customer service tool for our store teams to provide comprehensive information quickly to both our DIY and our professional customers. The implementation of our proprietary catalog has allowed us to expand the applications covered to many more of the products we offer, improve the interface to make the system more easy to learn and use, provide robust product content, and add related product sales information, all of which will allow our team members to provide even higher levels of customer service. Recently, I attended a catalog review meeting in Houston with some of our most proficient parts professionals. They're very excited about the functionality of the new electronic parts catalog. As with any new and complicated system, our team had suggestions for additional enhancements, and our dedicated catalog team is working on these suggestions, along with their ongoing efforts to add even more rich content to ensure we have the most robust catalog in the automotive aftermarket. We do not expect to see an immediate measurable increase in sales from this implementation. However, we are very confident the increased level of service we're able to provide our loyal customers will result in continued strong sales growth over time. Next, I'd like to update you on our initiative to enhance our store-level inventory availability. We are about halfway through the project to add additional SKUs at the store level. The original estimate of the investment for this project was approximately $80 million of additional inventory. As we progressed with the project, we have determined that we have additional opportunities to enhance our customer service levels, and the total expected investment now is actually closer to $100 million. Our goal remains to have the parts our customers want on our store shelves even more often than we do today and to rely less heavily on pickups from our hub store and distribution center network. The last initiative I'd like to touch on, in general terms, is our e-commerce strategy. We strongly believe that clear consumer choice for auto parts will remain brick-and-mortar stores due to the immediate need for failure parts, the uncertainty around all the necessary parts needed for a repair, and the technical knowledge and assistance that can only be provided by an experienced parts professional. That said, the amount of auto parts sold over the internet continues to increase and offers us an opportunity to enhance our growth. A major initiative for us is to continue to add to the functionality of our e-commerce site, OReillyAuto.com. We are focused on having a site that not only offers a convenient shopping experience for either home delivery or store pickup, but also provides robust product and repair content that serves as an information resource for our DIY customers and further solidifies their attachment to the O'Reilly brand. We've had a solid first half of 2012, highlighted by a comparable store sales increase of 4.9%, a 125 basis point improvement in operating profit as a percent of sales, and a 29% increase in adjusted earnings per share. We remain very optimistic about the long-term future of our business as the U.S. vehicle fleet of 241 million cars and light trucks on the road continues to age and go through more routine maintenance cycles, and consumers continue to gain confidence to invest in repairs of higher mileage vehicles. Per the recently released Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association Factbook, the average age of the light vehicle fleet increased again from 10.6 years in 2010 to 10.8 years in 2011. We see this trend continuing as better engineered and manufactured vehicles justify continued repair and maintenance at higher mileages. We also remain very optimistic in our ability to profitably grow our business. Again, referring to the AAIA Factbook, the number of auto parts stores continued to stay consistent in 2011 at between 35,000 and 36,000 stores as it has for the past decade. We see continued opportunity to consolidate the business through greenfield growth and opportunistic acquisitions. We aren't going to go into specifics on acquisition opportunities, but it's safe to say we continue to aggressively look for opportunities to consolidate the market. In closing, I would like to again thank all of team O’Reilly for your continued focus on providing outstanding service to our customers every day. I'll now turn the call over to Ted Wise. Thanks, Greg, and good morning, everyone. No doubt it was a tougher quarter for business than we've seen in a while. I'd like to take a few minutes to comment on our store team and compliment them for working so hard to maximize our store sales and profitability by providing top-notch customer service while controlling our costs. For the quarter and the year to date, our SG&A spend is in line with our expectations. Dissecting our SG&A, the two big expenses we can control in the short term are store payroll and our advertising. I'm not going to give specific numbers, but given the tough environment, I would like to spend a little time discussing how we can manage these critical expenses. No expense more directly impacts our level of customer service and each store's ability to grow our business than store payroll. Our store operations team spend a lot of time managing store staffing and productivity on a store-by-store, day-by-day basis. Our store operations team use a number of tools to manage payroll by store, including detailed productivity tracking by individual team member, our e-scheduling and review system, and our individual incentive-based compensation for every store team member. Stepping back and looking at our business as a whole, we are in the customer service business, and with the level of competition in our industry, the primary reason where both DIY and professional customers choose to do business is the level of customer service they receive. Providing consistent, excellent customer service is critical to building long-lasting relationships with our customers and is especially critical on the professional side of our business. Sudden dramatic decreases in store staffing levels, not related to normal seasonality of our business, have a noticeable and negative impact on customer service. As a result, we avoid dramatic short-term changes to our store payroll, even during periods of soft sales. Over time, and based on the business trends and sales entitlement, we adjust each store staffing to levels to provide excellent customer service and to grow the business while at the same time controlling our expenses. It takes a long time to earn a customer's trust and become their preferred supplier for auto parts, and we do not want to jeopardize those hard-won relationships because of a soft month or two of business. This is especially true in the acquired markets, where we have done a good job in building a professional installer business, but where we also have a tremendous opportunity to continue to build market share. We firmly believe our long-term view and philosophy of staffing stores to provide excellent customer service with enough payroll to grow the business in both good times and bad times, has been a key factor in our ability to consistently and profitably grow business and sales. In regarding our advertising program. While for the last year or so, DIY business has been under pressure and consumers continue to deal with a tough job market, the expiration of unemployment benefits, and a general feeling that the economy isn't getting better anytime soon. To ensure we continue to build the O'Reilly brand and top-of-mind awareness when customers need parts, we have added national level TV and radio advertising to our advertising program to increase the amount and frequency of our branded message. As Greg mentioned earlier, we have adjusted our current year advertising approach to focus on shorter duration, call-to-action promotional events. This allows us to offer DIY customers great saving opportunity on high-profile items that increases foot traffic in our stores while limiting our margin exposure. Our store teams are responsible for providing excellent customer service when customers respond to these promotions, while also adding items to their purchase and ensuring those customers will come back to our stores when they have a hard part need. Several of these events have been themed events supported by radio, window signs, and in-store signage and have produced positive results. We plan to continue these type of events in the third quarter. In addition, we have continued to get the O’Reilly brand out to new customers with our motorsports marketing program involving NASCAR and NHRA racing, along with many regional and smaller local tracks across the country. Our grassroots marketing also includes local car shows, farm shows, and many other local type community events that O’Reilly can become involved in at the individual store level. Now I'd like to touch on our distribution operations. The DC operations team has done an outstanding job controlling expenses, especially in light of softer than expected sales, along with our store-level inventory enhancement initiatives, while they continue to give excellent level of service to our stores. A significant portion of our year-over-year improvement in gross margin is the result of our DCs operating more efficiently. This is especially true for the newer DCs as those team members bring their productivity levels closer to our more seasoned DCs. In addition, our DC teams have been instrumental in rolling out our store-level inventory enhancement initiatives. We are approximately halfway through the $100 million project, so the remaining $50 million of additional shipments on top of our normal volume is a huge undertaking. Again, I would like to thank all the DC members for their hard work on this project. Now moving on to our store expansion activities. We opened 50 net new stores in the second quarter, covering 20 states. Texas led the way with 10 new stores during the quarter, as we continue to find attractive opportunities in our largest state. For the year, we have opened 119 net new stores in 28 states. For the year, again, Texas leads the way. We have significantly increased our presence in Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, South Carolina, and Florida. During the quarter, we also relocated seven stores to new locations and completed major renovations to 15 stores as we work to keep our existing store base well-positioned and fresh. For the year, we continue to be very comfortable that we will hit our goal of 180 new stores. Our real estate teams continue to find great locations at good occupancy costs as a difficult macroeconomic environment has put some pressure on real estate prices. We also continue to work hard on acquisition opportunities. While I don't have anything specific to report on, we continue to investigate all avenues for the right opportunities to consolidate the industry through accretive acquisitions. To finish up, I would like to thank all of our team members for their hard work, their dedication, and most importantly, providing the great level of customer service. Now I will turn this over to Tom McFall. Thanks, Ted. Now we'll take a closer look at our results and add some color to our guidance. Comparable store sales for the quarter increased 2.5% on top of the prior year comps of 4.4%, with both DIY and DIFM contributing. More of the gain coming from the DIFM side. In total, the increase in average ticket accounted for the comparable store sales increase, with DIY ticket count down, partially offset by increasing DIFM ticket count. For the quarter, sales increased $84 million, comprised of a $37 million increase in comp store sales, a $45 million increase in non-comp store sales, a $3 million increase in non-comp non-store sales, and a $1 million decrease from closed stores. Year-to-date, our comparable store sales increased 4.9% on top of the prior year comps of 5%. Our sales guidance for 2012 is unchanged at $6.15 billion-$6.25 billion. We're revising our full-year comparable store sales guidance down from 3%-6% to 3%-5%. This revision to the top end of our guidance is based on our cautious view of sales environment in the third quarter, as it looks like consumer confidence will continue to be under pressure. Gross margin for the quarter increased 132 basis points over the prior year to 49.9% of sales. This increase is consistent with the year-to-date trend of gross profit increasing 134 basis points. As Greg mentioned, we currently anticipate our 2012 full-year gross margin will be in the upper end of our guidance of 49.4%-49.8% of sales. We anticipate the quarterly gross margin for the remainder of the year to be slightly down from June year-to-date levels based on seasonal mix. For the year, the improvement in gross margin as a percent of sales has been driven by improved acquisition costs, a more targeted advertising approach, and improved distribution efficiencies. We expect these factors to continue through the end of the year. During the quarter, SG&A delevered by 76 basis points to 34.3% of sales. This deleverage was due to slower sales, our long-term approach to payroll management, as Ted discussed, and the timing of our advertising spend. Through the first six months of the year, our SG&A improved nine basis points as a percent of sales versus the prior year, with the average SG&A dollars per store increasing 2.9% over the same time frame. In the second half of the year, we expect the growth in SG&A dollars per store to slow as we make minor adjustments to our store staffing in light of the anticipated slower sales environment and incur less advertising expense due to seasonality. For the full year, we expect SG&A per store to increase approximately 2%. Operating margin for the quarter was 15.6% of sales, representing a 56 basis point improvement over the prior year as improvements in gross margin more than offset the SG&A deleverage. For the first six months of the year, operating margin improved 125 basis points to 15.9% of sales. For the year, we continue to expect operating margin to be in the range of 15.4%-15.9% of sales. Diluted earnings per share for the second quarter of $1.15 a share represents a 20% increase over prior year's diluted earnings per share of $0.96. For the first half of 2012, diluted earnings per share increased 29% to $2.29 a share as compared to the prior year adjusted earnings per share of $1.78. As a reminder, the adjusted earnings per share from quarter one of 2011 excludes the one-time charges from our financing transactions. Moving to the balance sheet, we continue to make great progress in improving the productivity of our net inventory investment. At the end of the quarter, our inventory turnover net of payables was 4.8 times versus 2.8 times at this time last year. Inventory per store is currently flat compared to June of 2011 at $556,000 per store. However, with the store-level inventory enhancement project increasing by $20 million, we now think year-end inventory per store will be up approximately 2%. The driver of net inventory productivity continues to be our ability to work with our vendors to improve terms through our vendor financing program. At the end of the second quarter, AP to inventory stood at 79%, which is an incredible improvement over the prior year ratio, which was 55%. We continue to anticipate our year-end payables to inventory ratio will be approximately 80%, as gains for the remainder of the year from our vendor financing initiative will be offset by seasonality and the payments for inventory ordered as part of the store-level inventory initiative. At the end of the quarter, our adjusted debt to adjusted EBITDAR was 1.66 times, which remains well below our long-term targeted leverage range of 2 to 2.25 times. We will increase our leverage over time. We remain very committed to maintaining our investment-grade rating. On this topic, we're pleased to report that yesterday, Moody's affirmed our Baa3 rating and changed our outlook from stable to positive. For the first half of the year, free cash flow improved 31% to $540 million. This strong improvement was driven by our increased net income and the improvement in our net inventory investment. Based on our results to date, we're increasing our 2012 full-year free cash flow projections to $725 million-$775 million. From the beginning of the year through the date of this earning release, we've repurchased 9.4 million shares with an average price of $91.53. This brings our life-to-date repurchases to 25.3 million shares with an average price of $72.67. Our first priority for the use of free cash flow is to continue to consolidate the industry through accretive acquisitions. To the extent these opportunities are not available, we intend to continue to prudently execute our share repurchase program with the cash in the balance sheet, additional free cash flow generated, and additional borrowings as we incrementally increase our leverage ratio to our stated goal. Our guidance for both the third quarter and the full year takes into account shares repurchased through yesterday but does not reflect the impact of any potential future share repurchases. For the third quarter, our diluted EPS guidance is $1.25-$1.29 per share. For the full year, our diluted EPS guidance is $4.56-$4.66 a share. At this time, I'd like to ask Melissa, the operator, to return to the line, and we'll be happy to answer your questions. Melissa? At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. We have a question from the line of Michael Lasser with UBS. Thanks a lot for taking my question. Good morning. Good morning. Greg, there seems to be a lot of debate on the industry right now. I wanted to get your view on what you think is driving the greater variability in demand trends. Is it really weather, a hangover from some of the warm conditions we saw in the winter, or is this more reflective of just getting towards the end of what's been a pretty good cycle for the industry? Well, I don't think it's the end of a pretty good cycle for the industry. I think that the dynamics that drive demand in our industry with miles driven, the age of vehicles, and all those things continue to bode well for the industry. It really remains unchanged to some degree. I think the factors that are affecting us right now, or early in last quarter, it was, of course, the pull forward of some business into the first quarter due to the mild winter. I would suspect that that has some effect on business this summer, just related to parts that weren't caused to fail by the lack of winter weather. As much as anything, we would speculate that it is simply consumers that are reluctant to spend money in an uncertain economic environment. We see that in a lot of different ways, when we look at our category reports, we see things that can be deferred. It appears as though they're being deferred. In talking with the mini shops that we do business with, you hear them tell stories of their Reduction in the ability to sell jobs. Someone comes in because their air conditioning won't blow cold, hoping that it just needs Freon, when they find out it needs a compressor and it's going to be an $800 job or something, they say, "Well, you know what? I'll take care of it later," they drive with their windows down. Again, we see that in our by-category reports. While we don't go into a lot of detail in our by-category sales, it's easy to see that some of these categories that are more subject to deferral are being deferred. Another headwind our industry has to some degree is just some commodity pricing. When it comes to seasonal items like Freon, 30-pound cylinders of Freon are selling for substantially less than they were this time last year. That creates a bit of a headwind for all of us. To the extent that some of the softness is being caused by the lack of duress from the warm winter, how long do you think that persists? Is it that once the fall arrives, anything that would have been done is no longer an issue? I think so. I hope what we'll see is that. We're in the middle of an incredibly hot summer, and drought in the central U.S., a lot of things that are hard on cars. We see the effect of that heat up in some of the categories that would be subject to immediate failure as a result. Some of the failure that is caused by heat is deferred into winter. For instance, on batteries, sometimes a battery will fail under heat, but many times the damage is done to a battery during heat, but it's not really stressed until cold weather when the engine demands the most from a cranking perspective. Our hope is, and what our past experience has been, is that when we have a really hot winter like this, that we would benefit from that, or a hot summer like this, we benefit from that in the winter. Another factor for us is, a substantial amount of our business, at least in the historical O'Reilly stores, are in rural areas that are subject to customers who are in the agricultural business, and this drought is just terrible for their business. We see that in, for instance, our filter sales, where we do a lot of business in farm and ag filters. Our filter business isn't doing as good simply because the farmers aren't doing as much because their crops aren't growing. There's no water. There's no question that there's some weather issues, that coupled with just the economic uncertainty would be the things that we would speculate are causing the sequential reduction in comp store sales. My final question, is there any evidence to suggest that greater competitive factors are beginning to weigh on the DIFM side of the business? Perhaps it's a case where a commercial customer has a certain propensity to switch to a new supplier. They're more likely to go with one of the dual-focused auto part retailers. That segment of the market is just going to be trading share from here on out. Well, I think there's no question that the do it for me side of the business is a very competitive business. It always has been. The more players there are in that side of the business, the more competitive it can be. I have to look to our sales results, and while we would like for our historical O'Reilly stores to have performed better on the do it for me side, the sequential reduction we saw is pretty similar to what we saw on the DIY side. It's hard for me to think that it's related to competition. In the CSK stores, where we feel like robustly gain market share on the do it for me side. We continue to see really good sales results there. It's a factor to some degree. We, of course, have been in this business a long time and are very sensitive to what our competitors do and are very defensive when it comes to losing business to a competitor. It's something we work on every day, but it's always a challenge. Sounds great. That's very helpful. Thanks a lot. Yeah, thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Gary Balter with Credit Suisse. Hey, it's Simeon for Gary. I guess he's running around an airport somewhere. This is following on Michael's question a little bit. Can you talk about your sense of market share, I guess the slowdown? Was that purely market-driven or could it be some market share shifts? Then breaking out of the one to three range, will that be a function of the market getting better, or do you think it's something competitive also on your end? Well, speaking of market share, I sure don't think we've lost market share by any means, and the information that we get indicates that we continue to gain market share. I think our ability to grow comparable store sales more robust than we did in the second quarter depends to some degree on both. We feel very confident in our ability to incrementally take market share. I think as exemplified with what we've done with the CSK stores, we have that ability and execute that ability every day, and I think we'll continue to be able to do that. In the historical O'Reilly stores, I think we have a very solid market share that we continue to incrementally gain, maybe at a slower rate than we are the CSK stores, but I don't think we're losing market share. I think the contributor to our comparable store sales comes from just industry dynamics, having a good demand for auto parts, which I think has slowed to some degree related to just the position the consumers are in, and then, of course, our ability to take market share, which we work every day to come up with better ways to do that. I think we're as good as anyone in the industry at accomplishing that. Following on some color that you mentioned that I think there was an equal slowdown to both businesses, but that both contributed positively. If you break it down a little further, and it sounds like CSK is still a positive driver, was there any disproportionate slowing on a relative basis? The contribution from CSK slowing more than other pieces or retail in historic markets slowing? I'm just curious for a little bit more texture there. Yeah. In historic markets, both retail and our professional business, it decreased of course. They both decreased in equal proportions. On the CSK side, they were very close again. Our Do It For Me business being significantly stronger from a comp store sales % standpoint than what our DIY business is. Okay. Greg, have you looked at pricing? Have you tried any different pricing initiatives to see if that could be one of the issues holding back sales right here? Well, on the DIY side, for instance, Gary, we shop our competitors intently, as I'm sure they shop us. We can feel extremely confident that our prices are set competitive on the retail side. On the professional side, it's a little more difficult. Our competitors, if we call them, aren't willing to tell us what price they sell a certain customer at, you have to do a little digging to do that. Yes, we do experiment with that, and we have complete flexibility in the way we price our professional customers. Our experience has been that while price is very, very important on the Do It For Me side, it's second, third, or fourth on a list of things that are more important, including availability, the amount of time it takes to get the product to them, the abilities of the person that they contact to get the part. The professionals, the technicians don't want to deal with someone that doesn't know what they're talking about, and they want the phone call to be very brief and as little information given as can possibly be given to make the transaction. It's important, but I don't think that's the primary factor. To answer your question, yes, we do experiment, and we feel good about where we're at from a pricing standpoint. Just one last thing, just following up on Michael's questions, or maybe it's the same question. You sound pretty comfortable that we don't have a seat change. Like we haven't done all the deferred maintenance and all of a sudden, we have a step down in the business, but a lot of this is related to just the weather that we had, and by the fall, we should get back to more of a normal, maybe it's two to four, maybe it's three to five type comp. Is that reading too much into your commentary? Is that what you're saying? Well, Gary, of course, it's my speculation, but that's the way I feel. I just don't see anything that drives our business that has changed enough that it would cause a deceleration outside of these other factors that could be affecting either demand or deferred maintenance. Okay. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Alan Rifkin with Barclays. Thank you very much. Greg, you mentioned that you saw a deceleration in cold weather markets. I was wondering if you would be able to quantify the comp performance in the cold weather markets versus the corporate average. Well, we have a variety of different cold weather markets, and Alan, honestly, I'd rather stay away from defining in these markets. We drill it down in a lot of detail, and I would rather not tell our competitors what our comps are in some of the specific markets. I can tell you that generally, in the cold weather markets, we saw a more abrupt deceleration in comparable store sales than we have in the warmer weather markets. Okay. Second question, if I may. In the four quarters following your acquisition of CSK, which pretty much coincided with the height of the recession, when you broke out the performance between the legacy stores and the CSK stores, your legacy stores were still comping consistently north of 1%, 2%, even in that difficult environment. I certainly don't want to put words in your mouth or anything, but most people would agree that even with the consumer taking half a step back today, we certainly are a better environment today than where we were in the back half of 2008 and throughout the first half of 2009. Is there any reason why we would see a greater impact on your performance at the legacy stores for the next two, three, four quarters than what we saw in 2008, 2009? I don't think so. I think that the economic factors may be similar to your point. They may not be quite as tough as they were. I think to this point in the year, the weather has been an unusual factor. Long term, it really doesn't matter. The weather's the weather, and our business will be what it is based on miles driven that cause parts to fail. Yeah, I would see no reason for our performance in the core O'Reilly stores to be much different than what it would have been, and we expect it to be better. A second question, I guess, if I may, since you weren't able to answer the first one. I know you've spoken about your belief that the CSK stores over the longer term could get to $1.8 million a store. I was wondering if maybe you can provide us an update on that number. Do you still think that's a good number or if it's even north of that? If we look at the stores that were converted earlier, the Midwest and Seattle and compare it to, let's say, Phoenix and some of the latter markets, any discernible difference between the trajectory of the CSK revenues post the conversions in some of the latter converted markets versus earlier converted? Well, what I would say is we continue to be very effective in our ability to roll out our DIFM programs. We're a little, I guess, beyond where we would expect on an average store basis would have expected to have been when we set our early plans. As far as the trajectory of which those stores are comping, what I would say is some of the early conversion stores we have are in cold weather markets up in the Upper Midwest, and those stores' trajectory did slow greater than the rest of the CSK stores. The CSK stores on the West Coast continued on a very solid trajectory, whereas the ones in the Upper Midwest slowed some, really pretty well beyond what the rest of the CSK stores. We relate that directly to some pull forward and just the effects of the weather. We've really not publicly given the exact number we average per stores and segments of stores, so I'd rather not do that, but I can tell you we're well down the road with getting to our $1.8 million average. Alan, this is Tom. When we look at the progression of comps based on the date that the stores were converted, we continue to see a pretty similar ramp, and we are confident that we'll hit the stated goal of $1.8 million per store. Okay. Thank you both very much. Okay. Thank you, Alan. Our next question comes from the line of Christopher Horvers. Thanks, good morning. I know you didn't really want to talk about the weather, but I was just curious if perhaps Texas is an issue. We talked to clients down there, and it's not an issue, but that's where maybe some of the slowdown is. You have maybe 12% of your stores there. In spite of the drought in the Midwest and Southwest, it seems like it was a lot warmer there last year. Is perhaps some of that AC, some of the air conditioning slowdown attributable specifically to that market? I wouldn't think so. There's a lot of factors that go into how we evaluate our comparable store sales. Sometimes we do well in a market because we have made changes in a market that resulted in more positive results. I would tell you that we're pretty happy with Texas right now. It being one of the southern markets, it's less affected by the pull forward from weather. While the drought in Texas and some of the agricultural business in Texas with the cattle farmers and so forth isn't as strong as it was, overall, we're doing really well in Texas. Texas is generally a good economic state, and we're pretty pleased with it. I'd say that just general auto parts sales growth in Texas, market share gains in Texas are more than offsetting the effect of the hot, dry weather in the ag business. Understood. Jen, just to reflect back on last year, were your monthly comps pretty similar throughout the quarter last year in the third quarter? They were pretty similar. They were very similar. July was just slightly softer than August and September, but they were very close. Okay. Thanks very much. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Matthew Fassler with Goldman Sachs. I'm going to focus on some of the sales commentary as well. You spoke about the weather and its impact on pull forward for April. As you think about July and the fact that you're running within the range, is it your view that the weather that you're experiencing today is a positive for that number as you're within that one to three? Matt, I think it is, or at least it should be. The categories that hot weather affects, cooling systems, automotive batteries, HVAC. Automotive batteries, we're not going to cover off the ball. Cooling, we're doing real well. HVAC, because it's somewhat discretionary, someone can decide not to fix their air conditioner, isn't performing as well, whereas in this environment, we should be doing very well. Generally, I would say that the weather is very favorable right now. I would say that there's a backdrop of economic uncertainty that is causing consumers to be reluctant to spend money to fix their cars, as they're probably reluctant to spend money on clothing and anything else that they're buying. One thing I'd add to that, Matt, is if we look at the prior two third quarters, they have also been positive weather quarters for us as far as heat goes. Okay. Related to that, if you think about the different components of your business, you think about failure, you think about manage, you think about discretionary, which I realize is small for you. Is the discretionary business, such as you identified, getting any harder than any of the needs-based businesses, or is the slowdown across the mix pretty similar? What we'd say about that is discretionary has been under pressure for the last four or five years, and it's not a huge portion of our business as we focus on hard parts. It's not having a dramatic impact on our comps. Got it. Finally, I did note, unless I misread it, that while you cut the high end of the comp range, it looks like you left the sales dollars intact. I'm not sure if that's a function of new store productivity or something like that. Any clarity would be great there. Well, we kept the guidance the same after our strong results in the first quarter. When we look at year to date or for the full year, that hasn't changed. We didn't change it in a positive direction in the first quarter and left it the same here in the second quarter. Okay. Thanks so much. Thanks, Matt. Your next question comes from the line of Dan Wewer with Raymond James. Thanks. Greg, earlier you had indicated that you did not believe O’Reilly is losing market share, and I don't think it is either, but you did indicate that your sales in June were noticeably weaker in the first three weeks, and yet NAPA is indicating that their business was stronger in June. How do we reconcile those differences? I don't know. That's a good question, Dan. I don't know how to reconcile that. I can tell you that from a comparison standpoint for us, we were weaker the first three weeks of June. I don't know how NAPA did last year and what they're comparing to. Maybe they were down the first three weeks of June, and it was easier for them to comp the first three weeks of June this year. It would be something that'd be hard for me to answer, not knowing the details of their comp composition. Okay. Tom, a question for you and the decision as to why O’Reilly pre-announced. After all, your earnings came right in the middle of the original guidance, and your same-store sales were one half of one percentage point below the low end of your guidance, which is not a surprise given what Advance and Monroe had to say after your last conference call. Are we establishing a new precedent going forward that if we don't hear from O’Reilly, it's an indication you're going to either be in line or better, and that if, given what you had to say in the second quarter? Yeah. Tom will have some comments he wants to make on this too, Dan. What I would say is we try hard to be as transparent and straightforward with analysts and investor shareholders as we can be. We have said several times that if we were going to miss our comp guidance, because we're always asked about comps intra-quarter, and we try not to talk intra-quarter about what's going on in the quarter any more than we would if we were disclosing it to everyone. We had said several times that if we were going to miss it, we would pre-announce. At the point we decided to pre-announce, there was a chance that we could have gotten down into the low 2s, which we would've considered a substantial miss. The end of June comps increased, and we ended up getting to 2.5. Had we known we'd ended up at 2.5, we might not have, but we felt like it was most appropriate that we do based on the transparency and the comments that we had made to investors and shareholders about what would cause us to let them know if we were outside of our comp guidance. Tom. For my time here at O'Reilly, and I'm pretty sure for our history, we've only pre-announced one other time, which was the first quarter of 2008. To echo Greg's comments, the end of June is a very volatile time for our business based on the timing of the holiday and the days that the month ends leading into the holiday. There was a possibility that we would be two or below two, and we were happy to see business pick up, based on where we were and the comments we've made in the past about missing comps, and letting people know if it was a significant number, we decided to release. Directly to your question of, in the future, should you expect us to pre-release if we are below comps guidance? We'll make that decision. We're not going to commit to anything at this time. Okay. Thank you. Okay, thanks. Your next question comes from the line of Scot Ciccarelli with RBC Capital Markets. Oh, goodness. Hey, Scot Ciccarelli. How are you guys? Good. How are you, Scot? Good. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is, you've made a number of references to the economic situation, et cetera, and I get the fact that we're in a little bit of a rougher patch right now. The truth is this is an industry and your company, frankly, performed incredibly well through the depths of the recession. That being said, you did miss your own sales guidance three out of four quarters heading into the recession. I guess I'm just asking for maybe a parallel on what you saw back then, because you guys were all there in those seats, to what you're seeing today on the economic front. Well, what I'd tell you, there's been a lot of water passing those bridges since. What I would say is that I remember the time you're talking about, the demand had slowed some. The reason sometimes for demand to be slow is hard to quantify. We typically lean on consumers that are deferring maintenance based on the work we do in the field with our shops and our territory sales managers to understand what our repair shops are seeing, the customers that buy from us. When you go through a period where six out of 10 jobs, a shop is not able to sell after giving the estimate, and it's deferred for a month until someone gets a paycheck or whatever the case may be, you get the feeling that the economy is affecting our business on the DIY side, too. Today, we're hearing a lot of that. When I read what I read about other retailers and the struggles that they're having with revenue, it just makes you realize that there's a lot of uncertainty among consumers right now, and people are holding on to money. When they have an opportunity to defer a spend, we have to feel like they're doing so. Fortunately for us, many of the automotive things that they would spend money on are not things that they can defer if they want to drive their cars. Although this time of year, there are probably more things that they can defer because our business becomes a little more dependent on a deferred repair item, which is HVAC, which is not performing as well as what we would ideally like to see right now. I guess I'm just trying to understand, okay, I understand everything kind of slowed, your indication, I guess if I were to read it, if I'm reading it properly, is you think the slowdown you've experienced is more on the economic front rather than a delayed hangover, if you will, from the weather pull forward? No, I think they're both a factor. It's hard to quantify either one. Us having gone through this really odd weather year where we have this winter that in many markets just didn't happen. Here in Springfield, Missouri, where we normally would have some snows and ice and freezing temperatures for some period of time, we had none of that this past year. Many of our markets had those same conditions. It's hard for us to predict the effect that that will have on demand in the summer. Now here we are in summer, and we're having incredibly hot temperatures. I would think that hot, while it is driving some of the things that we would expect it to drive, rotating electrical batteries, things like that, our feeling is that it will continue to drive demand in the wintertime when some of the parts that are damaged in the heat actually fail. Okay. All right. Thanks a lot, guys. Okay, thanks. Your final question comes from the line of Michael Baker with Deutsche Bank. Thanks, guys. Two questions. One, just simple math. I think if I go to the midpoint of your third quarter guidance for comps and then the midpoint of the full-year guidance, it implies a couple hundred basis points pick up in the fourth quarter. Is there any reason that we should think the fourth quarter will get better? I do realize there are easier comparisons on both a two-year and three-year stack basis, but wondering if I'm missing anything else there. That's what we would point to also. As I mentioned earlier, the third quarter has been extremely strong in the last two years. Okay, fair enough. Last question. Can you update us on both in terms of the acquired stores and total company, what % of your business now comes from the commercial side? As I recall, the CSK had, when you bought it was about 10%. You have a goal to get commercial to about 40%. I think you had said it was somewhere in the low 30s last quarter. Can you update us on that, please? Right now it's 41.59. For the total company. Does that make the CSK stores still in the low 30 range somewhere? Yes. The goal is to get that to 40 over time? It would be. Like I said before, some of those stores are not in great do-it-for-me markets, so we won't get closer to the 50/50 that we have with the historical O’Reilly stores. Yes, we will still be able to do that, we believe. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. We've reached the end of the call. Operator, you didn't come back on. I'll go ahead and make a closing statement here to end the call. I just want to thank everyone for their time this morning. You can be assured that Team O’Reilly will be working hard during the third quarter to make sure we generate good results. We'll look forward to reporting those results to you in October. Thank you. This concludes today's conference.