Well, great. Thank you, everyone, for joining us back in the room here. I'm really excited to have the team from Upbound Group, who you may formerly know as Rent-A-Center. So I'd love to have Mitch, I think you have a couple of prepared remarks just to describe the business for those who may not be as familiar and just talk about what your current initiatives are?
Sure. Thanks, Liz. Good morning, everyone. Yeah, formerly known as Rent-A-Center, so I'll start there. The Upbound Group, we formed about a year ago as not just a holding company, but it's a holding company and a shared services company for two primary segments. There's a few more than that, but two primary ones right now, two or three really. But our legacy brand is Rent-A-Center, and over 50 years old. It turned 50 last year, so 51-year-old brand, still growing. It has become as much an e-commerce company now as a brick-and-mortar retailer. But Rent-A-Center, I'll talk more about it as we go. But Rent-A-Center is our legacy brand, about 2,200 stores nationwide, about 1,800 corporate-owned, about 400 franchised, and another 130 or so down in Mexico. Then our other large segment that's just as big now, they're both about $2 billion segments, Rent-A-Center and Acima Leasing.
Acima Leasing is a company we bought three years ago, which is also in the lease-to-own business, but it's a retail partner business. It drives business through the retail partners. It does leases through retail partners, and I'll talk more about that in a second, too. Another one that we've just recently started last year is called Acima Private Credit, and that's actual credit, not a lease-to-own transaction where people can get a revolving account within retailers. When you think about our customer, Rent-A-Center, you can think about it this way: Rent-A-Center is a pretty deep subprime customer that is looking for options, and it's a way to acquire household durable goods through Rent-A-Center.
Then you go from deep subprime up to maybe higher up the chain in the subprime space, get closer to near-prime, and you end up at Acima Leasing, and that's that retail partner business. So that moves us up the spectrum some. And then Acima Private Credit goes up into the near-prime category, which is again more someone who qualifies for a small revolving credit line and gets the product that way. So we really step people up, and it's really one of the ways where the name comes from, Upbound. Our mission is to elevate financial opportunity for all. So we can go through the stages with customers, excuse me, lifetime value of a customer. They could be in any of those stages, whether it be Rent-A-Center. And of course, there's multiple ways to transact with Rent-A-Center within Rent-A-Center, whether it's in the store, online, and so forth.
And then with Acima Leasing through retail partners or direct with Acima Leasing through the marketplace. And then for someone that qualifies for credit, we have the Acima Private Credit. So that's how we step up. And the products I just mentioned, household durable goods, leases are primarily household durable goods. It's a mix of furniture, appliances, electronics, and also tires. Tires is a big part of the business, wheel and tire. In fact, it's almost a third of the business at Acima Leasing. And then of course, the Acima Private Credit is everything because it's more of a revolving account. It normally would start in a retail partner store with a durable good, a living room group, or something like that.
But it's a revolving account where if they were in a store that had an accessory or you could buy a pack of gum on your way out on the cart as well, that kind of thing. Speaking of, I mentioned a little bit about Rent-A-Center, a number of stores, and so forth how you transact. Acima is a little different because it's that retail partner business where we would be taking Ashley Furniture store. If you went into an Ashley Furniture store, if you didn't qualify for traditional credit or you didn't even apply for traditional credit, you could lease the furniture instead virtually in most cases right through that store. Wide range of merchants in Acima Leasing. We're in over 35,000 locations plus some e-com players like Wayfair or Ashley.com. It does almost as much business as their stores as far as where our business starts.
All the way down to someone that owns two furniture stores here in Miami. So a wide range. We go from small all the way up to the Ashleys of the world, larger companies like Rooms To Go and Bob's Discount Furniture, that kind of thing. So pretty wide range, which when you have that wide of a range, it's an awful lot of white space when you go from... I mean, we put the transaction in, we've got a sales team that works the local markets, over 100 people in the country that work the local markets. And then we've got a different team that works more like the regional players. City Furniture in this area is a big partner of ours, for those of you who might be familiar with that, or more of a regional player.
And then the largest companies, the nationwide companies like Ashley Furniture. The value proposition for those who aren't familiar with lease-to-own for the customer gives customer with... Excuse me, that's cash and credit constrained, access to those household durable goods through a lease. And we can lease to customers that you normally can't finance because the equity doesn't transfer to the customer till the end of the agreement. So if they need to return it, they can't afford it, we take it back and rent it to somebody else. That's what Rent-A-Center does, or even at Acima Leasing, if the customers can't afford it anymore, we take it back, not the retailer. We take it back and then re-rent it in the Rent-A-Center store.
So it allows you to, as long as you can get the product back to rent from somebody else, you can take more risk than a finance transaction because the customer can return it if they can't pay. So you have a lot of options. For the customer, it gives them access, it gives them flexibility, gives them options to do the ownership options and so forth. For the merchant on the Acima Leasing side, it saves the sale. So that's the value proposition for the customer and the merchant.
Right. So I want to dig into Acima a little bit more, just kind of thinking about some of the points of differentiation versus peers. I mean, there are all sorts of different lending options out there, but how do we think about what that differentiation is and then what some of the goals for that business are in the near to midterm?
The differentiation is really the fact that we can lease to customers that you can't finance to. That's a differentiation for the merchant. That's why we're in 35,000 locations or take a Wayfair website and so forth and growing pretty dramatically. We had 19% growth in the fourth quarter last year when most retailers aren't growing. But with our customer, and of course we'll get into things like trade down and stuff like that. But the differentiation for the consumer is we can say yes when most would say no. Again, if it's not fraud, we can rent because we can always rent to somebody else if they can't pay. We'd have to figure out if somebody can make a year's worth of payments. We'd like them to make a year's worth of payments.
That's great for us and great for the customer, or make six months' worth of payments and then do the buyout or something like that. But if they don't, that's okay too. So that's why we can take the risk. That's a differentiation. Then the differentiation within Acima compared to our lease-to-own competition, we differentiate ourselves. First of all, we're the biggest in lease-to-own, but by having the omnichannel of both brands, there's differentiation there. Like with Ashley Furniture, we can take care of their customers in their store. We also buy Ashley Furniture for Rent-A-Center. So it's those kind of partnerships. Same with companies like LG Electronics where we can be on their website for anyone buying direct from them, and then we buy LG products for our store. So you'd rather do business with us than...
There's reasons to do business with us other than our competition because of that crossover. For the consumer and the merchant, we have Acima Private Credit that I mentioned earlier. You can get one-stop shopping with us. If you had a prime lender like Wells Fargo or Synchrony, you could have the near-prime lender, second-look lender with us and leasing. You get one-stop shopping. I mentioned we're in 35,000 locations. About 1,000 of them, we actually have a subject matter expert where we supplement the staff of the retailer. If it's a store that does a lot of our kind of business or has a lot of that subprime customer in there where there's a lot of volume for leasing, we'll put during the peak periods especially a subject matter expert to help with conversions.
We're the only ones that offer that staffing support because you can double conversions when you put a subject matter expert in there, the consumer, and it pays for the person. So we do staffing. We have extended terms. Most of our competition will stop at 12 months. We can go to 24 months. A lot of our competition needs their returns faster, but with our size and scope and balance sheet and cash flow, we can extend terms, which helps conversion because the monthly payment comes down. We've got direct-to-consumer, so a lot of our... at Acima, so a lot of our merchant partners like the fact that they could sell direct to the consumer as well as us selling in their stores. Like Ashley's on the Acima Marketplace as well as where we're doing leases in their stores. So lots of differentiation.
I mentioned the Rent-A-Center tie-in and so forth. Differentiation for us compared to other finance companies and then differentiation within the leasing business for us.
And so with Rent-A-Center being more the brick-and-mortar side, most are company-owned. I mean, how does that differentiate versus some of the other players in that space?
Yeah, there's not a lot of competition in that space, really only one other major player. Our footprint is the one thing to mention now with 2,200 stores in the U.S., about twice the size of the one competitor that's out there, and then there's not much else. The size, the scope, the footprint we have in every market is pretty hard to compete with. Plus, the buying power of that size is hard to compete with our pricing. Our e-commerce is growing like crazy. We had the 31% growth on our shopping visits in the fourth quarter. We've done a lot of great things on our e-commerce site from a conversion standpoint. If we can't convert them online, our stores get another chance at converting the customer. We've got those 2,200 locations to do the final mile.
So we're right there in the neighborhoods for quick delivery, fastest delivery. Maybe other than Amazon, we're the fastest delivery. You actually do a living room on Rent-A-Center.com today. You either get it this afternoon or tomorrow. We're not quite as fast as Amazon, but we're pretty close with that kind of footprint in the final mile. And the same goes for a customer that wants to return the product. We're right there and we can pick it up and rent it to somebody else. So it's very convenient for the customer with that footprint. And we've got the experience. Rent-A-Center is over 50 years old. We've got operators like Anthony here that's been running the business for years and years and years, been with us over 20 years. I've done this since I was a kid, I think. I actually started in a Rent-A-Center store in 1983.
I realized some of you weren't even born then, but I started in a Rent-A-Center store in a manager training program in 1983 and worked my way up, obviously, over the years. So we've got a lot of experience taking care of this customer.
Right. So I want to switch a little bit into the current macro environment. I mean, you mentioned that you don't really touch just one customer demographic. You have a pretty wide range between the two businesses. So I guess thinking about what the current environment looks like for your customer base, maybe at the lower end and at the higher end, what are you noticing now? And are you seeing incremental pressure or has that started to stabilize? I think you had seen some softness in demand and how is that starting to progress?
Yeah, it's a great business from that standpoint. I'll talk more about why I say that. But in 2023, our delinquencies stabilized. We ended the year flat year over year in delinquencies. And one of the things that makes this business so resilient is the fact the customer can return at any time. So you don't get stuck with a lot of receivables. We don't even have receivables. We report income when we get paid. But when the customer can return it, it just gives you a ton more flexibility. And the resilience of the business also comes from when times get tough. And as I just mentioned, I've done this through many economic cycles, maybe even the worst one was 2008 and 2009 or 2007 and 2008, whenever the Great Recession was. The customer, when times are good, our core customer does very well.
When things tighten up and times aren't as good, the core customer does struggle. But what happens and what's always happened for over 40 years that I've seen, and the reason Rent-A-Center is 51 years old, is you start to get some of that trade down or other customers get pushed down, which becomes our higher-end customer when they don't get approved for credit. The customer that was getting approved for credit doesn't get approved for credit anymore. Things get tighter. So our customers slide. When times are really good, our core customer does really well. And when times are tough, maybe they're not doing so well. And we go back. When times are good, maybe they're running two things, a living room and a bedroom or a living room and a TV. When times toughen up, they might only be able to afford one account.
But then we get this push down from above from the other side that brings us more customers. And when that happens, those are higher-end customers for us when they push it at the top of the funnel. So that's really the story of what makes this such a resilient business through any economic cycle, again, going all the way back to the '80s or 1973 when the first Rent-A-Center store opened. So very resilient. The delinquency will stay consistent because of return, because the ability to return it. So we're consistent in delinquency year- over -year. Losses will stay within a pretty small band, 3.5%-4.5% on the Rent-A-Center side, almost in any economic cycle. And they used to be a little lower than that when we go back before e-com was a big part of our business.
There's a little more fraud there, but still a narrow band in any economic cycle because of the opportunity to return. And when you do get trade down, it actually helps because that's the better customer coming in. So a lot of our customers are under pressure, just like everybody, what's going on out there with inflation and all that stuff. But the resiliency of the model is something that's always been there. We've outperformed in tougher economic cycles. You go back to 2008, we outperformed primarily because of trade down and because of the return feature on our when customers are struggling. There's always plenty of demand. I guess that's the good news. And even in good economic cycles, there's still plenty of demand. When things get good, people's credit scores don't just automatically go up either.
So, an environment of tightening lending standards and some of your lending peers would be kind of a market share opportunity for you. Is that what you're seeing in the current environment, that some of these other lenders are tightening the standards and pushing some customers down to you?
We've seen some trade down when we look at our numbers, our Vantage Scores and Clarity Scores and different scores we have coming in. But the other thing that happens, even when you can't put your finger on trade down because of Vantage Scores, and it is happening, we think it'll happen even more going forward. We think that's upside in our current guidance is additional trade down. But even without trade down, uncertainty, the consumer may pick a lease-to-own contract versus a finance contract just because they can return it at some point. The payments are more flexible. There's a lot more options. You don't just have to pay for it. You can do an Early Purchase Option or you can keep your small payments. I mean, the average payment in a Rent-A-Center store is about $25, so very small payments.
So it gives the customer a lot of flexibility. And the customer will trade down on their own a lot of times, whether there's tightening above us or not. And just because of the flexibility of a lease versus a sale, the down payment is much, much smaller than maybe a finance contract. So the consumer, and we see a little tightening above us right now when we look at Vantage Scores, Clarity Scores, credit scores coming in, third-party scores coming into our funnel. On the other hand, when you look at the actual growth of 19% at Acima, Rent-A-Center having 31% higher shopping visits in the last quarter than the prior year and 16% more orders coming on the web than the prior year, then you can tell the customers trading... there's a lot of customer trade down on their own as well.
Right. And so you did mention that there is some trade down assumed in your guidance as well. I mean, to what extent do you think that continues? And what are some of the macro forecasts that get built into that?
I think there's upside in our guidance based on more trade down. We've got built in there only what we've seen to date, which hasn't been a lot based on paper. It's hard to see it on paper based on those credit scores, but yet the business is growing pretty darn well when you go back to the fourth quarter and early on this year. But we think there's upside in that. We think the credit card fees, the late fees, the new rules coming out around late fees, depending when that actually goes in place, could help us because when you listen to the lenders, you hear a lot of tightening conversation when those fees go down. So that's all upside for us. So we think there's probably more trade down coming based on the environment we're in, plus those late fees being hit so hard for lenders.
We didn't build that into our guidance like we're expecting it. That's just upside to our guidance.
Gotcha. Great. So I want to talk a little bit about credit losses and just where underwriting stands today for both businesses and then whether that's integrated or is it separate for each segment? How does that part of the business work?
Yeah, good question. When we bought Acima three years ago, there's two things we really loved about Acima. There's more than two, but the two top ones were their underwriting ability in the virtual space, as well as their sales team, the diverse sales team, the fact that there's a sales team that can sell one... the two-store furniture chain here in Miami, as well as the Ashley Furniture of the world and the Rooms To Go of the world and Wayfair. So there's just a great diverse team and one that would be really hard to match and put together with all their experience. But back to the underwriting, we felt really good. We had it analyzed, felt really good about their ability to underwrite, and we're seeing that through these economic cycles of controlling the losses.
One of the most exciting things with the underwriting for me is getting some of their best practices into Rent-A-Center, which we're starting now, that will help Rent-A-Center even more. We've taken our legacy retail partner business Acceptance Now and converted that, and we're seeing the benefits of the better underwriting. There's a couple of more retailers that are converting this month, and then we'll be done with that part. And then on the Rent-A-Center side, the exciting thing there in the underwriting... Rent-A-Center's losses haven't been a real problem anyhow. But with the better underwriting, the other thing you find is you can have more throughput. When you have better fraud tools and better analysis, then you can find more approvals because the way our less sophisticated underwriting at Rent-A-Center kind of approves categories versus it's targeted.
So what we found when we converted some of our legacy Acceptance now retail partner businesses over to Acima is we actually can increase volume based on throughput and finding more to approve. And we're going to be able to do that at Rent-A-Center here this year as we put some of those best practices, some of those same tools into Rent-A-Center. And we don't have that in our guidance, but there's some opportunity there for some upside and more volume, as well as controlling the losses even better.
So really excited about the underwriting. It's top-notch and proven to be top-notch at Acima. Like I said, Rent-A-Center doesn't really have a loss problem, but we think we maybe can get more approvals by using their tools. So we're excited about some of those things as we finish up some of these synergies that we saw all along when we bought Acima three years ago.
Well, that kind of leads me into my next question, which is really about Upbound's risk appetite to potentially loosen standards, drive more volume, and then what some of the data points are that are used for credit decisioning just so we can better kind of understand how that gets done.
Yeah, good question. Another part of how this business works or the resilience of the business is around risk appetite. When things get tough and you think losses are going up, the other thing that happens with our transaction because the customer has a lot of options. So they lease, they can return it back to a Rent-A-Center store anytime, whether it's leasing at Acima or Rent-A-Center. Or they can buy it out early. And when they buy out early, that's at a pretty big discount depending on when they buy it out. If they buy it out in the first 90 days, that's where our lowest yield comes in. It's still a good transaction for us, but it's still where the lowest yield is. Well, what happens when times get tough is if you think about...
It'll be pretty intuitive once I explain it to you that as times get tough, you might have a little more on the loss side, but then you also have a lot less of your customers exercising that early purchase option because times are tough. So you get your yield maybe another way. You can go up 1% or 2% in losses, especially on the Acima side, and you'll make up 1% or 2% in the fact that their early purchase option is delayed a little bit because times are tough. So what we really focus on is our overall yield. And certainly, we look at losses, and we're always focused on losses. But when you can make it up in yield, then what we're really driving for is our EBITDA margin and the mid-teens EBITDA margin.
And Acima, in that 15% range, is if losses go up 1%, we make it up somewhere else. We really drive in yield. We look at a lot of metrics, losses and yield, but that's another beauty of the business. The resilience of the business is when times get tough, you actually make a little more money on most of your contracts because they'll buy out a little later. So you can afford a little higher loss here or there. So it's another beautiful way the business is so resilient. As far as the credit metrics we look at in the underwriting, there's hundreds of things that our product looks at that our underwriting, Stuart Schultheis, the guy that runs underwriting under Fahmi, our CFO, could explain better than me, but there's hundreds that we look at.
It starts with the right fraud tools, using a lot of the experienced fraud tools and some other companies that we use, and just looks at hundreds of things in a very sophisticated way within a second or two to approve the customer or to ask for the customer for more information, like a bank account verification and things like that that we might not get upfront. You might then ask for that out of certain customers. It's very sophisticated. It looks at a lot of different things.
All right. So I want to talk a little bit about some of the recent performance, the 2024 guidance. So I guess what's been driving the recent improvement in GMV growth? And has there been a competitive response?
Yeah, we had in the fourth quarter, I think I mentioned some of the numbers, 19% GMV growth, and that came from a few different places. We had about 6% merchant growth because we got that great sales team out there signing up new merchants every day. Productivity per merchant went up about 25%. Not because retail sales went off the chart, but a lot of times it's a matter of with your retail partners, are you the first one, the first lease-to-own company they run? Because some retail partners, especially some of the smaller ones, will have multiple lease-to-own companies in there. So are we first or not? Which value proposition do they like the best? Excuse me. So our sales team's done a great job getting us more in the first position. And so the productivity per location's up 25%. Our direct-to-consumer doubled.
Our e-comm business doubled in the fourth quarter. So it's coming out a lot of different ways. We mentioned on our call that that 19% rolled in in January and February pretty strongly at 15% growth starting out this year. Those we said on our earnings call in January, and then February was tracking the same way. Very strong. Our portfolio at Acima is the largest it's been in two years. We are taking share. You mentioned the competition, but we're the only ones in our industry that has a sales team that's adding local merchants, one, two-store chains like I talked about, as well as having conversations with the largest retailers in the country at the same time. That's how big our sales team is. So it's pretty hard to compete with.
Some of our competition can compete in one of those areas, but we don't have anybody that competes in all of those arenas, especially when you add the direct-to-consumer online. And with our differentiators, like the fact that we'll add supplemental staff to stores that are high volume with the lease-to-own customer, the way our value proposition works... No, we haven't seen our competition do anything that's going to impact that going forward.
All right. Just kind of touching on some of the macro assumptions underlying the 2024 outlook range, as you touched on this a little bit. But what do you think would need to happen to either reach the high end of that range or to fall below the low end of the range from a just macro standpoint?
From a macro standpoint, I think the high end is even more trade down with the late fees. More consumer credit tightening up is where the upside comes from. As well as we said on the Acima side, mid- to high single-digit growth. And here I just mentioned the first quarter, we're more in the 15% range. It's a little scary to forecast that kind of growth. Plus, by the fourth quarter, we'll be at... we're comping over that 19% we just ran. So if you think about the fourth quarter, maybe it's more like the mid-single digits, and we start out at 15, and that's going to average somewhere. Maybe that even averages in the low double digits. You put a little conservatism in there, and you have mid- to high single-digit forecast.
But there's certainly some upside in that, especially with trade down and with those late fees if consumer credit tightens up. On the downside, I'm sure you're asking someone who's always an optimist about the downside. So I don't have a very good answer on the downside, but to miss on the downside is hard to see because of... not just because I'm an optimist, but the resiliency of the business. I mean, if things get... you say, "Well, gosh, if the customer gets under all this kind of pressure, of course there's got to be downside. You got to be below the low end of..." Inflation went back to 7%, and I'm going to tell you there's going to be tons of trade down if that happens, and we'll make it up on that end. So that's the resilience of the model. Losses are going to...
I think if the customer gets under that kind of pressure, your losses go up 2%, and I'd tell you, "Well, that means our early purchase options will slide a little later, and we'll make it up there." So the way the business model works, it's hard to see downside because for everything that "bad" can happen to our business, there's an offset to it like I just talked about.
I guess I'm just kind of going back and thinking about 2020 and when everyone had all this stimulus money and the consumer had all this cash. Did that send them to other retailers and away from Rent-A-Center? Is that kind of the downside?
I'm glad you asked that. I'm glad you asked that. We did great. Yeah, why did we do great then? Customers had all kinds of money, but they didn't automatically have a 750 or 780 credit score just because they had all kinds of money. They had all kinds of money, and they came to Rent-A-Center or they went to the retail partners and bought things. But they still didn't have... that's the beauty of the business. They don't automatically get a better credit score.
Right, right. Good point.
And so we do great when people have money. We'll take either one. We'll take either one. And I don't know of another business model out there that can thrive in either one of those situations for those reasons, which is probably why I've done this since 1983, I suppose. Besides, I love serving the customer that most people don't like to serve, the underserved customer.
Yeah, right. Well, let me open it up to the room. If there are questions in the room, please raise your hands. We can get a mic to you. Otherwise, I do have a couple more. All right. Well, while people think about their questions potentially, just in terms of your retail partner pipeline, you've got... you're certainly growing in that side through Acima. What does that pipeline look like? Where do you think there are some potential opportunities where you're not serving retailers that you think are big opportunities?
Yeah, I think that one of our couple of areas of growth at Acima have been the wheel and tire business I mentioned earlier continues to grow fast. And it's almost a third of the business, and we're not even in some of the larger retailers. So I think that's one that's going to continue to grow for us pretty dramatically. And that's a good category for us from a yield standpoint. Of course, as you would expect, people pay pretty well to make sure their car is still going versus having to get back tires or have tires and not be able to get to work and those kinds of things if they have to return the tires because they can't pay for them. So people figure out a way to pay for those. So it's a good yielding product for us. A lot of growth there.
We're just going to... there's still a lot of white space. I mean, we're adding over 500 merchants every month, small and medium size. And then, of course, we're working on some of the larger ones. Now, those kind of larger ones take a long time to talk about when you talk about the largest retailers in the country. And we've got good experience in there with Wayfair and Ashley being some of the larger ones we're in now. Big O Tires, relatively large tire brand, Rooms To Go. It's a pretty good size furniture company, and we're in most of the... not most, probably half of the top 50 furniture companies in the country. So we still have the other half to go. So there's a lot of white space out there. Pipeline's very full.
Good. And then I guess you kind of talked about the differences in size and some of your business partners. What are the key differences between a small and medium business versus a regional partner versus a national partner in terms of what those contracts look like? If there's any exclusivity agreements, pricing for you, how does that vary by business size?
Yeah, we certainly have more resources to support. The relationship side of the larger one's more important, of course. I don't go see the people with 1 store like I go see our biggest partners personally. Some of the obvious things. But you will see more exclusivity the larger the partner. They want to deal with 1. As you get down into somebody of the few stores, they might have 2 or 3 options in there. So what you're trying to do is become first with our value proposition, which is the best in the industry. Or I mentioned City Furniture being local here into Miami, the South Florida area, where it's something like 40 stores, and we supplement their staff in about 15 of them, which we only do that with exclusivity. I mean, if I'm going to pay for 15 extra people, we'll do that only for exclusivity.
So we're the only ones in there and things like that. So we've got those differentiators that help us, and that's a great relatively new account that as we took market share from someone else, we took that account. But the differences really in the way you service them, the value proposition doesn't change much. Exclusivity will be even better on the larger accounts. The larger accounts are where we'll supplement the staff in some of their stores where the demographics are right for us and things like that. So it's a little bit different play, but every one of our partners is important to us. They all get the great... they all get extended terms. They all get the initial payment, that early purchase option, like how much you'd pay after 90 days, the fee can vary.
The larger the partner, the more they'll push on that fee being lower. They tend to care more about the value proposition for their customer than maybe somebody with one or two stores. Not to overly stereotype it, but they'll be a little more concerned with what we're charging the customer than some of the mom-and-pops.
Got it. All right. I'm going to give one last opportunity for people in the room who might have questions. Do I want to go inside?
In my office, I'd call on somebody, but I probably shouldn't do that either.
All right. Well, the last one I'll ask is sort of near term, but just curious since we're in tax refund season, one question that we had is really about if there's any meaningful differences between this year and last year in terms of the refund amounts or timing, and then if that has any impact on near-term sales or margins.
Not for us. We've seen it very consistent with last year and just what we expected. I know you can read a lot of different things about this or that. I think some of the data is pretty thin, especially early on. A month ago, well, the refunds are a lot lower than last year, and then last week it was they're higher once there was some volume there. So for us, we've seen it very, very normal and good. Very normal and very good.
Well, great. All right. That's all I've got. Thank you so much. We appreciate having you.
Thanks, Liz. Appreciate it. Thanks, everybody.