Good morning everyone, I'm Greg Melich. I cover the retail broadlines and hardlines here at Evercore ISI. It's my pleasure to have with us today, John David Rainey, the Chief Financial Officer of Walmart. An exciting, almost first year under his belt. And, John David, it's a pleasure to have you with us. Thanks for coming, and I'll have you introduce the team.
Greg, thanks for hosting this. It's a pleasure to have the opportunity to speak with this audience. With me today, I've also got Kary and Steph, and so they'll join me in answering some of your questions. We're really looking forward to it.
That's great. I'll kick right off on a strategic update. You know, Walmart has undergone a lot of portfolio shifts in terms of international businesses and even different capabilities that they bought or gotten rid of, divested. I'd just love an update now on where we are in terms of the portfolio of the business, both geographically and by function.
Sure, happy to do that. International's gotten a little more focused since we talked about it at our investor day a couple months ago, and for good reason. It's an area of a lot of excitement. India gets a lot of attention with what's happening there, with Flipkart and PhonePe. It's not crazy, Greg, to think that both those businesses could be $100 billion businesses in the future, so it's quite exciting there. Our international portfolio is much more than that when you think about the rest of our footprint. I would say we're pretty comfortable with where we are right now, and there's not necessarily a region of the world where we think that we need to be where we're not. I think the international portfolio is probably pretty stable at the moment.
We get asked a lot of questions about this, particularly when people try to derive the return on invested capital for this portfolio. There's a couple things that are probably worth noting, and it's a little into the weeds, but if you'll indulge me on this. With respect to some of our investments internationally, like JD.com, and some of these others, if you think about the equation, return on invested capital and our accounting for that, we actually have nothing in the numerator but a number in the denominator, because that is just mark to market each period. By the same token, acquisitions that we made in the past, like Asda, because we segment report at an international level, we still carry the goodwill from that, even though we no longer have that entity.
Our return on capital in the international entity is actually quite a bit higher than what one can surmise by looking from the outside in. We talked at our investor day about this plan that we have over the next several years of growing operating income faster than sales. International is a big component of that. In fact, we expect both on a sales basis as well as operating income basis, the international portfolio to do better than the rest of the enterprise.
Interesting. I guess maybe the same question then, in regards to the mix of the business. You've talked about the flywheel and those, whether it's, you know, an advertising business or 3P marketplace. Could you help us sort of level set where we are now in terms of that and getting those back to profitability and driving increased returns?
Yeah, happy to. In the U.S., I feel like we're beginning to hit our stride in some of these initiatives that go beyond retail. Things like advertising, things like fulfillment services, Data Ventures, depending upon what region of the world, we have advanced at different paces. If you just think of e-commerce broadly, in China, roughly half of our business is e-commerce.
Right.
There's a good balance between brick-and-mortar and e-commerce. India obviously is almost entirely a digital business. When you think of areas like Canada or Mexico or Chile, those are areas that, you know, I think we can continue to build out this other suite of services that include the things that I mentioned around these digital services, like advertising, fulfillment services. We've made great progress with what we're doing in Mexico, but I think we've got more to go.
It's more of a continuation of what we talked about in the U.S., with different levels of advancement.
Got it. Maybe then bringing it back home a little bit, where are we? What's the bigger opportunity? Is it in marketplace? Is it in fulfillment? Is it in media? If you look at these, the new businesses, domestically.
Well, they're all interdependent, and we won't.
... be able to do any one of them in isolation without being really good at the others. I think it starts with the value proposition that we provide around convenience and what that does for our customers. As we move more into the channels that are responding to the ways in which they want to shop, it gives us the opportunity to go in and advertise to them, or for a third-party seller, fulfill their the sell of that item and deliver it to our customers. They're all very large opportunities. Advertising is probably the one that gets the most focus. I don't want to talk about that at the expense of the others, but certainly it's a big opportunity.
When you look at what some of our competitors are doing in terms of their advertising dollars relative to their GMV, and then you look at Walmart, it would argue that we're way under-penetrated. I think the important thing for us, if you think about any digital business, the challenge is scale and scaling those opportunities out. Well, we're starting today with scale. We've got hundreds of millions of customers that come to Walmart each week. If we can leverage that with these digital opportunities, it gives us a real advantage.
Are there any other capabilities that you need, or have we sort of piloted and tested the capabilities so that now you can scale the back end, whether it be from innovation, logistics, et cetera?
At a macro level, I don't feel like there's anything that we're missing. At a micro level, I think we can get a lot better at some of these capabilities. Understanding our customers, understanding what creates great buying experiences for them, where they wanna come back with frequency and shop with us in multiple channels. This is part of building that muscle. We are less advanced than some of the leading companies in this space, and so that's what we're doing right now, but that's what excites me about the opportunity that we have in front of us.
Maybe to pivot a little bit and we walked around the world, we got to the U.S. strategic. You know, Sam's Club, it's a business that a few years ago we were closing clubs, now we're gonna start to open clubs. You know, I guess what changed here? Is it inherently lower margin than Walmart U.S. or not? You know, help us figure it out.
The nature of Sam's, and the way that we price for our customers, it is a lower margin business. If you look at the last three years, setting aside the last quarter, we've had tremendous growth, double-digit comp growth over the last three years, 12 consecutive quarters. We're always looking at where we can change our portfolio, whether it's adding to it or removing from it in some cases. In the case of Sam's, we identify some good opportunities where there's a good market fit and a market need, and it gives us the conviction to go out and add 30 stores over the next several years. Sam's, in many ways, is. Honestly, I think sometimes gets overshadowed from this larger U.S. segment, but there's a ton of exciting things to talk about in Sam's.
In particular, what we're doing with the digital engagement of those customers. One of the things I love to talk about is the scan and pay, or Scan & Go, where someone can use a mobile device to shop in store and then seamlessly check out and not have to wait in line. What's interesting about that, Greg, is roughly 1 in 4 of our transactions is done that way. If you step back and you think about that for a second, that's a digital experience in a brick-and-mortar world, right? There are few experiences or few other companies that can probably point to that level of penetration in that type of experience.
I think it's really a great example of where we're advancing and where we're following the customer to make sure that we're providing the type of experience that they want.
we actually had Frank Blake at the conference earlier today, and we were just talking about that, the data that the retailers have and how that's so critical, and the ability to use it to drive customer satisfaction. Maybe to pivot, to a little bit more of the business today, and the top-line drivers, I would say, you know, Walmart's traffic, we've seen accelerate to 3% or better, with the comps running north of five. Could you help us understand what categories are driving that and some of the consumer makeup within that's driving that growth?
Sure. Well, we're mostly benefiting from higher growth in grocery right now, food and consumables. As customers' wallets are being pinched, you're certainly see them have more discretion with some of these larger ticket items, and they're looking for value. Value and convenience. We've seen share gains, most notably in grocery. When you think about the income demographics that we're seeing that in, it's pretty dispersed acros
income tiers that we follow. Earlier in the, going back last year when we were seeing higher inflation, it was more skewed to the higher income groups. I think more recently it's been more evenly dispersed among all income groups. An important thing here, Greg, is that this is not just about value, this is also about convenience. As we continue to see robust growth in things like delivery from store or people buying something online and picking up in store, we're providing convenience to customers. I think very importantly, if you contrast that to a lot of other trends that we saw throughout the pandemic, some of those trends, for good reason, like, went up during the pandemic, but then reverted back to trend line.
This is an area of our business, and specifically what I'm talking about, is the grocery delivery or buying online, picking up in store, has continued to go up and to the right throughout the pandemic and after. One of the things we look at is the weekly average customer count of our customers, and in the last quarter, we talked about that being 40% up year-over-year. Well, it's been that way for several quarters. It, if you go back four years ago, this has been a consistent trend up and to the right, and so I think it really shows that this is as much about convenience as it is about value.
Interesting. Maybe to follow up on the value side of that, and we'll get to convenience, how would you frame your price gaps today versus-?
... 12 months ago, or pre-COVID, versus the competition?
We're comfortable with our price gaps today, and I think that's been the case for the last 3, maybe 4 quarters. certainly if you go back multiple years ago, I think there was a recognition that we needed to invest in that area. We needed to invest in our pricing. We've done that, but we operate in a dynamic, competitive environment, we're gonna continue to do what's best for our customers, do what's best for Walmart. That may take changes from time to time, but we don't see a period or a step-change investment in this area. It's something that we look at. Every Monday morning, we have a meeting where we're monitoring our prices versus the competition, and as we stand here today, we feel comfortable with where we are.
Got it. We had the Mission: Impossible theme at the Shareholders' Day. Maybe you follow up a little bit on that. You know, what can Walmart do to help reduce inflation? You know, where are we with rollbacks and how, what can that go to historically in terms of the number across the store and in categories?
I'll start here, and maybe Steph, you might want to jump in on the rollback piece. We recognize, first of all, like the headline inflation numbers are coming down because we're lapping higher prices year over year, but prices are still high. If you're a consumer and you're going to fill up a basket of groceries of food, it's still roughly 20% higher than it was two years ago. Our mission is to provide the very best pricing for our customers that we can. We work with our suppliers to try to make that happen. We also, we've got a big private brand business.
With Walmart U.S., roughly 20%, a little bit ahead of that, greater than 20% of our sales are in private brand items, and in Sam's, it's closer to 30%. This is a good vehicle to be able to provide value to our customers. Steph, do you want to talk a little bit about some of what we're doing on rollbacks?
Yeah. I think John David's point that we're working very closely with our suppliers and our vendors, particularly in dry grocery, but across the overall grocery and consumables basket, to be very directed about how we use rollback dollars. We're concentrating those around major events where we know the consumer is looking to us to fight inflation even harder for them. If you recall, even last fall, we started this campaign where we would effectively digest inflation for the consumer. Thanksgiving meal at last year's price, or a holiday basket at last year's value. We carried that all the way through our spring marketing campaign, and it's proven to be really effective for us, not only in driving customer engagement, but also reinforcing our position.
I think we're gaining some goodwill among consumers right now, in addition to overall working very closely with our suppliers to make sure that their dollars are the most effective for them to drive the volume they need as well. It's a continuation of what we've been doing and what's been working, but you're going to see more of that as we get into the back half of the year. Back to school is a really important point for us to reinforce that value proposition, and then you'll see that continue into the fall and holiday season.
Just to maybe frame it a little bit, I think I heard the number a few weeks ago when I was out there, that we have hundreds of rollbacks now. I think they're typically, what, 90 days, and then... In the past, I remember there being thousands of Walmart rollbacks at other periods of time. Is that the kind of magnitude that could increase over the next few months?
Yeah, I think what John Furner shared last, a couple weeks ago at our shareholders' event, is that you could see a doubling into the back half-
Okay
... I don't know that I would put a 10x multiplier on it.
Okay. That's definitely the direction, I guess. Maybe to pivot a little bit, John David, you mentioned before, it's value, but it's also convenience. I thought, one of the things we saw recently was that, you know, the Pickup 2.0, also with delivery, which you mentioned, and just follow up with more on where you're really getting traction with those initiatives.
Well, a lot of what we're doing there is also automating that supply chain. Whether it's the automated storage and retrieval in our Fulfillment Centers or what we're doing in our stores in these micro-fulfillment centers, it's making it a lot more efficient for us and enabling us to better serve our customers, reduce wait times, have more accuracy in terms of the items that we're picking for that basket. We're continuing to see consumer behavior shift in that direction, where they recognize that it is a very convenient process.
Moreover, I think if you are a consumer, probably like I was and prior to the pandemic, you probably didn't think about online grocery or grocery delivery because you were concerned about the quality of the goods that you were going to get, whether it was the wilted lettuce or the hard avocados. You wanted to make sure that you had the ability to do that. As customers go through that experience, and they have a very good experience, they're much more likely to come back. What's important for us as we think about the expansion of the portfolio of products that we sell, customers get used to doing that, then they're more likely to add that general merchandise item that they can throw into that basket, have it delivered at their house, or pick it up at the store.
Convenience is a really important part of where we're going here. I think importantly, when we look at or we survey the mind share scores from our consumers, we're rated right now for convenience almost as high as value. We've never been there historically. I think it suggests, Greg, that what we're doing is working and it's resonating with customers, and we want to continue to do that going forward.
Could you remind us the number of stores that are getting the remodel, you know, this year and I won't, I'll throw out the 20% number I think we heard in some New Jersey stores, but feel free to dial that back if you want, and update us on the store rollout?
Well, we're really excited about a lot of these remodels that we're doing. What is the total number?
$300.
300. The number that Greg's referring to is during our Associates' Week, it was disclosed that some of these stores are seeing an uplift in sales as much as 20% after we've remodeled them. You have to experience this for yourself. It really is, it's a different Walmart when you go to it with improved waypoint finding signage, wider aisles, displays around apparel, and it really has a different look and feel, as well as additional brands that we haven't traditionally carried. We're quite excited about it.
To the 20% number, one would expect, and we've seen this historically, when you have a remodel, that you're gonna get a little bit of an uplift in sales, and sometimes that abates over time as that newness wears off. The uplift that we've seen around this is much, much higher than what we traditionally see. We would again expect it to decline over time. I don't expect any of us believe that we're gonna have a 20% uplift in sales in perpetuity. Even if it's a fraction of that.
Right
this is a highly accretive ROI initiative for us. We're quite excited about it. We're pretty early on into this as well.
Yeah.
I don't want to overstate this. We've only done a few stores, but the early returns are quite exciting.
Another, I won't call it the last, but certainly not least, top line driver is Walmart+. You talked about delivery. I'd love to, where does that fit in the realm of things you're doing to build that loyalty and traffic, particularly with a new customer? I mean, our survey work suggests you got around $12 million members, and when we back out some of your numbers, feel free to update that or critique it. Fundamentally, where are we on Walmart+ now?
Yeah, so I think Walmart Plus, we're in the beginning stages of this, quite excited. And what's really interesting to me about this, Greg, is the, um, um, the, the, the, the, the group of customer that we see this as. It's a more... It's a younger, tends to be a little more affluent, more tech-savvy customer that, again, really, um, values convenience. And if you think, going back to this convenience notion, that matters to people irrespective of your income level. And, um, when you look at, um, like, um, grocery pickup as an example, roughly fifty percent of our Walmart Plus members come through that channel or, um, grocery delivery. And so it, it's someone that really values the utility of that, of that membership and what it can provide.
I think very importantly for us, it allows us to have more digital engagement with that customer, so we better understand them and can tailor our offerings that are most relevant to them, versus trying to guess and pick and choose certain things that are really based upon more macro level customer stats. We want to continue to do this. We want to continue to provide value and utility. I think importantly, we need to get better at some of the things that we provide here. Like, even if you think about one-day delivery or two-day delivery or in some cases, we may have to cancel an order. Like, we have room for improvement there, but these are all things that we're working on and making great progress.
So-
Greg, let me just add to that, just as a follow-up from our associate event. One of the things we're doing uniquely with Walmart+ is we're co-creating this experience with our customer. There's a very strong feedback loop embedded in the development of Walmart+ as a platform. John David's spot on. The value equation is very clear from an economic perspective. The conveniences are increasingly becoming clear, but even going into desirability and, you know, help me live better, the other side of our mission, right? Save money and live better. You're seeing value added to the Walmart+ platform based on the feedback loop we're getting from our customers, going out to the market and finding things that help them live better and making that available as part of their overall Plus experience.
Look, is that the CLV or the customer lifetime value of a Walmart+ member, it is appreciably higher than someone that doesn't engage with us this way or is not availing themselves of that membership. They spend more with us, and they tend to shop more frequently. It's something clearly we want to have more of our customers take advantage of because of the benefits that we see to Walmart.
Is the lift 50% or does it double?
I'm not disclosing a number, but.
Okay
I guess I would describe it as appreciably higher. We're not talking, you know, $10 or $50. It's much higher with that customer.
Got it. Well, maybe, I think on our last 10, 15 minutes, I want to get to some of the, you know, the fun stuff like margins.
Yeah.
It's great to drive the top line, the traffic, but it's also good to make more money doing it. Could you just, you know, get into some of the drivers of the margin expansion that you've talked about, that you can get back to the goal of growing EBIT faster than sales?
The margin expansion that we talked about, and we really, I think, drilled in on this at our investor day, where we talked about growing margin much faster than sales. It's a result of a number of things, but fundamentally, the mix of our business is changing. If you think about a 4% or 5% margin retail business, which is growing at a low single-digit rate, and then you combine that with these faster-growing elements of our business, like advertising, like fulfillment services, like Data Ventures, and I'm not even talking about like what's going on with Flipkart and PhonePe and some of these other entities. These are all things that are improving their margins and have higher margins at a much greater rate and growing faster. The pure mix of our business is changing.
That's one element of that. The second piece of this is moving more into GM. By moving into e-commerce channels and having a marketplace and third-party sellers, it allows us to provide assortment and merchandise that we haven't historically to customers. We see that the customers that are coming there are buying more GM. That tends to carry a higher margin than some of our food and grocery. The third area, Greg, really relates to the pure unit economics of what we control in delivering these services and goods to customers. Supply chain is the, I think, the best example to point to right there. We're making a tremendous investment in our supply chain. You've got the opportunity to see some of this. You mentioned that, but the unit economics around fulfillment will improve by roughly 20%.
Will be 20% lower, rather, I should say, in 5 years when we complete this. In the next 5 years or 3 years, I think it is, we're going to have roughly 65% of our stores that are served by automation. This provides a better experience, more integrity to the, to the experience with our customers. Also lowers our unit costs. It's expanding more into GM. It's having these other businesses grow faster and then improving the unit economics of the services that we provide today.
If I was thinking about a unit economic standpoint over that 3, 4, 5 years, should I be thinking about supply chain costs coming down 20%? If they were 5% of sales, that could be 100 basis points of margin. Or can I include some of the store costs as well to maybe even have it be more than 100 basis points opportunity? Am I framing that right?
The opportunity is in excess of 100 basis points. You're thinking about it absolutely the right way, and it applies to both our FCs and DCs, but also the stores themselves. We focus a lot on supply chain technology, but, you know, we're implementing technology like our VizPick system back, and electronic shelf labels. Electronic shelf labels save a ton of hours in a store over the course of a period like a quarter, because you're not needing to go in and change all of those manually. It, all of this automation really gives us an opportunity to operate much more efficiently and allow our associates to do what they do best, and that's serve our customer.
Greg, maybe I.
Just to finalize that point on associates, our expectation is that our population of associates would remain relatively flat over the next several years. We don't expect to see a drawdown in the number of people, but it's redeploying each individual person to do different jobs, and upskilling a good majority of our workforce into places that they're serving the customer, or more close in proximity to the customer, or doing things within the automation sequence, where they're serving and contributing to the overall technology. A really great opportunity for our associates as well, and not expecting to have, you know, major changes in our overall headcount.
Well, and I-
Go ahead. I'm sorry, Greg.
I guess what I would say is the trend, the next question is gonna be basically that, which is that you've invested a lot in labor, over the last few years. I think wages have been up probably low double digits a few years ago, and probably up mid-singles this year. As that moderates back to something more normal, the way here is really to get more productivity out of the labor? Is that what I'm?
That's true, and to restate what Steph said slightly differently, we believe we can grow into this. Our labor, we feel comfortable with where we are today, whether it's our average wage or our starting wage, and the wages for our associates have increased tremendously over whether you look at a three-year period, a five-year period. We definitely want to continue to pay our associates appropriately, but it's not just about an average hourly wage. We view this as careers.
If you just take a stat like promotions, 88% of the promotions or positions, I should say, that have been filled at the store above a start or an entry level, have been filled by people that are Walmart associates. We're not going out and hiring someone off the street necessarily, we're giving someone the opportunity to advance. That's, I think that's really important as people think about their own wealth creation and career growth at Walmart. I want to go back to this point that you mentioned around margin, because what we said at Investor Day is that we expect over the next several years that on average, sales will grow about 4%.
Some years it may be more, some years it may be less, but on average about 4%. We said that operating income should grow faster than that. Very clearly, like, I'm not talking about, like, 5%. If all we do is 5%, I'll be disappointed. We showed this range of outcomes, I think kind of cleverly in a, in a shaded graph here, but, you know, upwards of almost 8%.
Right
... we think there's a tremendous opportunity if we execute on the initiatives that we control, to dramatically change the margin profile of our company. What that really translates into is increased free cash flow, better profits, and then you get into capital allocation. It's a big opportunity for Walmart going forward.
No, that's a, that's a great way to tie it together. I do, I wanted to make sure that we didn't leave out those, that business mix part that you talked about at the beginning. You know, what is a reasonable goal for things like the media business? Do I look at as a % of sales, like, of digital sales, or how do we even-
... frame what the opportunity is there?
The way that we look at it internally, and I think the external metrics around this as well, is looking at it as a percent of GMV, but, you know, call it roughly sales today. If you look at what some of our competitors do or maybe what best in class is, that approach is 10% for some people. That's also dependent, Greg, upon the types of items that you're selling. So you'll see more advertising as it relates to GM than you will food. You're gonna. It's easier to attract advertising dollars for a pair of sneakers than it is a head of broccoli.
If you were to take that 9% or 10%, which is kind of the high watermark in the industry for people like us, and normalize that for our mix of business, that actually translates into, call it roughly 6%, using-
... a little bit of crude math here, but roughly 6-7% GMV. That's an aspiration for us. If we did that would put us in the top 10 probably advertisers in the U.S. in the next five years, it's a big opportunity.
Is there an opportunity beyond just product sales, and, you know, vendors that you might already be working with? Maybe other, I'm just thinking examples like, would Marriott Hotels want to advertise with you knowing that somebody's been looking at luggage?
Yeah. Absolutely. I, and I, but I, and I think that's a, that's a not insignificant opportunity at all, but I think very importantly, we want to make sure that we advertise in a way that provides a better experience for our customers. We don't want to over-rotate here and just try to monetize advertising dollars and throw a bunch of stuff and offers in front of our customers that aren't relevant to them. We are always going to keep our focus and our eye on our mission, which is helping our customers save money and live better. We're gonna be probably a little more, use a little more discretion in certain areas around advertising.
In your example, if that's relevant to that customer, and we believe that that's something that we want, that they would want, we would absolutely consider something like that.
Got it. You don't wanna go crazy with it. It's a slippery slope, if it's targeted and makes sense.
Exactly.
Great, maybe in the last few minutes, we did margins. I wanna make sure we get to returns and balance sheet and cash flow and all that good stuff. CapEx is going up. I think you guys have mentioned maybe close to $20 billion, I can't remember how you framed it. When do we get that ROI inflection?
Let me start with, the way that we view capital allocation is every dollar has to compete for all the alternatives that are out there. Right now, we believe the single best investment is investing in ourselves in some of the CapEx, because of the high ROI around that. What we've stated there is, despite a more elevated level of CapEx, we believe that our ROI can go up every year. To me, that's a good governor or guardrail to make sure that we're not telling the investment community, you know, "We promise," or, "Just wait, we're gonna spend all this money, and this will come several years later." We wanna demonstrate that we can invest in our business while seeing our return on investment go up each year. It'll go up a little bit this year.
It's gonna go up a little bit more than that the year after that, and more the year after that, based upon the trajectory of the investment that we're making. That said, we believe it's important to be balanced in capital allocation, and that includes returning cash to shareholders through the form of share repurchases and dividends. We're gonna be aggressive where it's appropriate. If we think our stock is undervalued, you'll see us be more opportunistic, but we believe that it's always appropriate to return cash to shareholders through share repurchases. When we look at our multi-year plan, our 5-year plan, and the economics around that should drive share gains much greater than what we see today. We're investing for the long term here. We're thinking about this in the same way that any investor would.
We also would aspire to continue to increase our dividend. We are a Dividend Aristocrat. We've been increasing our dividend for a number of years. At some point in the future, we'd be able to maybe hope to have a step change, where we increase it even more to perhaps have a higher payout ratio than what we do today. I think it's important that we demonstrate that that comes with increasing margins, increasing free cash flow before we do that.
When you talk about payout ratio, is that a % of prior year earnings, or how would you think about it?
Prior year earnings, if you look historically, go back, you know, 8 or 10 years, that's vacillated or, you know, been a, in a range of, call it mid-thirties to mid-forties. That's probably what's been appropriate for our business that period of time. I think we don't really have a targeted payout ratio or as a policy, I should say. We have something we target internally, but we don't have a policy around that. That, you know, this is an opportunity for us in the future if we want to change that send a little different message to the street around how we're thinking about that dividend.
Maybe the last part of that question is the what's the optimal leverage ratio? I mean, obviously a lot of changes in rates. You own a lot of your real estate, you know, fortress balance sheet. Is there a number of debt to EBITDA you'd target or?
Yeah.
You know.
We generally target a 2x leverage ratio, AA credit rating. That provides us the most flexibility, whether it's respect to using that capital, also considering things like commercial paper. Importantly for us, like, we have a tremendous amount of opportunities when we think about capital allocation. We're always going to be looking at this through the lens of what creates the most value for shareholders. If you look at our leverage ratio today, and you were to map out or graph out like where you get to the lowest weighted average cost of capital, it would suggest that we could lower it marginally, but we lose some flexibility by doing that.
We really like where we are with roughly a 2x leverage ratio and AA credit rating.
Makes a lot of sense, I think we're our time is coming to a close. John David, wanna appreciate your time. We got through a lot in 35 minutes. Kary and Steph, I'll be annoying you to figure out what remodeled store we should tour at the summit next year.
Absolutely.
Thank you for joining us, and have a great rest of summer.
Okay. Thank you, Greg. Appreciate it.