Good day, everyone. And welcome to today’s Whole Foods Second Quarter Earnings. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later you will have the opportunity to ask questions during the Q&A session. I will be standing by, should you need any assistance. And it is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Cindy McCann, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. On today’s call are John Mackey and Walter Robb, Co-Chief Executive Officers; A.C. Gallo, President; Glenda Flanagan, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Jim Sud, Executive Vice President of Growth & Development; and David Lannon and Ken Meyer, Executive Vice Presidents of Operations. As a reminder, all forward-looking statements on this call are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the expectations and assumptions discussed today. This maybe due to variety of factors, including the risks outlined in our company’s most recently filed Form 10-K. Please note, our press release and scripted remarks are available on our website. I will now turn the call over to John Mackey.

Thank you, Cindy. Good afternoon, everyone. First I will share highlights from the quarter and then turn to our updated outlook for 2014 and strategic vision for the next few years. In Q2, our sales grew approximately $300 million to a record $3.3 billion. Our comparable store sales, excluding the Easter shift increased 5%, reflecting healthy market share gains. We increased our operating square footage 8% to $14.2 million, expanding our reach to 374 stores across 41 states in three countries. We are particularly proud to have produced average weekly sales per store of $743,000 translating to record sales per gross square foot of $1,000. As we have called out since the fourth quarter, we believe our comps have been impacted by many factors, including our own strategies around value and growth, as well as increased competition, the macro-environment and weather. Since Q3 last year, our average price per item growth has moderated to 160 basis points from 3.3% to a three-year low of 1.7% this quarter. We attribute this primarily to our proactive value strategy and believe this is the biggest contributor to the change in our comp trends over the last several quarters. A dynamically changing competitive market is certainly a factor as well. The growing demand for fresh healthy foods, the offering of natural and organic products is expanding everywhere and new stores, existing stores and online. Looking at the big picture, that’s a positive for us, as it affirms our mission for the last 36 years and speaks to the increasing growth opportunity. However, we believe it is currently impacting our transaction count growth. In addition, severe weather in several of our larger regions impacted shopping patterns again this quarter, customers making fewer trips and buying more items each trip. And looking at the sequential change…

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Karen Short with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Hi. Hi. Just looking at your guidance overall, I mean, obviously the perception here is you’ve lowered your guidance and yet at the same time you’re accelerating your unit growth. And I know you have obviously very long-term, a very long-term vision in terms of where you can be in a couple years but can you help us reconcile that a little bit because obviously those two don’t really go hand in hand?

Well, we -- hi, Karen. It’s Glenda. We definitely wanted to look at where we were year-to-date. And we have a clearer picture of what the rest of 2014 looks like. And so it’s one thing to translate that into what we see happening for the next six months. But on the other hand, we are very optimistic about the future and our ability to continue to manage the investments that we are making in our value strategy. And at the same time put additional measures in place to lower our cost structure so that with fiscal year 2015 and beyond, we can deliver the unit growth. And at the same time deliver the slight improvement in operating margin growth that we have put forth in our strategic vision.

So is the slight operating margin expansion growth coming from just slight benefit from that 100 to 150 basis points direct store expense savings that you identified or is that not something that’s tangible that immediately at this stage?

The slight increase in operating margin improvement comes even while we are continuing to make further investments in gross margin. So yes, it’s coming from the expenses, both direct store expenses and G&A.

Okay. Thanks for taking my questions.

Thank you. We’ll go next to Ken Goldman with J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Thanks. I have to admit, I’m surprised by what I perceive to be a constructive tone on this call. You’re telling us that our estimates for the next couple years are significantly too high. Your stock’s down around 14% after hours. One of the questions I’ve been getting lately is does Whole Foods management appreciate that the world has changed and there’s a lot more competition out there? I’ve got to be honest. I’m not really hearing anything that’s suggesting management is taking this situation as seriously as some investors want you to. There’s a lot of talk about what’s going, not a lot to talk about what it takes to win the change market. I’m really just curious what are you doing differently versus a year ago other than taking your cost down which I think the market’s telling you may not be enough anymore?

Well, we’re lowering prices. We’re making investments on price. We’re cutting expenses. And we’re…

You’ve been doing that for years. You’ve been taking price down for years. I mean, it’s hard to understand.

No, we haven’t. I mean, if you look at we had rising gross margins for the last five years. So we haven’t been investing in price as aggressively as we probably needed to do. So we’re going to be investing more aggressively in price going forward while continuing to take our expenses down and continuing to innovate and differentiate. That’s our t strategy. We’ve laid it out. So there you have it.

All right. Thank you.

We will go next to Rakesh Parekh with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my question. So my question has to do with competition. So as you guys look out there right now as competition intensified lately from what you’ve seen maybe the past few quarters, whether from competitor openings or maybe just from some of your competitors being more promotional?

Could you repeat the question? We didn’t quite hear it.

Yeah. Just from a competitive standpoint, we’re clearly seeing a number of -- a greater number of specialty unit openings. You’re seeing more competition from discount channel and even conventional chains. So are you guys seeing -- has competition intensified from your perspective this quarter, maybe compared to what you saw some of the previous quarters?

I think -- this is Walter. I think we’ve acknowledged that the marketplace has become more competitive. And we’ve -- we’re also telling you that we are stepping up our value and our price investments to respond to that. We’ve laid out kind of the pathway over the next five years how we intend to compete with that, not just through the price investments but also through our investments in technology, our continued innovation in the store experience and our continued innovation in a number of different areas of the customer experience. So pick a point this quarter versus last quarter, I think we all see the world evolving pretty quickly with the different choices customers have and our kind of thought about that is to continue to make these price investments. We have a point of view that they’re going to continue -- they’re going to work and they are going to continue to build the long-term growth for the company. We’re increasing our square footage growth as quicker than any time we have in the history of the company. And we are pushing hard on the digital side and the innovative side to continue to differentiate ourselves from the competitors.

And just one quick question. Just in terms of competition, are you seeing any differences maybe in some of your suburban versus urban locations right now for competition versus some of the prior quarters?

I think it’s important to understand that competition has accelerated. There’s no question about it. We’ve seen the conventional supermarket companies like Kroger and Wegmans and HEB, they certainly have upped their game in natural and organic foods. We’ve seen new entrants get public money such as Sprouts, Fresh Market, Natural Grocer, they’re expanding more rapidly. Trader Joe’s continues to expand. So I’d say competition is more intense right now than possibly we’ve ever experienced before. But it’s also important to understand the Whole Foods Market is still gaining share. I mean, we’re still growing our comps at a much faster rate than the rate of inflation. So we’re just not gaining it as fast as we have gained it in previous years. So we still remain the leader in this category by I think a pretty significant margin. And we think the markets continue to expand as well which is why all these guys are jumping into it. They see there’s a seed change, that natural and organic foods are continuing to penetrate to a larger marketplace and everybody wants in on it. So I think for a long time Whole Foods had the field to ourselves, pretty much. That was nice. But we don’t any longer. So we’re adapting to the reality of the marketplace which is increased competition and important that we continue to innovate, differentiate, while paying more attention to value. That’s why we’ve outlined sort of how we see ourselves moving forward over the next five years. We’re obviously radically increasing our store growth. We have never opened stores at this type of pace before. And we think that shows you -- what we think is the potential market for our business long term. The second time we are -- the second point, we are making investments in price on a continued basis. Our gross margins do sort of trend down gradually every year. The third time we’re very focused on more discipline on the cost side of our business. So we think that’s the right strategy. We want to be as transparent as possible to our investors as well as to the leadership throughout Whole Foods markets so they can see exactly where we’re heading.

This is Walter. It is evolving quickly. But to respond to, kind of, the previous question there, is this team taking it seriously? Absolutely. Is this a competitive team? Do I think we have the -- whoever on this team, the competitive chops to meet this challenge and make our way forward? Absolutely. Yeah, there is some headwinds here and there are some quick changes in the marketplace. But this company has 36 years of a track record of being the leader in the nat food industry and continuing to make these investments strategically in price and in technology and differentiation and evolution. And I think are going to -- over the long term, this is the right path for us and we are absolutely 110% focused on this competitive battle. We will do what it takes to be competitive. We’ve laid out our pathway to be able to do that and make no mistake about it we will be there in the end.

Thank you.

Thank you. We’ll go next to Kelly Bania with BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good evening. Thanks for taking my question. Just want to talk about expenses. I think you’re looking for about a 30 to 40 basis point in annual reduction in operating expenses over the next several years. And just curious if you can give some more details on where in the stores those are expected to come from and are you at all concerned that a multi-year reduction in in-store expenses could in anyway impact the company’s ability to continue innovating that in-store experience?

Hi. This is Ken. One of the things that if you look over the last five years, we’ve showed our ability to leverage our expenses as our sales have grown. We anticipate being able to continue to do that. Coupled with that, we anticipate looking at structurally how we run the business and make some adjustments there within the operations, both at the store level, at the regional level and at the global level and that combination together will provide us with the platform to reach that reduction in our direct store expenses and operating expenses overall.

Thank you. We’ll go next to Jason DeRise with UBS. Please go ahead.

Hey. I wanted to ask about the inflation in the basket. So, I guess it was up 1.7%. Can you talk about, one, I guess, what was the actual cost input inflation that you felt just so we can understand how much you’re investing in price, or to sensitize that maybe even just a comment about what the life inflation you actually charged. And then secondly, to comment about that 1.7 relative to overall food inflation, which I think the last data point for all food types was up about 90 basis points, so reconciling if you’re doing enough relative to conventional baskets to drive that trade-in to your store?

Hi, this is AC. Inflation was fairly flat for us in the quarter. We’re seeing a little bit of -- just starting to pick up now going forward. We see that there’s certainly certain areas as we get further into this year that are -- there’s quite a bit of inflation and we see some drought effects in California for produce this year. Things like shrimp are up 8% going forward. Beef futures are up 14% going into the summer. And pork is also up as everybody knows. But there’s other areas that are down like corn is down this year and whereas -- we know there’s going to be a 25% short wheat crop. So we see that wheat’s definitely -- hard red winter wheat is going to go up and that’s going to affect a lot of baked goods. We have a lot of contracts in place for the rest of this year. We think we can mitigate a lot of what’s going to happen here. But a lot of what we do is really dependent on what the market does. I mean, we are -- as we’ve talked on the call so far, we’re really focused on being really competitive with our prices and on some of these areas like we know that California cherry crop’s really short this year but we don’t know what we’re going to charge. It’s really going to depend on how the market breaks. If retail prices stay fairly low then we’re going to stay there. We’re going to be really competitive. So, it’s not really clear in a lot of these different areas where the inflation and cost is really -- what’s going to kind of pass through into the retail. It’s really going to be how the overall market, competitive market responds to it.

Can I follow up on that? I mean, in the prepared remarks, it was the average price for item growth moderated to a three year low of 1.7%. So if inflation was flat, though, for the quarter, I mean, what is driving the up 1.7%? Is that all mix? I guess I’m just having a hard time reconciling that number with the comments you just made about it being flat, or that’s just your input cost being flat and then it looks like you’re still getting pricing above inflation which doesn’t look like a price investment. So again, I just hope we can clarify that a bit.

That would mostly be mix, yes.

Throughout the year, our mix changes and what we’re selling. Different departments, you sell more or less. So sometimes that change can really have to do more with mix than inflation.

And it’s also customers trading up, so it can be a variety of factors. The point that we’re trying to make is that it’s significantly lower in this quarter than what it has been in our history.

Okay. Would you quantify by what percent you’ve, on average reduced your prices relative to how inflation is happening for you? I just want to understand.

We don’t think about it that way. We don’t have that kind of top-down approach. We respond to each market based on our competition, based on the feedback received from our customers. So we’re hopefully a more decentralized company and we compete on a regional, local basis. So there’s really no answer to that. So thank you very much. We’ll go to the next question.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. We’ll go next to Stephen Grambling with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe as a follow-up to Ken’s line of questioning, management has consistently indicated that Whole Foods pricing gap has converged with peers. So it seems like price investments may not be as relevant of a comp driver. So can you maybe give us a little more detail on how you will more effectively convey a value image aside from price and also maybe give some details on what other levers you have to reaccelerate the comp?

Well, we still have work to do in certain perishable areas on price. We’ve done a much better job on central -- center store. But we still have some gaps on perishables and that’s where we’re going to be focusing going forward on pricing. And in terms of accelerating comps, probably the biggest driver of accelerating comps is going to be the age of the stores because we’re accelerating the number of new stores opening up. Younger stores have higher comps than older stores. So as we do that, that’s going to help. Also, we’re going to start going against easier comparisons. We’ve had some tough comparisons and as we anniversary those and start getting into easier comparisons that’s going to help as well. We had a lot of bad weather. I mean, I don’t every like it when retailers make weather excuses but there was a lot of bad weather. It was a tough winter. And that continued on through our second quarter and so we’re looking forward to that stuff going away. And we think our price investments are going to gain traction as over time -- it doesn’t happen like immediately when you begin to lower prices. It takes a while for customers to see it and respond to it so you get lift later on. There’s a lag in other words between price investment and cost picking up. So we think all those things together will help reaccelerate our comps in new stores.

This is David. Just picking upon what John said about new stores, this year’s crop, we’ve got some blockbusters that have opened, Domain in Austin, well over 60,000 square feet, Brooklyn Rooftop Garden, landmark store, we’ve got a store in Houston that’s going to be opening up close to 60,000 square foot (indiscernible) now just finishing up the designs in all the stores that will be opening next year, working with the regions. All the Dominick’s which are 50,000 square feet will all be opening, will be starting opening next year. So we’re really -- we’re excited about this year’s crop and how they’re going to grow and they’ve got a room to grow because they’re bigger and next year’s crop the same way.

Thanks. I’ve got some follow-ups, but I’ll follow up after. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. We’ll go next to Kate Wendt with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks. So in terms of the investments in price, obviously we understand it takes time. But in terms of your second half and especially your long-term guidance, is it fair to say that the price investments that you’ve been seeing aren’t really getting the lift that you expected and are maybe now necessary to get to the comps that you project versus accelerating comp growth? And then, as a follow-up to that, does your guidance include any spend for more advertising or marketing around what you are doing on price because it seems to us like that’s part of the problem, people have no idea what you are doing?

So this is Walter. I would say it’s fair to say that some -- I think what we expect from them we’re learning about the price investments and we are learning about some work, some don’t work, some need to be evolved and place in different areas. And so it’s a mix across all the learnings from those investments. But directionally, this idea of continuing to make investments and continue to improve and figure out where they work, where you see the lift, where you see last lift and how we need to continue to invest, that is the correct direction for us as a company. And with respect to marketing, it’s fair to say that we are reinvigorating that function so to speak in the different regions. There are some things that we are learning about how to communicate these investments and these improvements and we’re looking to spread those practices around the company. Plus, we’re also looking at different things on a global level of how we could do that better, too early to talk about those. But clearly we recognize the need to make sure in the changing world that we’re communicating more clearly the investments that we’re making and the value that we’re offering our customers. With respect to other things, I just want to mention one other thing about the differentiation. We haven’t talked about which is a catalyst to the comps is the continuing evolution of the standards for our products. We’re working now on our new produce standards, which will begin to roll out this fall on conventional produce giving customers greater transparency, visibility into the quality of the product and the standard of the product. And again, our ability to communicate that clearly I think represents the type of differentiation effort that’s going to continue to set Whole Foods Market apart from other retailers in the marketplace.

Okay, thanks. Just sneak in a quick housekeeping one. You gave Easter adjusted comps for Q2, what would be the Easter adjusted comp for Q3 to-date since overall for the quarter it’s 50 bps. I imagine that’s even bigger in the period that actually included Easter.

Well, the number we showed for the current quarter was actually a six-week number, including Easter in both years. So that would be in effect Easter adjusted. The impact on the entire third quarter will also probably be about 50 basis points.

Thank you. Next question.

Thank you. We’ll go next to Mark Wiltamuth with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my call. This is actually Chris Mandeville on for Mark. You touched upon the Dominick’s stores a little bit earlier. I was just hoping to get some greater color as it relates to when we should start to see those begin to cannibalize the comp base a little bit. And then, if you could provide any color as it relates to that impact versus what we had seen in Boston.

Yes, those stores are all in process. The first one will open up in January, so next January and they’ll open up throughout over the next year.

This is David. In addition, we have many other openings in the Midwest as well. It’s one of our fastest growing parts of the company. So just like we’ve seen in other markets like Boston and like, say, Minneapolis, we’re expanding the market, we’re growing the market. So they start to roll out in January and go forward from there.

So of course we don’t know exactly the cannibalization impact it will have. We’ve made some internal estimates of it. The good news there is of course Boston will be anniversaried, Austin will be anniversaried, though more than offset the Chicago impact.

Chicago’s big enough to…

Chicago’s a really huge city. And some of those are new market areas for us where we haven’t yet entered. So this should be -- some of the stores will have very little cannibalization impact.

Okay, great. And if I could just follow up with one other question. In terms of the price investments which you’ve made or accelerated over the last several quarters, have you seen any kind of response from your competitors in particular, the one whom you had cited being your main competitor in Q4?

They haven’t changed their pricing in response to customer, if that’s what you’re asking. So, I mean, one thing people don’t quite understand is that when you lower a price, the first impact on it is it lowers your comps as you’re selling the same amount of product for the most part at a lower price. So your sales are slightly lower. Over time, though, as people come to see that, you’ll hopefully get lift on that item as people purchase more of it and the overall perception of your basic price value ratio is improved and it helps your overall sale. That’s what we experienced in the past we made investments in price. But there tends to be a lag period. So unfortunately initially it’s not good in terms of comps, but then it does have a lift over time and so we’re hoping it will lift sooner rather than later, but the investments are being made now.

Okay, great. Just wanted to ensure you’re not chasing a moving target. Thank you.

Thank you.

It is a moving target always and we are chasing it, but sometimes you catch the moving target.

Thank you. We’ll go next to Charles Grom with Sterne Agee. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Good afternoon. Good evening. Just the follow-up here on the topic (indiscernible) just the price investments, Walter. Just wondering how you guys are planning to evaluate the success of those price investments? My understanding is there has been a couple 100 SKUs you’ve adjusted prices on. What are you doing to evaluate it and how should we think about future price investments in light of the gross margin view that you guys have shared. Should we expect multiple quarters and multiple years here of continued price investments? And then if you also could just shed some light on where you made those price adjustments so far? Thanks.

Hi, this is A.C. What we’re doing is we made quite a few price investments this past year and we’re now -- we now have about seven months of experience under our belts with them and we’re in a process of evaluating -- some have shown tremendous lift, others moderate, some have shown no lift at all. So we’re evaluating that and coming up with new list of items that we might want to pull some of them back a little bit and use that investment in other items. We’re in a process also of working on the next phase of price investments and we’ll have -- of course before we do any of it, we’ll have real clear criteria in place as to what we consider success. Because you know it’s really different. You may have some items which are kind of known value items where you lower a price on it and people don’t necessarily buy that much more of it. But you know you need to do it in order to be competitive in the marketplace because people really know the price of an item. And other items you lower the price and you really expect to get a large increase from it. And so we have different criteria for each item. You asked the question about how long will this go. I think we showed in our long-term vision here is that we’re looking to do further investment in price every year. We show up for the next five years because we think it’s important in this environment to continually be -- to be -- to do a better job all the time and we’re going to work both on price investment side and also on the differentiation side as well as Walter was speaking earlier.

We will return to our historical, we think, we’ll return in the next five years to our historical gross margin percentage of 34% to 35% range. While we will have lowered significantly our operating expenses, so that we think our operating profits will be actually at record levels in the five years. So that’s the strategic vision that we’ve laid out. So we’re going to continue to invest in price, we are going to and -- but we will see our gross margins slowly shrink down to what they have been for much of our history, but our expenses at the end of the period are going to be much lower and the overall profitability much higher. That’s our strategy.

Okay. Is it fair to say that so far in the seven months that you’ve started this journey that you really haven’t embarked on getting the message out there to somebody’s question earlier, which was a good one that you’re lowering prices, but you haven’t been really advertising them within the stores or doing it in some of the promotions that you do to get the message out there? Is it safe to say that that’s still to come or it’s not part of the strategy at all, you’re just going to lower the prices and hope that the customer starts to recognize that overtime?

Yeah. This is David. Just -- we’ve had some very encouraging results. We’ve been doing this experiment in half regions in the company with salmon and their farmer send at $10.99. And in California specifically, we’ve run additional marketing spend in California and additionally, we have the most savvy of our social marketing teams out there and we’re doing some extensive marketing in social media for this particular salmon price which is a great value and also a great differentiator for us. So we’re encouraged by those results. The other regions are studying it. We also are regional, so we do have experiments going on all the time. So we’re kind of experimenting, trying a variety of different approaches, of which marketing is one of them, so.

All right. Thanks.

Thank you. We’ll go next to Bob Somers with Susquehanna. Please go ahead.

Hey. Good afternoon. I guess, sorry, to do this, to stay on topic, but just, regarding the competitive architecture which appears to have materially changed from your point of view sort of two questions. One would be, on the heels of sustained multiyear price investment? Are you concerned that you’re starting to follow the path of the conventional business and that you end up with something that’s a lot more commoditized than you would like? And then related to that, since you have this vision, not guidance of committing 130 to 140 basis points of gross margin investment over a five-year period? Why not go scorched earth put it up front, make it uncomfortable for people to participate in the business since they are close to you a you have the balance sheet to do that?

Well, it’s easy to say scorched earth, if you’re not actually running a company and responsible to a variety of stakeholders. That’s very risky and that could blow up. So I don’t, that’s not what we’re going to do. But we’ve outlined our strategy and you can decide, if you think it’s a good strategy or not. But we are -- we’ve considered the -- we call a binocular option and we decided that that wasn’t the best strategy for our stakeholders at this time, so we’re not going to go that direction. We’re going to continue to make price investments, we’ll continue to lower expenses and we think five years from now we’ll be in a much different competitive situation than we are right now. We like the positioning that we’ll be in. It’s a -- we take the long-term in Whole Foods Market. We’ve been running this company for over 35 years and we think long-term, we execute our strategies over long periods of time and we found that that’s the best way to manage this business.

Let me add, this is Walter. Let me just add something that, I think, I mean, our presence, our purpose in the marketplace is around the quality of the food, the quality standards, the quality of food. You could -- I think we would all acknowledge we can do a better job communicating that to our customers, do a better job communicating the value offering to our customers. But our particular purpose or role in the market has been and continues to be to bring the highest quality food to the marketplace, that’s what we stand for. And we’re doing, so we’re never going to be a race to the bottom, chase it only on value, only on price. That’s not who we are and that’s not what we’ve been and that’s not what we’re going to be. And so when you think about our competitive formula, you think about the combination of quality and the role of quality in the marketplace along with the value, the value that we’re bringing to our customers and that particular combination is unique to us, because our standards are the highest in the industry and there is nobody in the marketplace that’s exactly like us. So there’s certainly a very rich competitive system out there right now. We recognize that. No one’s going to give us any business. We’re going to have to earn it through our own hard work and certainly these results today are not our finest, we acknowledge that. But I think why we don’t descend down that road is because we are working hard at the same time to continue to raise the bar on quality, continue to evolve the experience at our stores, our new stores in particular, if you go to Brooklyn, you go to some of the stores you can see how that customer experience continues to evolve. And continue to have thousands of exclusives and differentiated products that represent choices in the marketplace for customers that they don’t have. And if we get our digital act together, we’ll be able to be reaching our customers where they are outside the full values in the store. And I think that is going to be a nice catalyst for growth as well. So it’s a quality story as much as it’s a value story, that’s why we’re not going down that path.

For a long time, put this whole thing in competitive perspective. For a long time, Whole Foods Market was this small niche. I remember many years ago, talking to venture capitalists and early as a public market, as a public company. Their belief was that this was -- they wasn’t even sure it was a viable niche, wasn’t even sure that this had any legs at all. One guy said you guys are a bunch of hippies selling to other hippies. And yet we’ve grown continuously for many, many years until one time our market capitalization in the last year was the highest of any dedicated food retailer in the United States. Our tremendous success has created more competition. And that’s the way capitalism works, so we have, what we thought was a niche and we still think it’s a niche. But it’s just gotten to be a very big niche and in some ways it’s gone mainstream. So there’s a lot more competition, a lot more entrants into the marketplace as well as conventional supermarkets copying and imitating a lot of what we’re doing. Whole Foods Market does not want to engage and as you say, we don’t want it to become a commodity where we’re trying to just compete on the basis of price. That’s not what we want to do. Instead, we are upping our game in terms of differentiation, innovation, service, quality and overall experience that we give to our customers. You can see this if you go into many of our new stores. And we’re opening, I mean, we have 114 stores we’ve announced and we’re finding more and we just approved a bunch more stores today before this meeting. So, we’re rapidly increasing our growth and we’re opening tremendously good stores that we think…

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. It appears we have no further time for questions. I’ll turn it back to Mr. Mackey for any final remarks.

Thank you so much for listening-in today. A transcript of the scripted portion of this call along with the recording of the call is available on our website as well. We look forward to speaking with you again in July for our Q3 earnings call. Everybody have a great day. Bye.

This concludes today’s program. You may disconnect your lines at anytime and have a great day.