Greetings. Welcome to the AutoZone’s 2024 Q3 Earnings Release Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode [Operator Instructions]. Please note, this conference is being recorded. The company would like to announce the following forward-looking statements.

Before we begin, please note that today's call includes forward-looking statements that are subject to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. Please refer to this morning's press release and the company's most recent annual report on Form 10-K and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a discussion of important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date made and the company undertakes no obligation to update such statements. Today's call will also include certain non-GAAP measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures can be found in our press release.

It is now my please to turn the floor over to Phil Daniele, Chief Executive Officer with AutoZone.

Good morning. And thank you for joining us today for AutoZone's 2024 third quarter conference call. With me today are Jamere Jackson, Chief Financial Officer; and Brian Campbell, Vice President, Treasurer, Investor Relations and Tax. Regarding the third quarter, I hope you had an opportunity to read our press release and learn about the quarter's results. If not, the press release, along with the slides complementing our comments today, are available on our Web site www.autozone.com under the Investor Relations link. Please click on the quarterly earnings conference calls to see them. As we begin the call, I want to say thank you to our more than 120,000 AutoZoners across all of our businesses for delivering solid earnings results in the face of a difficult macro environment. With our continued focus on providing what we call WOW! Customer Service, our AutoZoners delivered our total sales increase of 3.5%, total company same store sales up 1.9% and on a constant currency basis, total company same store sales of 0.9%. Also, our operating profit grew 4.9% while our earnings per share grew 7.5%. In spite of our lower than planned sales, we managed our business well and we were able to deliver bottom line results that continued to build on the phenomenal results we've had over the last several years. Congratulations to our AutoZoners everywhere who helped us achieve this quarter's growth. Your dedication to delivering on our commitment of WOW! Customer Service is always inspiring. Before I begin my comments on our third quarter sales, as a reminder, the backdrop to this quarter and every third quarter of our fiscal year includes tax refund season. It is roughly a $300 billion influx of cash to our customers. It begins around Valentine's Day and generally last four to six weeks. These dollars…

Thanks, Phil. And good morning, everyone. As Phil has previously discussed, we had a solid third quarter with 3.5% total company sales growth, flat domestic comp growth, a 9.3% international comp on a constant currency basis, a 4.9% increase in EBIT and a 7.5% increase in EPS. We continue to deliver solid results and the efforts of our AutoZoners in our stores and distribution centers continue to enable us to drive earnings growth in a meaningful way. To start this morning, let me take a few moments to elaborate on the specifics in our P&L for Q3. For the quarter, total sales were $4.2 billion, up 3.5%. And let me give a little more color on sales and our growth initiatives. Starting with our domestic commercial business. Our domestic DIFM sales increased 3.3% to just under $1.2 billion and were up 9.6% on a two year stack basis. Sales to our domestic DIFM customers represented 31% of our domestic auto part sales. Our average weekly sales per program were $16,400, down 2.4% versus last year's $16,800. Now as a reminder, we have added over 300 new programs over the last 12 months and these new programs are diluting the overall sales per program. We are, however, extremely pleased that these programs are maturing significantly faster than our historical performance and position us well for the future. We now have our commercial program in approximately 92% of our domestic stores, which leverages our DIY infrastructure and we’re building our business with national, regional and local accounts. This quarter we opened 20 net new programs, finishing with 5,843 total programs. Our commercial acceleration initiatives continue to make progress as we grow share by winning new business and look to gain share of wallet with existing customers. Importantly, we have a lot of…

Thank you, Jamere. We are proud of the results our team delivered this last quarter. We remain on track to deliver a solid 2024, but we must continue to focus on superior customer service and flawless execution. Execution and our culture of always putting customer first are what defines us. We are well positioned to grow sales across our domestic and international store bases with both our retail and commercial customers. Our gross margins are solid and our operating expense structure is appropriate for future growth. We are putting our capital investments where they matter most, our stores, distribution centers, and leveraging technology to build a superior customer service experience where we are able to say yes to our customers' needs. Fiscal 2024's top priority has been enhanced execution. We are making good progress. Additionally, we have many strategic projects in varying stages of completion. We will continue opening new mega hub and hubs, completing construction on our new distribution centers and optimizing our new direct import facility. We are also in the early stages of ramping up our domestic and international store growth. As discussed, our international teams posted same store sales comps on a constant currency basis of plus 9.3%, continuing several years of strong growth. While I mentioned all these investments in FY24, AutoZone's biggest opportunity remains growing share in our domestic commercial business. We continue to believe we have a solid plan in place for growth for the foreseeable future. We know our focus on parts availability and WOW! Customer Service will lead to additional sales growth. We are excited about what we can accomplish, and our AutoZoners are committed to delivering the results. Now I'd like to open up the call for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question for today is from Bret Jordan with Jefferies.

Could you talk a little bit about the cadence? You commented at the end of the quarter in the commercial business ended a bit softer and obviously very early in Q4, but could you give us any color sort of as we've trended sequentially into the fourth?

The commercial business, like we said, has been choppy. The last four weeks were the more difficult compares for the quarter. And as we said several times, I hate being the weatherman, but this particular spring has been challenging for us from a wet and cooler season. And typically, in the latter half of the quarter, we start seeing some improved performance around the hot weather categories like AC chemicals and AC hard parts and battery sales, et cetera, and we just didn't get that through the last several weeks of the quarter.

And then I guess on a calendar year basis, could you just maybe give us some color where you see inflation in pricing for your mix as the compares, I guess, gets…

On the inflation front, that has definitely been challenging as we've come off several years of hyperinflation, if you will, at our average unit retail on both the DIY side and the commercial side, frankly. I suspect the average unit retail same-SKU inflation would get back to more normal growth levels as we move further and further away from the inflation that we had over the previous years. Now those inflation numbers start to come back as we get in the later quarters of the calendar year, and I suspect they'll return to more normalized levels over time.

Your next question is from Chris Horvers with JPMorgan.

It's Christian Carlino on for Chris. First question on gross margin. Supply chain crisis aside, you've grown the commercial business pretty considerably over the past couple of years. So could you speak to, I guess, the degree of vendor rebates you've yet to receive and how long you should benefit from this catch-up period for all the growth that you've had since prior to the pandemic?

Certainly, our gross margins, as it relates to our relationship with vendors, has an opportunity improved. As Phil mentioned previously, we are coming off a period of significant hyperinflation, particularly in the areas like flat -- freight. Quite frankly, we saw snarls across the majority of the supply chain. And it impacted them from the standpoint of having higher labor costs, higher input costs in total. So we're starting to see that abate and that's given us an opportunity to go and negotiate for some deflation as we move forward. We're still in early innings there. And I wouldn't say that all of the inflationary pressures have abated but we're certainly in a much better position today than we were a year ago.

And then now that you're starting to lap some of the earlier signs of maintenance deferral at some of the tire centers, are you starting to see trends improve with that cohort of customers? And just broadly, could you speak to the performance at like the national accounts, the tire centers, the buy here, pay here dealers and then the up and down the [indiscernible]?

I would say if you kind of broke apart those segments that you just talked about, probably the most challenged group of customers or customers that are -- drive their repair revenue from tires. Tires have definitely been a pressure point. I think that downward trend on tires has probably flattened out a little bit. But I still think the tire segment, in particular, is under some pressure and has been for quite a while. On your other segment of customers, the buy here, pay here lot and used car centers, those have been more challenged as well. You think about there was tons of used cars that were sold over the last two years or so, and I think that's just been slower. Also, as the consumers under a little bit more economic pressure due to inflation, not just in our category but across all of retail and across life at the moment, I think there's more pressure on some of those bigger ticket items like tires. New tires is a pretty big purchase for a customer.

Your next question for today is from Simeon Gutman with Morgan Stanley.

My first question is on mega hubs. Can you share some math on them? What -- you mentioned 200 over time, can you tell us year-over-year how many should we see per year? And then can you frame the one year lift from them, please?

So certainly, from a mega hub standpoint, we're pretty excited about our future there. As we've announced, we'll likely have over 200 mega hubs at full build-out. Last year, we opened 20, we're likely going to open less than that this year. And we've got work to do. But our pipeline is very strong and our pipeline is robust as we look into FY25. So we're going to go as fast as we possibly can. These are big boxes and difficult to find places. But we've done a really good job and worked really hard to fill up that pipeline and you'll start to see that accelerate as we move into FY25 and beyond.

Hubs are up -- I'll just add on. Hubs are -- these have been great stores for us. I think looking over history, we thought we'd have 30 to 40 of these things in various markets. And now we see line of sight to, like Jamere said, well north of 200 mega hubs. And the hubs are still an important part of our strategy as well, which has slightly less SKU count -- well, 30,000 to 40,000 less SKUs than a mega hub, but both of those store bases are great for us. They help significantly on the commercial side of the business and they lift the DIY market as well. So they're great assets for us and performed better than our normal stores.

And then can I ask -- I know you don't give forward guidance, in thinking about fiscal '25, the first half and the second half. Are you -- is it fair to think that there's -- not a hockey stick, but it will be second half weighted? In other words, the top line backdrop improves mildly, hopefully from weather, but you are going to lap some big gross margin gains core, non-LIFO while you'll need the top line to lever the expenses. So it looks like you could see some second half weighting in next year. Curious if that's -- some thoughts on sequencing for next year.

Yes, like you said, we don't give guidance, but here's some things that I'll tell you that I'm excited about. One is weather has been challenging. And we -- I think over summer -- summer is going to heat up, we should get some -- the merchandise categories and mix and things of that nature will help our sales as we move a little bit forward. And although slower than we'd like, our commercial initiatives are working and we think those will continue to mature over time. And in a segment where we're underpenetrated in share, below 5% share on the commercial business, we think we have ample opportunity to continue to grow over time with improved service, improved hard part and expanded part availability and better service and delivery on the -- based on the things we talked about, parts investments, mega hub investments and technology investments that will grow our sales. But it won't be -- it's not going to be a hockey stick that turns around in six weeks or something, it's going to take time.

Your next question is from Greg Melich with Evercore ISI.

I wanted to follow up on inflation, because it sounds like it was still across the box slightly positive in the quarter. And -- but I think I heard in commercial that it was same SKU, slightly negative. So could you just give us a little more of the detail on that?

I think two things from an inflation standpoint. Number one, the backdrop is we're coming off a period of significantly more inflation last year. So as we look at this year and look at that impact on our ticket growth, our ticket growth is lower than it's been historically. And quite frankly, that's had an impact on the top line growth. You've heard me say a number of times that while hyperinflation is difficult from a cost standpoint. From a top line standpoint, inflation has been our fronted, and we just don't have that tailwind right now. We do expect inflation to normalize over time but the high freight cost that we had and the significant inflation that we had in the industry, it's just not there right now. And this industry has been very disciplined about passing that inflation through but also in times where the inflation is not there, we've also been disciplined about the pace with which retails are raised. So we feel pretty good with where we are in total. We think inflation is going to return. But right now, it's running significantly lower than it was a year ago and lower than what we've seen historically.

And just to be clear, in the quarter, it was zero?

Yes, we saw ticket growth across the business being very muted in the quarter and we're seeing some inflation in certain categories and other categories we're seeing hardly any inflation. And as we manage our way through that, we've just got to make sure that we're pricing dynamically to price for inflation where we see it and in places where you don't see it. Obviously, we're being disciplined like this industry has been for a really long time.

So still discipline and you expect it to normalize, but right now, it's not, it's on the…

Yes, it's pretty muted right now.

And then my follow-up was just to understand a little bit more about the consumer trends. I know you've talked in the past that we really haven't seen trade down on the DIY side at all. I'm just curious if that started to show up as a way. I think you mentioned maybe fewer items in the basket. Could you just double click on that a little bit?

I think there's a couple of things going on with -- if you kind of think about average ticket, some of it, frankly, has been mix of category, and I'll talk about it in a couple of different ways. One is highly discretionary items have been challenged for a while. Some of those have a great ticket. There's probably slightly fewer pieces in the basket. But I think some of that has been driven by the environment and the weather. Big jobs like air conditioning, if you will, those have been definitely muted in the spring time. Those are big jobs that have big tickets, multiple parts in them. When it rains, you're probably going to sell two wiper blades and when it's nice, people decide to do a tune up, you may have all kinds of filters that have significantly more parts transactions -- pieces per transaction in them. So I think ticket average will improve. It's not going to be improved based on hyper inflation like we've had over the last couple of years. But I do believe it will improve as we move through the summertime and get a better mix of product as we move through some of this more challenging weather scenario.

Your next question for today is from Scot Ciccarelli with Truist.

Given the slowdown in sales that obviously we're talking about, is there anything else you guys think you can do to accelerate the sales trends, or is it just a matter of executing the way you can and you need the broader environment to improve? And then kind of part two of this is, is there a point at some stage where if sales stayed sluggish, does it potentially tempt you to go through another round of price investments? I know that wasn't the original intent, but a long period of -- so their sales could potentially raise that [temptation], I would think.

Let me start with kind of your first -- the first part of your question. Are there things that we can do to improve? The answer is yes. We're in the process now of doubling down on customer service and execution. And on the commercial side, we're continuing on both sides. We're continuing to invest in hard parts coverage and hubs and mega hubs. Those drive sales. On the commercial side, we continue to invest in ways to service the customer better and faster and we like those initiatives that we have. So I think those help to improve our sales execution, if you will. The second part of the question…

The second part is on pricing. From a pricing standpoint, as I mentioned before, we've been very disciplined on pricing. And we executed around the pricing initiatives a couple of years and it helped us grow our shares and improve our units. We like where we're priced today. And we don't see the need to go move the needle on pricing as a way to go accelerate sales growth. I'll just remind you that the lion's share of the demand in this business is relatively inelastic. So this industry has been disciplined about pricing for decades, and we continue to see that being the case. And to Phil's point, I mean, we're committed and doubling down on our growth initiatives. It's improving the quality of our parts, it's expanding the assortments with mega hubs, it's improving delivery times, leveraging technologies, being competitive on pricing, all those are the kinds of things that are driving our business as we move forward, and we're pretty excited about the future.

Our pricing strategy’s on both DIY, we like where we are and we believe we have the right strategies on both sides of the business. We made those investments several years ago to rightsize those strategies. The industry has been very disciplined on pricing over a long period of time, and we don't see that changing.

Your next question is from Kate McShane with Goldman Sachs.

I just wanted to clarify. I think you mentioned in the prepared comments a mention of store growth. And I wondered if that was more of a domestic comment versus international comment? Should we see an acceleration of the store openings here? And we wondered if just with the sheer amount of growth you've seen over the last few years, do you think some of the demand weakness that you're seeing is just due to the sheer volume of what your current store base is handling?

We've talked several quarters ago about our aspirations to expand and accelerate our store growth in the back half of the decade. We historically have built about 150 stores, give or take, a few in domestically. And we think that we can significantly expand that number as we move forward. The drivers there, obviously, are the growth opportunities that we see in DIY but also a significant growth opportunity in commercial. And as we look at that, along with the expanded trade areas in the US, there's an opportunity for us to expand our business domestically. And we're going to do that by accelerating our store growth as we move through the balance of the decade. And then internationally, we've been extremely pleased with what we've seen in Mexico, and we like the growth prospects that we've seen in Brazil. And you've seen what we've posted in terms of same store sales comp growth now for several quarters. And there's an opportunity for us to go faster there as well. So that accelerated store growth is certainly a part of our future growth strategy, and it will help us become a faster growing business as we move forward. And then your comment about the capacity of our stores. I mean one of the things that we've done over time is we've continued to optimize the footprint of our satellite stores and then augment that with what we've done with hubs and mega hubs to jam more parts in a local market closer to customers. It's an important part of the growth strategy, both on the DIY and the commercial side of the business. And we'll continue to do that as we move forward, which is one of the reasons why we talked about expanding the number of mega hubs that we have and our mega hub count will be north of 200 at full build-out.

We just wish they'd come faster. Those -- building new stores takes -- it's a long tail from the time you sign a contract to the time we actually open the doors and start selling parts out of them. It just takes longer than we'd like.

Your next question is from Seth Sigman with Barclays.

A couple of follow-ups from my side. So when I look at the gap between your DIY business and the commercial business, it just seems narrower than it's been in the past, certainly pre-pandemic and that's been happening in the last couple of quarters. And if you look at DIY down 1%, it's actually not that different than the range we've seen in the past. So it's really commercial at this lower run rate. I know there's a lot of moving pieces here, but it's more of a macro question, right? Do you think that the commercial end customer is just slowing more? And maybe that's deferral, maybe that's trading down, I'm not sure, but I guess that's really what we're trying to figure out. Is that is that commercial end customer that may be more middle income consumer trading down a little bit more?

Yes, that's tough to figure out exactly what's going on in commercial when you you start talking about how is the customer migrating up or down the cost curve, if you will. We don't get near the segmentation on the commercial side that we do on the DIY side and the retail side of the business. But is the customer trading down, I think if you look at some of the segments that we have, that are more challenged, thinking tires, right? Tire purchase could be well north of $1,000 for a customer. Those -- that segment has been challenged for sure. Some of the new car and used car dealer segments have been a little more challenged, partly because I think they're not selling as many units. So those two segments have been challenged. So if you think are customers migrating down because of bigger jobs or down the good, better, best column, I think that's probably true that a customer may -- they may have normally taken a car to an OE dealer, do they then migrate to a Firestone or something of that nature, and do they migrate to the UDS customer or do the job themselves. I think you could see that but it's very hard to understand how customers move on the commercial side of the business.

And I think part of that, as we think of the commercial market, in general, that's why we've been focused on this notion that we're roughly a five share in what's approaching $100 billion market. Despite the fact that big ticket is pressured across really all of retail and certainly, a big ticket purchase in auto parts is not immune to those dynamics. I mean we still have an opportunity to grow significantly in commercial and an opportunity to grow significantly faster. And so all the things that Phil talked about in terms of our initiatives are the things that we're focused on. And if we do those things and execute on them, then that gives us an opportunity to really accelerate our commercial growth as we move forward.

And just on that last point around accelerating commercial, you mentioned a number of initiatives around service and delivery. Can you just help us better understand operationally what is actually changing, are we adding people, are we adding routes and just how to think about that. And it sounds like you've had some success early on in some of the markets where you have deployed some of these changes. Any sense on the lift they're seeing there that gives you that confidence?

I think we are seeing success. Again, still relatively small in our rollout and that rollout is not very mature at the moment. But we're leveraging some technology, leveraging the technology to handhelds and other technology in our stores to be smarter about how we deliver and where we deliver a part from. We're ultimately able to get the part to the shop faster than we were previously and we're leveraging all of the assets we have in the local market to get those parts to a customer faster, and we like the results that we're seeing. We believe that as we roll these out, our sales will improve in those markets. And ultimately, we'll provide better customer service and gain new customers as well as share of wallet with existing customers.

Your next question for today is from Brian Nagel with Oppenheimer.

So the first question I have, I know that we've already had a number of questions on commercial, so I apologize also asking about commercial. But just in the near term, if I heard the prepared comments correctly, it sounded like you expected a bit of a strength in here into the end of fiscal '24, the fourth period. So the question I have is, as you look at the business, I think comparisons do get easier. But are there specific sort of say, building blocks, which could help to strengthen the business here in the very near term?

I think you got two dynamics. One, as you mentioned before, is that the comparisons do get a little bit easier in the fourth quarter if you look at our grow-over numbers. But the second one is just the initiatives that Phil talked about. I mean we've been really focused on jamming more parts in the local markets and we've done a great job of doing that, and that's paying dividends for us. And then we've been focused on service and delivery speeds. And if we can win the game in terms of parts availability with jamming those parts in the local market and we can get them to the customer faster, those are things that are going to drive our business as we move forward. So again, we're excited about where we are and excited about the opportunity to accelerate our growth as we move forward. There are always macro challenges that you have to fight your way through and big ticket is pressured. But you combine the fact that we're underpenetrated, we've got a full slate of growth initiatives in place, those are the things that get us excited about the future.

My follow-up, again, it's also a follow-up. But just with respect to the consumer, I mean, look, you operate in a unique part of retail. A lot of the spend that happens at your stores is not necessarily discretionary, but there's a lot of chatter out there right now across consumer about maybe some incremental pressures on the lower income consumer. So the question is, are you seeing that -- as you look at your business and the data that’s available to you, are you seeing clearly or somewhat clearly signs of incremental pressure on this core consumer that's affected their shopping patterns?

I think big ticket, I think, has been a challenge for the consumer in all of retail, not just us. Like you said, big pieces of our business are break fix, starter, alternator, battery, your car is down, you've got to fix it. And those tickets, while they're large, they're not -- it's not thousands of dollars, it's -- a starter and an alternator could be a couple of hundred bucks. Certainly puts pressure on the low end consumer to have to have that money come out of pocket and they're under pressure. But discretionary categories have been under pressure for, frankly, quite some time. They all exploded during the pandemic when there was a lot of money in the consumer's pocket. And they've certainly been more challenged over the last 18 to 24 months and that continues. But maintenance items, I think as customers get more cash strapped, they look at -- if I take care of my car, I know that it will perform better and save me money in the long run. So maintenance items have a tendency to start to trickle up over time. And then the failure items, if you're going to get the car back on the road, you've got to purchase it. We don't have a lot of good, better, best categories. We have some in brakes and a couple of other categories, but that's not a big piece of our business. The vast majority of our sales are on application parts that have -- you have one choice and the customer buys that part to get their car back on the road. And we think that will continue.

Your next question for today is from Michael Lasser with UBS.

Phil, how would you compare and contrast this year for the aftermarket to 2017, which was the last year of challenged trends within the industry? And in your mind, is it really just a function of more cooperative weather that will drive an acceleration for the industry from here or do you think something else needs to happen in order for the backdrop to be more favorable?

It's a great question, I was wondering when the tough weather questions from a winter perspective would come up, and that was kind of that 16%, 17% range you're talking about. It's a great question. It's frankly one we talk about internally all the time. We've had a pretty soft winter weather pattern for the last two years. And when I kind of look across the country, this winter pattern, we got some pretty good weather from a precipitation, snow and temperatures in the Midwest. We got very soft weather patterns relative to driving, break fix part failures on the Eastern seaboard. Wasn't a lot of snow in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, D.C., and we didn't have a lot of cold temperatures in those markets. And those typically have meant undercar and brake categories performed very well when you have those types of seasonal patterns. We didn't get that this year and frankly, didn't get it last year. So it's a little undetermined what happens in a long period of time where you haven't had those weather patterns with categories in that half of the country. So I think that is yet to be seen. We don't have the inflation that we had probably back in '17, '18 and frankly, over the last two years to be a benefit. But I do think we'll get a better mix of categories going into the summer selling season than we've had in Q3. So I don't know if I'm really answering your question. I think that's yet to be seen and I think it will prove out over the next four months or so.

My follow-up question is on the underlying gross margin trend outside of the LIFO benefit. It sounds like the LIFO could be about a $20 million drag in 4Q. How much more room do you have to improve the underlying gross margin to offset that type of headwind that you're going to experience, especially as you move into next year where comps could remain uncertain and the market is still expecting double digit EPS growth?

So what I'll say is we've run the gross margin play with intensity and our merchandising teams and our supply chain teams have done a fantastic job. You saw last quarter, we had -- this past quarter, we had almost 90 basis points of margin improvement strictly from what we're doing on the merchandising side and what we're doing with the supply chain. I wouldn't suggest that those numbers are going to be as high as we move forward. We are coming out of a period where we had some pretty significant inflation that we got some deflation. And as we mentioned a little bit earlier, we're not getting the ticket necessarily to help us from a gross margin standpoint. So that will be muted some. But we believe that we'll have the potential to offset most, if not all, of the pressure that you see from a LIFO standpoint.

Your final question for today is from Max Rakhlenko with TD Cowen.

So first, on the speed initiative, can you discuss the pace of the rollout? And when we think -- when we should think that it will be in majority or all of the markets that you have mega hubs in?

We've been working on this for probably a year, year and half, and we started seeing the results that we really liked earlier this year and started ramping it up. We're probably in the middle innings, if you will, of rolling that out to our stores, we've got -- in our networks. We've got some more to go and we'll continue to add incremental stores as we move through the process. But I would say we're in middle innings. We do believe that as we roll this out, again, we believe we get better customer service, faster time to shop. And we believe with that better customer service, we'll gain new customers and grow share of wallet. It won't be an immediate snap but we like the efforts and the growth that we're seeing in those markets.

And then just as a follow-up, on the slower mega hubs openings, is that more structural, is it tougher to find boxes in the right areas or is it about execution opportunities on your end? And then it does sound like that the opening should start to accelerate in the next few quarters. Is that right?

The openings will definitely accelerate, and Phil has sort of smiled at me because I own store development as part of my finance responsibilities. And so this is one of my primary objectives for this year. They are big boxes in hard-to-find locations. We've been working through what we need to do from an execution standpoint. I will say it's anybody that's doing new store construction across the business know how challenging the market has been over the last couple of years or so. But we've worked our way through a lot of those challenges this fiscal year. We like the pipeline that we've built and we expect to see that accelerate as we move into FY25.

And I think the good thing is we know exactly where we want these stores in every metro market or adding multiples to a given city or an individual market that may have a smaller number of stores. We know where we want to be. We want to make sure we get them at the right distance from our current locations. And they've got to have good routes so they're easily accessible to the other markets. And then you got to find the spot that is a great retail location and a great place to do to fulfill and get these expanded parts to our shops and our stores fast. And it's just -- it takes time. We'd love to go faster because they're great boxes for us and they know -- they help us on both DIY and commercial.

That’s great. Appreciate all the color and best regards.

Great, thank you. Okay. So before we conclude the call, I'd like to take a moment to reiterate that we believe our industry is in a strong position and our business model is solid. We are excited about our growth prospects for the remainder of the year but will take nothing for granted as we understand our customers have alternatives to shopping with us. We have exciting plans that should help us succeed for the future, but I want to stress that this is a marathon and not a sprint. As we continue to focus on the basics, and strive to optimize shareholder value for the future, we are confident AutoZone will be successful. Lastly, as we celebrate Memorial Day next Monday, I ask that we all remember our country's heroes both past and present. We owe these great Americans a tremendous debt of gratitude. Thank you again for participating in today's call.

This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.