Operator
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Welcome to the BJ’s Restaurants, Inc. Second Quarter 2008 Results Conference Call. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Jerry Deitchle.
BJ's Restaurants, Inc. (BJRI)
Q2 2008 Earnings Call· Sun, Aug 3, 2008
$37.83
+1.38%
Operator
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Welcome to the BJ’s Restaurants, Inc. Second Quarter 2008 Results Conference Call. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Jerry Deitchle.
Jerry Deitchle
Management
Hello everybody I’m Jerry Deitchle with BJ’s Restaurants and welcome to our quarterly investor conference call which we’re also broadcasting live over the internet as usual. Joining me on the call today is Greg Levin our Executive VP and Chief Financial Officer and Diane Scott our Director of Corporate Relations. Greg Lynds our Executive VP and Chief Development Officer is usually on our calls but he’s off traveling this week working our upcoming new restaurant openings so he’s not going to be joining us on the call today. After the market closed today BJ’s Restaurants released financial results for the second quarter of fiscal 2008 that ended on July 1, 2008, if you haven’t had a chance to see our press release today you can see it on our website at www.BJsRestaurants.com. Our agenda for the call today will be as follows: First I’ll provide a business and operational overview for the second quarter. Greg Levin will then comment on our consolidated income statement, our summary balance sheet and our liquidity position as of the end of the second quarter and then after that we’ll be happy to answer your questions. We’re going to try to wrap up the call today in about 45 minutes and we’re going to get started right after Diane provides our standard cautionary disclosure with respect to forward looking statements.
Diane Scott
Management
Our comments on the conference call today will contain forward looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by forward looking statements. Investors are cautioned that forward looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and that undue reliance should not be placed on such statements. Our forward looking statements speak only as of today's date, July 24, 2008. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward looking statements or to make any other forward looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless required to do so by the securities laws. Investors are referred to the full discussion of risks and uncertainties associated with forward looking statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Jerry Deitchle
Management
As we indicated in our press release today’s our leadership team is very pleased with our solid overall financial results for the second quarter particularly after considering the current condition in the macro environment and the very difficult quarterly comparison we had to overcome. The key message that we continue to communicate internally to our team here at BJ’s is we can either let the events overwhelm us we can do our best to overwhelm the events. Our approach here at BJ’s is to do our best to overwhelm the events. As a result of that basic philosophy and mindset we believe that our restaurant, brewery and infrastructure support teams been a very good job of driving our business forward and controlling the parts of the business that are within our control during the quarter that despite the continuing challenges in the macro environment we’re all aware of that are currently impacting consumer spending for restaurant occasions in general and that are also impacting the costs that input to our business. Compared to the same quarter last year our revenues for the second quarter went up about 16% to $99.2 million. Our net income for the quarter was $2.9 million compared to $3.3 million for the same quarter last year and our diluted net income per share was $0.11 compared to $0.12 for the same quarter last year. As I previously mentioned our quarterly earnings comparison is a pretty tough one this quarter as we were up against a very strong 7.5% increase in comparable restaurants and a 40% increase in net income dollars in the same quarter last year. We should also point out that our diluted net income per share comparison for the quarter was impacted by about $0.03 per share due to asset disposal costs related to…
Greg Levin
Management
Let me take a few minutes and go through some of the highlights for the second quarter and provide some forward looking commentary for the rest of 2008. As Jerry previously noted our total revenues for BJ’s second quarter of 2008 increased approximately 16.5% to around $92.2 million from $79.3 million in the prior year’s comparable quarter. This increase is the result of approximately 19% more operating weeks offset by slight decrease in our weekly sales average of about 2%. The operating week increase is due to 14 new restaurants that we have opened since the second quarter 2007 and that’s offset by the closure in the first quarter this year by one of our legacy small format restaurants up in Oregon. As Jerry mentioned our aggregate comparable restaurant sales for the first quarter was a positive .6% and we were able to achieve that despite rolling over a 7.5% comparable restaurant sales in the second quarter of 2007 and a softening, in what I’m calling more challenging economy for the consumer. While we don’t normally give monthly comparable restaurant sales numbers I would like to note that our comparable sales comparisons steadily improved as the quarter progressed. We’ve got a lot of questions regarding the stimulus check and what affect that may have had on comparable restaurant sales for the quarter. Our answer is we just have no way to determine that. While we did see comparable restaurant sales steadily improve during the quarter we believe that that was due to BJ’s competitive advantage to handle large parties. The majority of our restaurants are built with what we call dining room three that allows for flexible seating and can be separated from the rest of the dining room to accommodate large parties. As such, our restaurants tend to do…
Jerry Deitchle
Management
That was one of the most complete and thorough financial reviews that we’ve had. We have a lot to say and I’m glad that we were able to take the time to do it. As a result of that we’ll keep our call live for a little bit longer to take as many questions as we have. Before we open it up for questions I want to take one more minute and reiterate our confidence that 2008 still offers a significant opportunity for BJ’s to continue to gain market share in the casual dining segment. Our leadership team has never felt better about the factors in our business that we can control. The vital organs of the BJ’s concept are in great shape. BJ’s concepts driven very strong warranty with consumers. I’ve been in the retail and restaurant chain business for over 30 years and through and been through a number of cycles. I can say with some certainty that tough times never last but well positioned concepts like BJ’s that are well managed and well executed by committed professional management teams do have a tendency to last. At BJ’s we remain fully committed to our longer term strategy to drive our concept and build our business. We’re going to try to do our best to position our business to really take advantage of the next economic up tick when it does come around. Until then we’re going to do our very best to drive sales, control what we can control and as I mentioned at the beginning of our call today we’re going to do our best to overwhelm the events. That concludes our remarks and at this time we’ll open her up for call.
Operator
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Jeff Farmer - Jefferies & Company. Jeff Farmer - Jefferies & Company: You mentioned that same store sales steadily improved as the quarter progressed so two questions, did that trend carry over into July and the second part of that is there any particular top line initiative that you can point to as a driver.
Greg Levin
Management
We really can’t comment on July. The only thing I would say is with July 4th moving to the Friday that really froze off the first couple weeks of July to get an understanding. Unfortunately you loose that weekend, you lose that Friday which is a strong Friday and people are doing something different for July 4th and you lose that Saturday. Being only three weeks into it it’s really hard to give a top line perspective in regards to that.
Jerry Deitchle
Management
As far as the impact of specific sales building initiatives as we mentioned in our press release and in our comments we’ve got a number of things that are working in tandem out in our restaurants today. We have our curb side cashiering service, our call ahead seating service; we’ve expanded our delivery service. We have lunch specials in 22 restaurants and based on the favorable results of those lunch specials we will expand that program to all of our restaurants here in the third quarter and we will give that some media support. There are many, many things that are happening concurrently from the sales building initiative perspective in our restaurants and I think they’re helping us to protect our market share and frankly to get enough menu pricing to offset at least in the second quarter the decline in guest traffic that we experienced. Jeff Farmer- Jefferies & Company: You’ve definitely provided a lot of detail on the initiatives I was curious if there were any stand outs for you so far in the early days?
Jerry Deitchle
Management
The only thing that I would comment on is that a lot of these initiatives were going to take some time to build. We’ve been very pleased with our off premise initiatives the curb side cashiering initiative in particular we have seen about a half percent increase sales with respect to overall premise sales. I think that’s early results of what we’ve been talking about for a couple of years now in terms of the under delivered channel for off premise sales and BJ’s in general. What off premise can do for us given our menu. We also mentioned that we have our online ordering capability which will be completed from roll out perspective this quarter and we do intend to divest in external media before the end of the third quarter. I think we’ll be one of the very few casual dining chains of our size and scope of operation are larger out there that have rolled out chain wide online ordering and curb side cashiering which we believe should give us a bit of a competitive advantage. Jeff Farmer- Jefferies & Company: Switching gears on you, I think your first two Florida units and I think the first Ohio market unit have been open for more than a year now. Looking back I know they opened pretty big but a year plus later are they still performing pretty well for you.
Jerry Deitchle
Management
The answer is yes. We’re very satisfied with the aggregate performance of our restaurants in Florida. It still represents in our minds a very prosperous market that will be a very fertile development ground for BJ’s restaurant going forward in the future. Our intention will be to develop out Central Florida and Northern Florida before we take on South Florida which based on my prior experience it can be a very challenging market to develop. We do have perspective sights in Gainesville and Jacksonville as well as a few more in Tampa and couple more in Orlando that we would intend to put into our development plan over the next several years. Jeff Farmer- Jefferies & Company: Final question for me, I might have missed it but did you give the average weekly sales number for the quarter?
Greg Levin
Management
The weekly sales average was $100,900.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from Jake Bartlett – Oppenheimer. Jake Bartlett – Oppenheimer: I have a question about your comp guidance. If you can give us some color about how you expect it proceed throughout the year, third quarter versus fourth quarter. I know year ago comparisons ease. I’m also wondering whether there’s an impact happening from stores coming into the comp base that might be dragging it down even through you’re getting easier year ago comparisons.
Greg Levin
Management
We don’t give quarterly comp guidance. The way we look at it, which we said on the formal remarks is we’re thinking its going to be flattish for the rest of this year. That’s the best we can give at this time. Jake Bartlett – Oppenheimer: Is there anything specifically that you’re seeing? On a two year basis it does decelerate that implies deceleration I’m just wondering whether there’s something that you’re seeing now that is leading in that direction.
Greg Levin
Management
I think what it is, 13 restaurants that are in the Sacramento area of California and Inland Empire and Phoenix market. You’ve got 13 restaurants of 54 in our comp base that as I mentioned were doing negative 5% to 6% range, negative 5% in California, there’s 10 there and negative 6% in the three in the Phoenix market. Those are what have really brought us down and really that’s a macro picture. As Jerry mentioned we’re doing what we can to continue to drive sales in those areas and hold on to our guests and eventually get those positive again. Jake Bartlett – Oppenheimer: One question about the remodel program, how many stores did you remodel and could you describe whether you expect that to be ongoing throughout the year, whether we might see some more charges.
Jerry Deitchle
Management
There were a couple of restaurants, some of our older restaurants that we wanted to put our current interior and certain components of our exterior look on our new restaurants to gauge guests reaction and to gauge whether or not it was a reasonable return on investment profile for those particular investments. We’re a little bit early in that but overall we’re very, very satisfied with what we’ve seen so far in terms of guest reaction, in terms of staff reaction and in terms of our incremental sales performance and we’ll try to provide some additional metrics on that on our next call. We have not yet committed to any additional major renovations or remodelings, about 15 or 20 restaurants that frankly still have what we internally call the industrial cozy look from the early part of this decade and clearly the comps have evolved past that as we’ve added the casual plus interior and exterior look and energy and feel to the concept. Everything else being equal I think over time we would love to go back and get that group of restaurants that opened from the year 2002 through 2006 we might give them a little bit of a face lift and bring them more current to the current look of our concept. Obviously that requires a little bit of time and a little bit of money and we have to factor that into our plan. We did want to do a couple of experiments to gauge overall results so far they’ve been favorable and we’ll see where we go from here.
Greg Levin
Management
One other thing that’s in there is we’ve gone through and will continue to go through and update our television technology. We’ve replaced some of televisions that were basically a 4x4 cube with a 103” plasma right in front of our bar that looks fantastic. It really gives a huge pop to our restaurants and we will continue doing that through the rest of this year and into next year.
Jerry Deitchle
Management
That’s very important. I forgot to mention that. The whole video, television positioning of the BJ’s concept is one of the high quality points of differentiation of our business in casual dining. We’re not a sports bar, we are a casual dining restaurant that happens to have some of this great technology and one of the many reasons why guests visit us is because of our televisions and particularly the 103” plasma provides a video statement in casual dining we believe is second to none.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from Brad Ludington – KeyBank Capital Markets. Brad Ludington – KeyBank Capital Markets: Has the percentage of to go sales increased at all with the delivery and curb side and all that yet or is it too early to tell?
Greg Levin
Management
We have seen about a half percent increase on the sales. While they might have been 4% to 4.5% we’ve seen it bump up closer to 5%. Still a ways to go but it’s looking very promising for us. Brad Ludington – KeyBank Capital Markets: When you look at the delivery what percentage of the store base do you think that could go to? I would imagine there are some markets that aren’t large enough to support the delivery.
Jerry Deitchle
Management
We’ve rolled out either internal or outside third party delivery service to substantially 95% of our restaurants. The restaurants that we haven’t rolled it out to have a constraint generally because of where they’re positioned on the street to where we can’t get dedicated parking or dedicated curbs or have enough space for the cars to get in or out from the delivery service whether its ours or whether its an outside service. We have rolled it out during the second quarter to substantially all of our restaurants and that business will begin to gradually build over time. Brad Ludington – KeyBank Capital Markets: What did you say the CapEx in the third quarter was?
Greg Levin
Management
What I gave, we spent $37.1 million year to date. We still expect $60 million net CapEx those are net CapEx after tender improvement allowances.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from Destin Tompkins – Morgan Keegan. Destin Tompkins – Morgan Keegan: You mentioned the development target for 20% to 25% square footage growth that you guys weren’t going to change that for 2009. Can you handicap that as we look at 2009 and the potential that there may not be as many good sights available with the co-tenants that you would typically look for. Can you give us a little bit more color on maybe what could look like if things don’t turn out too good?
Jerry Deitchle
Management
I think we’ll know more about that over the next three months. Right now if I had to comment on the overall pipelines and I’m looking at them right now, of the approximate 30 potential sights that we have in our current pipeline there are clearly at least 15 that do not appear to have any of these co-tenancy issues. There’s probably some other ones, again I’m not as close to it specifically as Greg Lynds is, that’s one of the reasons why he’s out this week. We’re really trying to get with all of our developers and understand all of their leasing issues and opportunities. The challenge as I mentioned earlier is not necessarily having enough satisfactory sights to pick from but trying to get them scheduled in, in a thoughtful manner. Give us another three months or so to get a little more information and then I think by our next quarterly conference call I think we’ll be able to give a much more fair handicapping of what we’re going to be seeing out there. Right now I think we’re pretty confident that in the aggregate we’ll have enough to execute that capacity growth for next year. It’s a very quickly evolving situation out there; we have to stay on top of it. Destin Tompkins – Morgan Keegan: Following up on that have there been any changes in terms of the development cost trends because maybe there’s less competition for some of these sights or has that really not changed too much.
Jerry Deitchle
Management
I think it’s fair to say that there have been some very slight improvements for tenants like us in terms of some of the rent terms, some of the land work, construction contributions available. There hasn’t been any material favorable changes yet. The type of sights that we seek to develop are AAA sights with the major developers are highly desirable sights and developers have not yet begun to dramatically or materially reduce any of their lease economics on that particular collection of sights. What we have seen however is with the reduction of develop in a lot of the smaller concepts that require a couple thousand square feet for example the [John Bedusas] or the Starbucks where they have pulled back their development. A lot of these major developers used to take 10,000 square foot or 8,000 square foot spaces that were highly desirable on the point corners of their projects and they used to reserve them for that group of perspective tenants. Now that a lot of those tenants have pulled back their development we have seen some of those 8,000 square foot sights become available to us which obviously are very, very attractive to us. We have seen that occur but as far as any material improvement in lease economics I think it’s fair to say we have not yet begun to see that yet.
Greg Levin
Management
The other would be the construction costs and right now much of our jobs are currently bid out for this year so we’re not really seeing much change there. That market is slowing and I think we’ll hopefully as we get into 2009 we’ll be able to get some general improvements in that area. Destin Tompkins – Morgan Keegan: On menu pricing you mentioned the 6% to 8% food cost inflation at your best guess for 2009 and the 2.5% of average check needed to offset that. Can you give us your philosophy on that menu price given that traffic has been a little soft here recently? Does that change your pricing decisions as you go into 2009?
Jerry Deitchle
Management
I’m glad you asked that question. Our basic philosophy with respect to menu pricing is that that is the last consideration that we will give to our margin protection program. Just like all of the other great restaurateurs and high quality restaurant operations out there we will work harder on productivity and efficiency and execution and we will pull all of those levers before we will reduce the quality, before we will reduce portion size, before we will do anything to subtract from the guest experience. After we’ve worked all of those opportunities on our margin protection plan, only then will we consider menu pricing. As far as BJ’s is concerned however, this might be contrasted a little bit to some of our other restaurant chain competitors we believe we have everything else being equal a little more pricing power in the BJ’s model today than maybe some of our competitors do. First of all as Greg mentioned our average check is still in the $12 range so a 2.5% increase, a $12.50 average check is about $0.30 if my mental mathematics serves me correctly. Asking our guests to pay another $0.30 or $0.35 and taking our average check up and say $12.50 to $12.80 or so is clearly something that everything else being equal would be reluctant to do but then compared to our competitive set it does not dislocate our relative prices from those of our mass market competitors. I think what we have to do going forward, we have about 100 items on our menu. We’re not a 20 item menu offering where it’s a little bit harder with 20 items to camouflage your price increases, we do have 100 items. There is a bit of a science to it. There also is a bit of an…
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from Nicole Miller – Piper Jaffray. Nicole Miller – Piper Jaffray: On price you talked about 4% for the back half. In calculating that right it would be an incremental 2% to 3% on the fall menu does that sound right? Can you confirm the June price increase was?
Greg Levin
Management
June was about 0.8%. Nicole Miller – Piper Jaffray: What’s planned, is it November is that the next one?
Greg Levin
Management
It would probably be somewhere in October probably. Looking at it we’ve got, yes it would probably have to be somewhere in that neighborhood.
Jerry Deitchle
Management
I think its going to have to be our objective we’d try to be to replace any pricing that’s rolling out of the comparisons. Nicole Miller – Piper Jaffray: On the depreciation can you just run through again quickly I think we understand it from initiatives that it’s higher year over year in the first half. My real question is will that trend persist in the second half?
Greg Levin
Management
The way to look at depreciation maybe take it as a cost per week. I think we talked about this before if you have six the first quarter and how many restaurant weeks we had and divided in there its going to probably be your dollar amount. If I look at the depreciation quarter to quarter meaning Q1 to Q2 I believe we were sitting right at the 4.9% for both quarters. When I’m thinking about where depreciation is going to be and based on comparable restaurants sales it’s probably going to be right in that percentage. Nicole Miller – Piper Jaffray: The last question you talked about having gone through these cycles before. As you look back what are some of the key factors with hindsight being 20/20 you said okay that was the signal we’re coming out of it and/or what should we be looking for this time around just more broad based, not specific even to BJ’s necessarily.
Jerry Deitchle
Management
Obviously the answer would be the consumer feeling a little bit better about their overall income levels and the level of fundamental costs of living in terms of food, energy costs, feeling a little bit better in terms of the over all asset values. As I think back in the late 70’s and early 80’s and I think back in the year 2000, 2001, I think clearly that the consumers got to start feeling a little bit better on all of those measures before you’re going to likely begin to see some of the top line improvements hit the restaurant industry particularly the casual dining industry. Your crystal ball is probably not better than mine on that respect as to when that’s likely to occur here given the current down turn. Again, as I think back off the top of my head I think those factors are going to have to be in place. I also remember back in the late 70’s when I bought my first house, took out my first mortgage it had a 13% interest rate. I’ve got to scratch my head on why I did that one. Obviously inflation was out of control right a the end of the 70’s and early 80’s and I think it took some changes in governmental monetary policy and fiscal policy to bring inflation under control and get the consumer feeling a little bit better about the overall predictability of the basic cost of living here in this country. I think our country has a lot of challenges in that respect. How that’s all going to resolve itself is anybody’s guess at this point in time. I do think those are the important factors.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from Larry Miller - RBC Capital Markets.
Larry Miller - RBC Capital Markets
Analyst
Did you say that comps improved sequentially during the quarter and that was due to the easier comparisons is that what you said exactly?
Greg Levin
Management
It wasn’t because of easier comparisons. We think that comps improved sequentially in the quarter really because I think BJ’s has a competitive advantage in regards to large parties. We saw some tremendous sales on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and some graduation related week.
Jerry Deitchle
Management
I would just add to that, that if you’re achieving any positive comparable sales in casual dining in this environment your having to fight hard for its, you’re having to work for it. For those comps that say we built it, they will come. That is just not likely to happen in this environment. When you look at all of our sales building initiatives and look at what we drove in our business from the large party perspective and what we got locked and loaded in for the second half of the year you’ve got to fight for this and we fought hard for it and we’re going to continue to fight hard for it. It was not a matter of easy comparisons on an absolute basis but we went out and fought for it.
Larry Miller - RBC Capital Markets
Analyst
I’m curious what the comparisons look like in the next few quarters for the Sacramento, Phoenix, Inland Empire Group. I know you said that you lapped them in January but I remember that the restaurant market started rolling over in Q3 and maybe you don’t lap them fully in January but do they get sequentially easier in those particular markets and does that also explain what’s happening in it right now?
Greg Levin
Management
No, not really, the reason I say that is there’s only two restaurants that we talked about at the end of last year’s third quarter which were in the Inland Empire they were in the Moreno Valley and Corona restaurants we saw softness in. For us specifically we didn’t see softness until the first quarter of 2007 even in those restaurants. Some of those restaurants that were really rolling over were some of the large volume restaurants that we opened up in 2006 and in 2007 that to some degree are rolling into the comp base. Those are some of the newer restaurants; they opened up with all the initiatives and through put value already in place so they were very effective and very efficient from the beginning. As they come into the comp base they probably come in more from a drag standpoint again because a little bit of the natural and the fact that they’re opening up with such high volumes.
Larry Miller - RBC Capital Markets
Analyst
It’s certainly an achievement to have positive comps in this environment but how do you guys see the day to day volatility. You tend to see in these consumer cycles where confidence is being very volatile a lot of swings in the business. Are you guys seeing that and how do you guys prepare the team to meet that challenge.
Greg Levin
Management
That’s a great question and I will tell you that through the second quarter and even here into the first few weeks of July it’s choppy. Its big surf out there where there’s some lulls then some huge surf that comes in for us California speak out here. With that in mind every Friday, you guys try and call me on Friday and I can’t return anybody’s call on Friday’s because we sit on a conference call going through our business metrics every Friday where restaurant operators literally schedule out how they’re going to do for the day. They schedule out their labor hours per 100 guests that are coming through and they try to be proactive based on how the shifts are coming. One of the tool sets that we’re working on is to give them a life scoreboard for lack of a better term, think of a 50” plasma TV when you walk into the kitchen it’s showing you all the key metrics of what’s going on in your business at that time so they can adjust accordingly. We spend good Friday going through all the metrics of our business and from there the restaurants have really some great tool sets that help them manage on a shift to shift basis.
Jerry Deitchle
Management
Having said that, given the choppiness in the flow of business and sales from restaurant to restaurant some are much more predictable than others and its is a challenge for our operators to really nail their productivity and efficiencies, we call the PE statistics here which has a double meaning obviously. It makes it very difficult and challenging for them to hit their targeted PE statistics. It is a choppy environment for sure.
Larry Miller - RBC Capital Markets
Analyst
With interest income it’s an unusual year can you give us an idea what a good number might be for ’08. I thought you said 28% to 29% tax rate is that right because of the ARS’s.
Greg Levin
Management
Sorry, I missed your question do you just want to know what you think our tax rate is going to be.
Larry Miller - RBC Capital Markets
Analyst
I thought you said 28% to 29% tax rate I wanted to confirm that and also maybe you can help us with an interest number for this year given the ARS has an unusual fact?
Greg Levin
Management
I would think that tax rate would be close to 29%. In regards to the ARS’s the best way to think about it is $37 million in interest rate somewhere in the neighborhood of 3% to 5% depending on how the index moves up and down.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from Sharon Zackfia - William Blair.
Sharon Zackfia - William Blair
Analyst
I wanted to go over your new restaurant productivity because it looks like it’s dampened a little bit along with the comps over the past few quarters and I’m just wondering is that generally mirroring what you’re seeing with comps in regions that are having particular difficulty, can you walk us through what’s happening there.
Jerry Deitchle
Management
That’s really a function of where we’ve opened a restaurant. If you take a look at all of our restaurants that we’ve opened so far this year you have brand new markets, Cincinnati, Louisville, our second restaurant in Orlando, our first restaurant in Indianapolis, a new market Baton Rouge so I think what your seeing there is what we expect to see in brand new markets where we first opened a BJ’s where we see their average weekly sales generally come in indexing 75% to maybe 80% of the average. Then over time as we build consumer awareness trial and usage we would expect those numbers to gradually move closer to the average. I really think that’s what you’re seeing for the most part over the last couple of quarters. We do have a handful of restaurants that have not hit the comp base yet. Stockton, PalmDale, a handful of them that are probably in the Central California, Inland Empire area that might be seeing a slight decrease as well reflecting general economic conditions.
Greg Levin
Management
A shift of California openings versus non-California openings.
Jerry Deitchle
Management
That’s really it and that’s and Greg also mentioned at the beginning of our call today that that shifts going to turn as we finish up the rest of the years development we’ve got more California and Texas restaurants coming on board.
Operator
Operator
Your last question comes from Paul Westra – Cowen and Company. Paul Westra – Cowen and Company: I wanted to confirm the occupancy and another line item. Obviously your lapping most of the initiatives than you gave us mid 20% range for the year. Obviously the 100 basis point plus or more in the first half is going to only be modestly increasing going forward the year over year basis.
Greg Levin
Management
That’s correct on a year over year basis because we start to hit that Q3 where we rolled them out. The thing I think was a little bit unexpected here in Q2 is really the energy costs. There was about 40 basis year over year on energy costs about 20 basis sequentially from Q1 to Q2. This thing to what’s going out there with commodities, fuel and so on natural gas seems to be going down but I don’t imagine that that energy costs might stay with a little bit. Paul Westra – Cowen and Company: You mentioned the asset disposals there’s no one time stuff in that number all the asset disposal was put into the broken out line item right?
Greg Levin
Management
There was no, hey we’re doing ‘x, y, and z’ catch up on a bunch of assets or closing or something like that it was things that were implemented during the second quarter.
Operator
Operator
That does conclude our question and answer session. I would like to turn the call back over to our speakers for final remarks.
Jerry Deitchle
Management
Thank you all for being on our extended call today and if we can help you in any other way please call us at our offices here in California.
Operator
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen that does conclude our conference for today thank you for your participation you may now disconnect.