Julia Stewart
Analyst · Peter Saleh of Telsey Advisory Group
So I think the right way to say it, from a what we said to you last quarter, was that we felt that franchisees could price with inflation. Certainly at Applebee's continue to believe that. No reason not to. And at IHOP, we've seen -- and by the way, that inflation for Applebee's, well I think we said -- the beginning of the year, we said was somewhere around 4% or 5% inflation. And we said that at the beginning of the year, that's for 2012. There's a lot of confidence that franchisees can price with inflation. And if you recall, we said IHOP could be slightly up. I think we said flat to 1% at the beginning of the year, and that's looking like the case. Now the drought in the last couple of weeks, who knows? I mean, I can't predict the future, but it concerns everybody. What's interesting is in addition to that reality, if you think about it, when we made the acquisition in late 2007, there were 56 distribution centers in the domestic U.S. Today, we've gotten down to 36 and the goal is to be at 29 by the end of the year, every time you consolidate a distribution center, that puts real money in the pockets of franchisees who have that consolidation. So we're hoping that some of this consolidation of DCs offsets anything that may happen. But pricing, absolutely on the Applebee's side, more problematic on the IHOP side. But the good news is, they're reversing their trend. Last year, IHOP had a higher forecast for increases. This year, it's more flat. So the good news is, they shouldn't have to price right now, unless there's something dramatic that comes of this drought that I just -- I can't predict.