Sandy Douglas
Analyst · CL King.
Hi Andy, the way I describe the supply chain environment is that it's improving, and it's somewhat gradual. We talked a little bit about staffing being the best it has been since the beginning of the last fiscal year. In fact, our supply chain vacancy rate is down to 6%, which is almost fully staffed. We saw marginal improvement infill rates in the quarter, sequential from Q4 by about 1.5% year-over-year, about 4%. So, I would say we're seeing improvement in stabilization, which has allowed us to activate the kind of supply chain program that you'd expect around improvement, process normalization, training, tactical use of technology and then more strategic use of automation. And that's why we're confident that with all those actions, we should see an improvement in our operating rates as we go forward, expense rates and continue to see improvements in our service to our customers. And it just bears remembering, in the first quarter of last year, which we're comparing to in this quarter, there was a lot of distress in the supply chain, which got even worse than the second quarter. So, we've taken a lot of action around people and recruitment and staffing. Our first priority was making sure that we were serving our customers in a stable way and in a reliable way. And I would say we've made some improvements. But I think collectively, our team and I, working with our suppliers believe, we have a very long way to go and a rich opportunity to improve going forward. Regarding promotions, we -- what we're seeing in this environment is private label brands, our own brand program performed very strongly in the first quarter, and we outgrew private brands in the broader market. We've added some brand and commercial talent to the private brands group. And we have made it a significant priority to make that program significantly more competitive and to sustain that kind of outperforming growth rate. Where all that comes back to our suppliers is through their strategies and our efforts to make customer opportunity more visible to them, we do expect promotions to improve sequentially. We hear that, that's in many of their plans, and we're continuing to want to make sure that they can see a good return from those investments because in the end, unit declines, which equal brand occasions is not good for their business over a sustainable basis. And so we want to work really hard to attract that investment, and we expect it to improve going forward.