AZO - NYSE
AutoZone, Inc.
AZO·NYSE
$3.06K
+1.1%Consumer CyclicalSpecialty Retail
AutoZone, Inc. retails and distributes automotive replacement parts and accessories. The company offers various products for cars, sport utility vehicles, vans, and light trucks, including new and remanufactured automotive hard parts, maintenance items, accessories, and non-automotive products. Its products include A/C compressors, batteries and accessories, bearings, belts and hoses, calipers, chassis, clutches, CV axles, engines, fuel pumps, fuses, ignition and lighting products, mufflers, radiators, starters and alternators, thermostats, and water pumps, as well as tire repairs. In addition, the company offers maintenance products, such as antifreeze and windshield washer fluids; brake drums, rotors, shoes, and pads; brake and power steering fluids, and oil and fuel additives; oil and transmission fluids; oil, cabin, air, fuel, and transmission filters; oxygen sensors; paints and accessories; refrigerants and accessories; shock absorbers and struts; spark plugs and wires; and windshield wipers. Further, it provides air fresheners, cell phone accessories, drinks and snacks, floor mats and seat covers, interior and exterior accessories, mirrors, performance products, protectants and cleaners, sealants and adhesives, steering wheel covers, stereos and radios, tools, and wash and wax products, as well as towing services. Additionally, the company provides a sales program that offers commercial credit and delivery of parts and other products; sells automotive diagnostic and repair software under the ALLDATA brand through alldata.com and alldatadiy.com; and automotive hard parts, maintenance items, accessories, and non-automotive products through autozone.com. As of November 20, 2021, it operated 6,066 stores in the United States; 666 stores in Mexico; and 53 stores in Brazil. The company was founded in 1979 and is based in Memphis, Tennessee.
At a Glance
Live SnapshotMarket Cap$50.12B
EPS148.8000
P/E Ratio20.58
Earnings Date07/29/2026
Earnings Call Transcript
AZO • 2026 • Q2
Operator
Greetings, and welcome to Auto
Brian Campbell
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-Ks 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 has 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.
Operator
Thank you. With that, I would like to turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Philip Daniele. Sir, the floor is yours. Thank you.
Philip Daniele
Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for Auto
Jamere Jackson
Thanks, Phil. Good morning, everyone. Our operating results remained strong for the quarter and were highlighted by solid top line revenue. Total sales were $4.3 billion and were up 8.1% versus Q2 of last year. Our domestic same store sales grew 3.4%, and our international comp was up 2.5% on a constant currency basis. Total company EBIT was down 1.2%, and our EPS was down 2.3%. As Phil stated earlier, excluding our non-cash $59 million LIFO charge, EBIT would have grown 7.2% and EPS would have been up 7.1%. Foreign exchange rates positively impacted our results for the quarter. For Mexico, the peso strengthened versus last year's Q2 over 12% versus the U.S. dollar, resulting in a $74 million tailwind to sales, a $23 million tailwind to EBIT, and a $0.95 a share benefit to EPS versus the prior year. We continue to be proud of our results as the efforts of our Auto
Operator
And now I will turn it back to Phil.
Philip Daniele
Thank you, Jamere. To wrap up this morning, I want to stress that we are on track for delivering on our objectives for the remainder of fiscal 2026. While we have much more to accomplish this fiscal year, we remain committed to flawless execution and appropriately spending our capital to drive growth and efficiency. We feel we are well positioned to grow both our domestic DIY sales and domestic commercial sales. We also feel that our international same store sales on a constant currency basis will improve, but we remain cautious as the Mexico consumer remains under pressure. We also expect to manage our gross margin effectively while growing our operating expenses in line with our accelerated store opening assumptions. Finally, I want to reiterate that we are putting our capital to work where it will have the biggest impact on sales: our stores, our distribution centers, and investing in technology to build a differentiated and superior customer experience. We will make sure that the capital we deploy produces strong returns. The stores we have opened over the last five years have exceeded the planned sales and earnings we modeled when these sites were approved. The focus areas for FY '26 will remain growing share in our domestic DIY and commercial business and accelerating international top line growth. We do understand that we cannot take things for granted. We must remain laser-focused on customer service, execution, and gaining share in every market in which we operate. We are excited about what we can accomplish over the remainder of the year, and our Auto
Operator
Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting our question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue, and you may press 2 if you would like to remove your question. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star key. And we do ask that you try to limit your questions to two in the interest of time. One moment, please. Thank you. Our first question today is coming from Bret Jordan with Jefferies. Hey. Good morning, guys. Good morning. Good morning, Bret. Could you talk a bit more about your same SKU inflation
Bret Jordan
expectation? I think you said it would be with you mid-single-digit going forward, so maybe the rest of the fiscal year. But when you think about the second half of the calendar year, do you anticipate continued same SKU price benefit?
Philip Daniele
Yeah. We believe that it will continue to increase over the third quarter and through most of the fourth quarter, and then the fourth quarter is when we will start annualizing those higher rates from last year. But we still see same SKU inflation, you know, kind of similar through third, and maybe slightly tailing off through, you know, the back half of what you said, calendar year. Which would be most of our fiscal year, which ends in, you know, late August, as you know.
Jamere Jackson
Yeah. I think a couple of drivers there, Bret, is, you know, there are, you know, lots of discussion about what is going to happen with tariffs and, you know, obviously, the IEPA tariffs have been stayed at this point. That was a relatively small portion of our tariff bill, if you will. Most of our tariffs are the 232 tariffs. So we are still expecting to see tariff impact as we move through the back half of the year. I think the other dynamic is that, you know, we have talked about this notion of having, you know, a multipronged strategy here where we would, you know, continue to negotiate with our vendors, we diversify our sources, and then in some cases, we will raise our retails. All of the costs that we have seen so far from tariffs have not made its way through the system, which is why, as Phil mentioned, you know, we are expecting tickets to continue to be elevated through the third and the fourth quarters. Just wanted to give a little bit of color on why that expectation is where it is.
Bret Jordan
Okay. Great. And I guess early days here, but a lot of talk about expectations around tax refunds this year. Are you seeing any signs of incremental traction and, I guess, sort of a similar theme, the weather that we have seen here in the last six or eight weeks, I guess what is your near-term outlook on demand creation from that would sort of seem like undercar, some of the seasonal categories might see some benefit?
Philip Daniele
Yeah. I think if you kind of look across the Midwest, the, you know, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Northeast, what we have kind of affectionately called the Rust Belt markets for us. This type of weather that we have had in those markets for winter have always indicated a pretty strong category performance on those markets as you move through spring and summer selling season. So exactly those categories you talked about. Undercar will probably have some improved sales in those markets. Chassis, steering, suspension, anything that is open to the bottom of the car to get rust and salt on it. Those are going to drive maintenance and failure events over the summertime. So we are pretty encouraged by that. Tax refunds, I mean, it is, as you said, early on. That tax season is just now beginning. And, you know, as has been stated in the news, we expect those to be slightly bigger, based on no tax on tips and all that sort of stuff that has been talked about pretty widely in the news. So we think that also bodes pretty well for us through the early part of spring and into early summer.
Bret Jordan
Great. Thank you very much.
Operator
Thank you. Thank you. Our next question is coming from Christopher Horvers with JPMorgan. Your line is live. Thanks. Good morning, guys. So
Christopher Horvers
wanted to follow up a bit on Bret's question. So first, distilling through all the noise of the puts and takes of weather, both good and bad, including, you know, that widespread hit in late January and early February, what do you think the right underlying run rate of your domestic businesses is? And can you also talk about that on the commercial side? I think, you know, people are pretty attuned to the deceleration below 10% on a total DIFM basis.
Philip Daniele
Yeah. And, you know, as I talked about in our prepared remarks, you know, we were kind of running on the previous 10 weeks or so in the quarter. We were up in that 12% range. And then those last two weeks of the quarter were pretty substantially lower, at a 1% comp. So, you know, the quarter was kind of running along at that better-than-double-digit number, and then the last two weeks were pretty significantly impacted. And, again, it was a pretty wide area that stores got impacted going all the way from Dallas, Little Rock, Oklahoma City, all the way across, you know, here in Memphis, Nashville, Louisville, all the way to D.C. had a pretty big impact, pretty significant ice, you know, initially during that time frame. And as you went a little further south, you ended up, you know, I will give you an anecdotal example, most of the schools in Tennessee and Arkansas were shut down for two weeks. I mean, people were pretty much locked in their house for a time frame. So that was a temporary impact. It was late in the quarter to recover it, but, you know, we see nothing that indicates that we are not going to have pretty strong sales growth on the commercial side of the business.
Jamere Jackson
Going forward. Yeah. I mean, you think about it, or think about it. You know, the first quarter results, we expected our second quarter to perform pretty similarly. Excluding sort of the severe weather and the prolonged impacts on both our DIY and commercial business, we would have, you know, printed a number in the second quarter very, very similar to that. I think what is important to us is that our DIY business continues to remain resilient, and our commercial business has sort of snapped back. So the results that we saw in the first quarter, you know, we see us performing somewhere in that
Christopher Horvers
And then, you know, Phil, to your previous comments about typical lag of a benefit to the business off a cold and snowy winter. As you think about that benefit, historically, does the business accelerate from that recent trend because of that? And as you think about sequential growth of inflation into the third quarter here, what would hold back the business from not accelerating from what sounds like something in the 4% baseline? Thank you.
Philip Daniele
Yeah. I do not, again, I think the tailwinds that you get from the tougher winter weather in those markets that are impacted, we believe those would be a net positive in the go forward. Now as we move through summer, there is, you know, the other side of the weather equation that we have to have is a normal to hot summer, which we are expecting to have at least a normal summer at this point. So I think all of those are benefits. And, you know, as we said, we expect a slightly larger tax refund season. It will be, we will have to wait and see how that ultimately pans out, but I think those are positive trends for us as we move forward.
Christopher Horvers
Thanks so much. Have a great spring.
Jamere Jackson
Thank you.
Operator
Is coming from Steven
Steven Zaccone
pricing on a different way. When we get to peak pricing, how do you think about elasticity of transactions? On the other side? The industry does not typically see deflation, but just help us under your expectations for elasticity of transactions once pricing growth starts to moderate.
Philip Daniele
Yeah. I think we kind of think about the business in three different discrete buckets of types of product. You have got, you know, discretionary product. That business has been pretty tough, although it is slightly better than it has been over, since the pandemic, frankly. Slightly better. But those are probably the more elastic or inelastic categories. Maintenance has a tendency to, sometime be in a higher elevated average ticket growth. You will get some delayed maintenance. Typically, the customer understands that if I delay maintenance, I end up with a failure going forward. And if the part is a failure mode, ultimately, you have to replace it. So there is not a whole lot of, it is break-fix. And that has not really changed over a very, very long period of time. So discretionary gets impacted the most. We would expect, you know, as you get further out from inflationary items in the average ticket, that that business probably recovers a little bit. It is a relatively small percentage of our total overall volume. Most of our business is break-fix, failure, and maintenance business, and those will continue to be pretty strong for us, we believe.
Steven Zaccone
Okay. Thanks for that. My follow-up question on the topic of investments in general. You have been on this journey to increase your hub count, grow SG&A spending. How would you assess where we are in the investment cycle? What inning are we in? How do we think about the pace of some of these investments as we go through the next couple of quarters?
Jamere Jackson
I would say we are in the middle innings. You know, one of the things we highlighted was that we expect to, by FY '28, to grow our domestic store count by 300 stores a year. And, you know, we are going to continue to ramp there. That means an incremental 40 to 50 stores next year, and then the following fiscal year. So we are kind of in the middle innings of that ramp. What I will say is that our pipeline is very strong, and the stores are ahead of our pro forma in terms of our performance. So we like the, you know, we like the progress that we have made. We like the sales growth that we are seeing. We like the market share gains that we are getting from that. It has put some pressure on our SG&A as we have been very transparent about, probably to the tune of 1.5 to 2 points. But, you know, we are managing the rest of the SG&A in a very disciplined way. So, you know, as we move through, you know, I expect this to result in a, you know, a faster-growing top line business and a faster-growing EBIT business as a result of it.
Operator
Understood. Thanks for the detail.
Jamere Jackson
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is coming from
Zachary Fadem
Hey. Good morning. First, to clarify, it sounds like weather was about a 1 to 1.5 hit to comp in Q2. Just want to make sure that is right. And then second, when you look at DIY traffic or volumes down about 3.5%, similar in Q1 and Q2, how much of this would you categorize as deferred maintenance? And how should we think about the path and time frame towards getting those volumes back?
Philip Daniele
Yeah. Great. So I think your estimation on what the impact was is kind of right on target of how it impacted the very end of our Q2. As far as, you know, deferred maintenance and that sort of thing, it is always a little bit hard to tell. But we feel like those will accelerate coming into the second half of our year. You know, on the backs of, like we have already said, some of this tax time should, generally speaking, when you get more tax money, or money in the marketplace, customer will reinvest in the car, and they will tackle some of those bigger failure projects. And we believe that that is going to continue into the second half of the year.
Zachary Fadem
Got it. And then, Jamere, it sounds like the SG&A spend is peaking to some extent and should moderate a touch from here. And I think we do, at this point, all have a good sense of what that level spend will be, both in terms of investing in SG&A in new stores. But perhaps you could spend some time talking about the size of the prize in terms of expected returns and payback on these investments? And is it fair to say we would see outsized top line and EBIT growth as soon as 2027.
Jamere Jackson
Yeah. That is certainly our expectation that you will start to see these stores mature and that you will see our top line growth accelerate in FY 2027 and FY 2028. So in terms of size of the prize, you know, in addition to seeing a faster-growing business, you know, you are also going to see a business that has very healthy, you know, returns on invested capital. You know, we model these stores in a very disciplined way even though we are very conservative. And they get to sort of the targeted returns on invested capital in a very, very short period of time. I mean, most of these stores will mature in the four- to five-year kind of time frame. What I will suggest is that Mega Hubs have been, you know, improving their performance over time and are actually doing better, significantly better than what we had modeled. So we feel pretty good about it. And, again, we are very disciplined on making sure that we are driving the returns on invested capital associated with this strategy. And so you will have a faster-growing business, you know, that has, you know, faster-growing EBIT growth as a result of that. But very good returns on invested capital.
Zachary Fadem
Thanks for the time.
Operator
Great. Thank you. Our next question is coming from Simeon Gutman with Morgan Stanley. Your line is live.
Simeon Gutman
Good morning, everyone. My question is morning. There was a comment made in the prepared remarks, growing market share in a disciplined manner. There has been talk about growing EBIT faster. Can you phrase it in terms of margins? Can the margins of the business re-expand? Or should we think about it in terms of EBIT dollar growth?
Philip Daniele
Yes. Good question. I will say, you know, we kind of think about how we manage margin rate on the two sides of the business. What I would say is I think we can incrementally grow both of them. You know, you start at the highest level of margin, gross margin rate, both on DIY, we have slight margin improvement, and we think we can improve gross margin in the commercial side of the business over time as well. Now we still believe that we are going to grow commercial faster than DIY, so you will end up with some margin mix pressure. But we are okay with that because at the end of the day, that commercial business throws off a pretty good amount of operating profit and EBIT. So there will be a little bit of top line margin pressure because of mix, but overall, to Jamere's point, we will have a faster-growing EBIT business as these stores mature and as we move forward. We believe we are growing share on both DIY and commercial, and in our international markets. So all of those are, we believe, very, very healthy for us.
Jamere Jackson
Yeah. I mean, if you think about, you know, the way that we have sort of managed the business historically, I mean, in that 18% to 19% sort of operating margin range, we will operate the business in that
Simeon Gutman
And I guess to zoom in on the mechanics of that, I realized you do not give a lot of guidance points, but the comp rate of this business that was prevailing that you should grow faster from, is it fair that 3% to 4% is the baseline that you are hoping to grow faster than? I know you have not endorsed a specific number. I do not know if that is a fair baseline to think you are going to grow faster than. It does sound like it is the SG&A tapering will enable EBIT to grow faster, given what Phil said around the margin pressure of mix coming from commercial?
Jamere Jackson
Well, I think you have two dynamics, Simeon. One is, you know, we are clearly adding more stores at a faster clip. As those stores mature, you are going to see that, you know, have some lift to the comp rate overall. So that is, you know, part of the calculus there. And then from an SG&A standpoint, I mean, we will be back to, you know, managing SG&A where we have historically. So, you know, that is what gives us the confidence that, you know, even with a faster-growing commercial business, which is, you know, part of that equation for a faster comp rate, you know, we can keep the operating margins, you know, close to where they have been historically.
Operator
Our next question is coming from Michael Lasser with UBS. Your line is live.
Michael Lasser
Good morning. Thank you so much for taking my question. Given the slowdown in the commercial business attributed to the weather, do not these jobs still get done? And would not that imply the commercial business should have accelerated as meaningfully as the weather improved and if not, does that suggest anything about where Auto
Philip Daniele
No. Michael. I do not think so. I think the impact of the slowing at the end of our quarter was just literally that at the very end of our quarter. Those shops were closed for the most part and did not open. And it was, again, right at the very end of the quarter. We have seen a pretty nice snapback. We are very early in our quarter of Q3. I think what has been true over time is we continue to gain share on the commercial side of the business on the backs of our strategies. Putting more assortment closer to the customer through megs and Mega Hubs and hubs, continually improving our same, our satellite store assortments, and working on strategies that make us easier to do business with and getting those hard-to-find parts faster to those customer shops. We think we are executing very well at that. And we think we have a strategy that will continue to only get better, which is, as we drop these hubs and Mega Hubs, we continue to gain market share, and they also help the satellite stores perform better on commercial. Oh, by the way, we do not talk much about it, but those same Mega Hubs and hubs put that same product closer to the DIY customer as well. So we think we gain over that. Again, I think the impact in the last four weeks was just that. And you will see that we have seen that business recover already. As those shops opened up, we think over time, we continue to move up the call list. Again, we are gaining with both new customers and share of wallet in what we call up and down the street, and in traditionals and national accounts. So we are gaining in all of those segments, and we like how healthy that commercial business is.
Michael Lasser
Thank you for that. My follow-up question is there was anything unique about the operating expense performance in the second quarter, meaning maybe you anticipated this slowdown in sales, so you pulled back on some operating expenses, such that it is going to significantly accelerate from here. And as part of that, if you do see this potential improvement in comps over the next couple of quarters given all the factors that have been discussed today, would you lean in and accelerate some of your investments such that operating expense growth will revert back to this high double-digit rate that was experienced last quarter? Thank you so much.
Jamere Jackson
Yeah. We do not expect to go back to double-digit rates over the back half of the year. Again, the big driver there is we are starting to annualize the accelerated store growth that we had in the back half of last year. So we naturally would have expected the year-over-year growth from an SG&A standpoint to moderate some in the back half. And in terms of the past quarter, there was nothing that we, you know, did that was different from the way that we have always operated the business. We have always sort of, you know, monitored, you know, the way that we manage our payroll with, you know, what we see in terms of transactions. And, obviously, with the severe weather, we had some store closures for, you know, several days, and we had, you know, reduced hours in some instances and fewer transactions. So we just managed the payroll with discipline, but we did not do anything that was outside of the way that we normally operate the business. And then as, you know, as our comps, you know, continue to accelerate, we make sure that we have got the right level of payroll in, and we, you know, continue to manage the business so that we are providing Wow customer service. So we did not toggle anything in terms of investments, and we are not going to toggle any of the investment cadence in the back half of the year.
Philip Daniele
And most of these investments that we are talking about, particularly store growth and DCs, and I would say most of the distribution and supply chain investments, we are over the majority of those, you know, the DC openings and that sort of stuff. But the stores, it is hard to accelerate a store. They are going to open when they are going to open. We, you know, we put the staffs in, get those folks trained before those stores opening. It is hard to move them forward by, you know, 60 days or 90 days just because of the construction schedule. So we will continue to monitor that. But I think what was notable about Q2 is as we had some changes in our individual week-on-week comps, our operators are really good at being able to manage that business based on the flow of customers. That discipline, we are very good at it. We have been good at it for a long time, and we continue to be good at it. We do not expect that to change.
Operator
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question is coming from Scott Ciccarelli with Truist. Your line is live.
Scott Ciccarelli
Good morning, guys. Two questions. Morning, Scott. First, still a little bit confused on the cadence differences between DIY and commercial. Like, why was DIY's low point the middle four weeks, if I wrote that down right? And commercial's low point was the last four weeks? And then secondly, as you guys continue to expand Mega Hubs, your Mega Hub strategy and get more experience there, can you help quantify the sales lift you are seeing in stores in a market where you open a Mega Hub? Thanks.
Philip Daniele
Yeah. Sure. We will talk a little bit about—let me answer the first question. On the cadence of DIY versus commercial. The middle part of the middle segment of Q2 last year, you had a pretty significant cold weather event in that middle segment. So it created a tougher comp for those four weeks. Last year, you had some pretty extreme cold, which drove a lot of battery sales and cold weather product last year. So that created a bit of a comp differential this year. That cold weather did not happen in the middle four-week segment. It happened in the last four-week segment. Now the mix of those two—so even though the commercial business was a little bit stronger in that second four-week segment, and we capitalized on that. DIY was soft. Commercial was better. The last four-week segment got the cold weather event which helped DIY, but it hurt the commercial business because we had shops that were closed for so long. So I would say we performed kind of as you would expect from a two-year comp basis. But that specific cold weather comp in the Midwest and the Northeast last year created a comp challenge for us, which was slightly negative on DIY.
Scott Ciccarelli
Got it. And then the question on the Mega Hub, just kind of what kind of halo effect are you guys seeing when you guys open a Mega Hub? And has that changed as you guys continue to expand that strategy? Thank you.
Philip Daniele
Well, yeah, we have never really quantified how much we think those things lift in total. Well, I will tell you this. We have been opening and working on our strategies for hubs and Mega Hubs for quite some time now. And, you know, going back several years, I could go back and tell you we thought we knew how high was high back eight to ten years ago with our strategies. We continue to perform different strategies and execution of tactics around how we deploy inventory to those stores, how we energize the inventory in a given market. You have heard us talk about doing density tests with more Mega Hubs in metro areas. And we continue to optimize and figure out way more ways to make those stores more productive for us. Specifically for commercial, but also on DIY. And we have yet to say we have reached peak performance at our hubs and Mega Hubs. So we like how they perform. They help us, again, on the commercial side, those hard-to-find parts. They help us, our per store four-wall performance, which is how we look at those hubs and Mega Hubs, continues to improve, and they continue to give a halo for the entire satellite network around them that they service. So we like the Mega Hubs and hubs, which is why you hear us keep taking those numbers up. You know, from several years ago from 40 to 100 stores, to 150, to 200, and now we believe we will have more than 300 at full build-out.
Scott Ciccarelli
Got it. Thanks, guys.
Philip Daniele
Those are great performing assets for us. Thank you for the question.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is coming from Steven Forbes with Guggenheim. Your line is live.
Steven Forbes
Good morning, Phil, Jamere. Maybe just a follow-up question on the domestic comp average ticket trends or, I guess, same SKU inflation trends versus the DIY. What explains the difference in the quarter with DIY being six and DIFM being sub five? I guess, specifically, just trying to figure out if there are any pockets of competitive pricing pressure or if it is sort of mix-oriented as it pertains to national versus up and down the street.
Philip Daniele
Yeah. It is almost all category mix. You know, in the winter events and things of that nature, it drives battery sales, starters, alternators, etcetera. It is the difference in category mix between the two channels. And even the category mix that you get in terms of timing of year, if that makes sense. So that is really what drives that.
Steven Forbes
That is good to hear. And then just a follow-up on DIFM comp transactions. I do not know if you could specifically state what it was during the second quarter. It looks around two, maybe slightly over 2%. And more specifically, like, what was the difference between the first eight weeks from a DIFM comp transaction base versus those latter, those last four weeks?
Philip Daniele
Yeah. The last four weeks, I mean, it was literally the last two weeks that drove the vast majority of the change, was the closings of stores and closings of commercial accounts. Many of them were closed for more than two weeks. And, you know, we kind of had a rolling 400 stores, if you will, starting in kind of west as that storm moved across from Texas all the way to D.C. It was kind of a rolling 200 to 400 stores depending on the day that were closed. And then those commercial accounts stayed closed much longer than that. So that was really what drove that change. Again, 10 weeks of the quarter in commercial were, you know, plus 12 or better. Those last two weeks were a 1. And I would tell you that, you know, later in even the last couple of days, that started to recover the quarter, and it has been back to normal as we would have expected in the very early goings of what is our Q3.
Steven Forbes
So I guess just to clarify that, if we look at the last sort of the last 12 months before this quarter, domestic traffic comps were sort of 6% or so, 6%, 7%. That is the right way to think about the business on a go-forward basis? There is nothing that sort of changes the view on the building blocks and comp to get to that sort of 4-plus percent domestic comp profile?
Philip Daniele
Yeah, I think you are thinking about that right.
Steven Forbes
Yes.
Operator
Thank you.
Philip Daniele
Thank you.
Steven Forbes
Okay. Well,
Philip Daniele
as we conclude the call, I want to take a moment to reiterate that we believe that our industry remains strong and our strategies for growth are working. We are excited about our growth prospects for the back half of the year, but we will take nothing for granted as we understand that our customers have alternatives. We have exciting plans that will help us succeed in the future, but I want to stress that this is a marathon and not a sprint. We remain focused on delivering flawless execution and striving to optimize shareholder value for the future. We are confident Auto
Transcript from March 3, 2026
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