Dan Florness
Chief Financial Officer
We are not saying we’re not. What we’re saying is, if our growth, like I said, in part of my commentary it was, the focus, the spotlight of every question that comes in is about gross margin here, here or there. And we are not going to jump out the window. If we report a quarter with 51 or 50.9 or 51.1 gross margin, we are seeing a tremendous amount of growth in our business right now, from non-fasteners, we are seeing improvements in fasteners, we see great trends in fasteners, but the year over numbers are what they are and it’s disproportionate to large account business. If the small customer was growing as fast with us and we had that that mix in our numbers, we are being challenged by mix in a massive way, all these things that are under the hood that we talked about, the vending -- improvements in vending gross margin, the improvements in our sourcing, the things we do everyday, the improvements over the years in our freight, all these things are structural changes we are making to combat the massive change in customer and product mix that occur in our business. When I joined Fastenal in 1996, 4% of our business was national account, today its 44%. If I add large reasonable accounts more than 50% of our business today is a large multi-location customer. When I joined Fastenal in 1996, I think at that time fasteners were about 80%, 85% of our business, today they dropped in half to low 40s, but during that timeframe, we've managed all the structural components within the respective product categories and end market categories and we’ve basically had a gross margin that has been unchanged. There has been periods of turmoil, but, yes, you have a business that goes from $220 million a year to $3.5 billion a year in 17 years that comes to the [third-party].