Operator
Operator
Welcome to the fourth quarter earnings release conference call. (Operator Instructions) Mr. Tom McFall, you may begin your conference.
O'Reilly Automotive, Inc. (ORLY)
Q4 2008 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 19, 2009
$91.57
-0.83%
Same-Day
-0.46%
1 Week
+0.00%
1 Month
+2.74%
vs S&P
-2.43%
Operator
Operator
Welcome to the fourth quarter earnings release conference call. (Operator Instructions) Mr. Tom McFall, you may begin your conference.
Thomas McFall
Management
Welcome to the O’Reilly fourth quarter 2008 conference call. Before I introduce Greg Henslee our CEO, I’d like to read a brief statement. The company claims the protection of the Safe Harbor for forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements can be identified by forward-looking words such as expect, believe, anticipate, should, plan, intend, estimate, project, will or similar words. In addition, statements contained within this press release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. Such as statements discussing among other things expected growth, store development and expansion strategies, business strategies, future revenues and future performance. These forward-looking statements are based on estimates, projections, beliefs and assumptions that are not guarantees of future events and results. Such statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions including but not limited to competition, product demand, the market for auto parts, the economy in general, inflation, consumer debt levels, governmental approvals, our ability to hire and retain qualified employees, risks associated with the integration of acquired businesses, weather, Paris activities, war and the threat of war. Actual results may materially differ from anticipated results described or implied in these forward-looking statements. Please refer to the risk factors section of the company’s Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2007 for more details. At this time, I’d like to introduce Greg Henslee.
Gregory Henslee
Management
Welcome to our fourth quarter conference call. Participating on the call with me this morning is, of course, Tom McFall, our Chief Financial Officer, and Ted Wise, our Chief Operating Officer, and David O’Reilly, our Executive Chairman is also present. I’d like to start off by once again thanking our management team and all O’Reilly team members for their continued focus on providing the highest levels of customer service in each of our stores that lead to our strong fourth quarter results. The core O’Reilly stores performed exceptionally well throughout the quarter finishing with comparable store sales of 6.2%, which is just outstanding, especially considering the strong performance we saw in some of our more mature regions. I’d also like to thank our newest team members who joined team O’Reilly as part of our CSK acquisition. Several of you have seen your store completely transformed into an O’Reilly store with all new merchandise and inventory coverage, five night a week inventory replenishment, multiple drops a day from your servicing distribution center, and more competitive pricing, as well as a whole new set of tools with which to peruse the commercial business. I want to thank all of our new team members for the commitment you’re making to the success of our company. We’re very much looking forward to the acceleration of this transition and are very proud that you are members of team O’Reilly and of our performance to this point. At a more macro level, it's clear to me that the lower fuel costs, as well as the decrease in new car sales as a result of many consumers making the decision to keep and drive a car that may have been a trading candidate in better economic times, has resulted in many of our customers deciding to perform…
Ted Wise
Management
I would like to begin by summarizing our store expansion in the core O’Reilly stores for the fourth quarter in for 2008. We installed 27 new stores in the last quarter bringing us to 150 new stores for the year resulting in a total of 3,285 stores. We adjusted our growth back from a projection of 200 stores at the beginning of the year to 150 stores at the announcement of the CSK merger, which allowed our store installation department to begin the Checker store conversions in the fall. In addition to the 27 new stores last quarter, we also moved 11 stores to new locations and renovated two stores. For the entire year, we moved 33 stores to new locations and renovated 66 stores. We also installed the store interior upgrade program in 177 stores, which completed the store image upgrade program we began back in '07. I also might mention that in addition to the CSK merger, we purchased six independent stores or 4% of our new store total growth. In regard to the expansion by market area, the fourth quarter growth included 17 different states, with North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin and Louisiana leading with three stores each. For the year, our expansion reached into 25 different states with Texas once again leading with 23 new stores. Other key growth states were Georgia with 16, Ohio with 14, Indiana with 12, Wisconsin with 10 and North Carolina and Minnesota both with nine new stores. As announced, we have another 150 new stores planned for 2009, and at this point, it looks like 60 of them will be installed by the end of this first quarter. In addition, we have four store relocations scheduled during the quarter. In the distribution area, we opened up our 15th distribution center in…
Thomas McFall
Management
I’d like to take a second to thank our finance teams in both Springfield and Phoenix. Your dedication through weekends and late nights to complete our first year end consolidated close is a great example of the O’Reilly culture. Now I’ll move on to the numbers. For clarification, stores converted from the CSK brands to the O’Reilly brand are included as CSK store sales prior to the conversion and in O’Reilly sales after the conversion. For the calculation of comparable store sales, we used the same methodology with stores included in the CSK comp base before conversion and included in the O’Reilly comps on the second day the stores reopened to insure the first day included in comps is a full day of business. With that said, sales increased 84% to $1.1 billion for the quarter. The increase was driven by a 13% increase in O’Reilly stores and sales of $433 million at the acquired, yet to be converted CSK stores. For the quarter, comparable store sales for the stores opened greater than 12 months increased 6.2% at O’Reilly stores and increased 0.8% at the CSK stores. On a consolidated basis, comparable store sales for the quarter increased 4.0%. Two thousand and eight full year sales increased 42% to $3.6 billion. This increase was driven by a 9% increase in O’Reilly stores and sales of $832 million at the acquired yet to be converted CSK stores. Two thousand and eight comparable store sales for stores open greater than 12 months increased 2.6% for O’Reilly stores and decreased 1.7% at the CSK stores since the acquisition on July 11. On a consolidated basis, comparable store sales for the year increased 1.5%. Gross profit was 46.2% of sales for the quarter versus 44.7% in the prior year. The improvement was driven primarily…
Operator
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Alan Rifkin – BAS-ML. Alan Rifkin – BAS-ML: I appreciate all of the clarity on CSK. I just have a couple of questions. Is there any reason to believe that the remainder of the stores to be converted in 2009 won’t possibly take the similar path of the stores that you’ve converted in the last 16 weeks with respect to the comp breakdown that you gave us by weeks?
Gregory Henslee
Management
The only unknown, Alan, of course is just the economy in general. We’re going to be doing all we can on this end to make sure that the stores perform as the stores that we’ve converted have performed. And, as you said, we have every expectation that we would continue to see the performance that we have had with the converted stores. Again, with the economy like it is, it’s hard to be real aggressive in comparable store sales guidance with the overhang of unemployment and just the economy in general. Alan Rifkin – BAS-ML: But putting the macro aside, of course, Greg, which none of us really know what’s going to happen, with respect to the stores that have been converted so far, there really isn’t anything unusual about that group of stores in terms of their performance being particularly poor before the conversions. Is that correct?
Gregory Henslee
Management
That’s correct. One thing to consider is many of these stores that we have converted to this point are in markets where there are O’Reilly stores already and they are being serviced by the O’Reilly distribution center and the O’Reilly brand is established and recognized. And some of the stores that will convert starting here in the next couple of weeks are stores in the Chicago area where the O’Reilly brand isn’t recognized, so we’ll a little bit of a new challenge there. I guess our success with those conversions is yet to be seen, but we have every reason to believe that we’ll have similar success in those stores. But, again, there is a little bit of a branding issue there that we have not had the opportunity to establish the O’Reilly brand in Chicago and Detroit as we have in some of the other markets.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from Anthony Cristello – BB&T Capital Markets Anthony Cristello – BB&T Capital Markets: Question is when you look at resources that you allocate to the conversion of CSK, but yet simultaneously allocating resources to Greensboro and opening up 150 stores you run pretty lean, can you just talk about how you manage that process? And I’m assuming with the bulk of the conversion for CSK the west coast starting the second half, will the store openings be more first half weighted as well?
Thomas McFall
Management
No they should be spread pretty evenly throughout the year. The way we do this, Tony, is we have teams that go out and set up and do the conversions. For the conversions in particularly, we have used an outside company that provides us some help in resetting the fixtures and setting up our display planograms and so forth. And then we have manufacturer help in setting the backroom inventory and just a lot of the handling that has to take place in lifting and placing the inventory and so forth. Then separately we have our new store teams that continue to operate as they have operated in our new stores expansions. It’s certainly a challenge and our company, obviously, has more going on from an expansion standpoint than ever in our history. Probably the most challenging part of this will be the setup of the distribution centers that have to be accomplished with the Greensboro opening. We’re moving a distribution center in Kansas City to a larger location that will allow us to continue to grow up there and then the four distribution centers that we’re opening out west, but that will be the most challenging part. But we feel like we’ve got the teams lined up that can do that. We have help from an outside vendor that helps us with the material handling equipment in the distribution centers and the set up of the storage facility in general. We’ve got a good plan in place to accomplish that. Anthony Cristello – BB&T Capital Markets: Okay. So simultaneously you run lean anyway, but it doesn’t seem like it’s a problem in general?
Thomas McFall
Management
It’s real hard work. There are a lot of people that are just putting in touch weeks, back-to-back-to-back to get this done and we ran lean, as you know, for a long time. But we have figured out that we can do it and we’ve got teams in place that are accomplishing it one week after the other and we don’t see a problem in completing this at the pace we are on right now.
Operator
Operator
Your next question is from Scot Ciccarelli – RBC Capital Markets Scot Ciccarelli – RBC Capital Markets: I apologize if you guys had mentioned this, but obviously when you convert one of the CSK stores to an O’Reilly format, you’ve seen big comp gains. Did you guys break out whether it was from DIY or from commercial or is it a combination of both?
Thomas McFall
Management
Well, it’s a combination of both. Our commercial business comes on a little quicker right off the bat than our retail business does typically because we are able to go out and gain that business, whereas you’ve got to wait for the retail customers to come to you through your advertising and marketing efforts and so forth. That’s kind of the case across the board for us as we open a new location. Scot Ciccarelli – RBC Capital Markets: So after just sixteen weeks, it’s probably fair to assume the bulk of that is because of the incremental commercial business.
Thomas McFall
Management
Yes. That’s part of it. Then on the retail side, of course, in many of the markets that we have converted stores it’s the dead of winter up there and that’s obviously not a great retail time anyway. That’s a contributor, too, and maybe some of the commercial success over the DIY success.
Operator
Operator
Your next question is from Scott Stember – Sidoti. Scott Stember – Sidoti & Company: Can you talk about throughout the month trends, particularly interested around the Christmas time, if you saw any delay in trends with your customers?
Thomas McFall
Management
The quarter in general was pretty solid throughout the quarter. We came out of the third quarter on a decent pace. It did accelerate a little through the quarter. December was the best month of the quarter. We had pretty easy comparisons to December of last year because December 2007 was very soft, but December was the strongest month of the quarter. Scott Stember – Sidoti & Company: As far as wholesale versus retail, we’re hearing anecdotal evidence of the commercial side is doing better when some of the other companies recovered. Can you confirm that for the quarter?
Thomas McFall
Management
Well for core O’Reilly, they ran very close. The core O’Reilly stores in whole, as we said, ran at 6.2% comp and both retail and commercial performed very well and both were right at that level. At the CSK stores, the commercial comp substantially better than the retail comp.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes is Dan Wewer –Raymond James Dan Wewer –Raymond James: Greg, I was trying to make a guesstimate of the profit flow through from the mid-teen sales increase you’re seeing in the converted stores. Could you talk about how the cost structure in those stores is changing and how you see that profit flow through looking like? And then there’s a follow-up question before he cuts me off, could you talk about how that change in the pricing strategy in the converted stores is impacting their gross margin rate?
Gregory Henslee
Management
Well, just from a profit standpoint in the CSK stores, the things that we’re doing are, as these leases come close to coming up we’re trying to negotiate more market appropriate leases for today’s real estate environment. So we work on that ongoing as a means to bring the cost of the CSK stores down. We’ve also implemented our process of evaluating the staffing needed at the stores to run both the commercial and the retail sides of the business and, are very analytical when it comes to the payroll that we allocate based on the sales potential and that’s underway. As far as the profit flow through, Tom, you might be able to speak better to than I relative to what actually is to P&L.
Thomas McFall
Management
When we look at converting these stores, in general CSK had not staffed their stores to grow the business and we have to have people there that can go call on customers and wait on customers to grow the business, and in addition to that having better commercial presence. So, initially there’s investment for these stores to convert them to the dual market strategy, so we are not seeing a big change in their profitability. We need to continue to grow the business and grow the commercial business to get the leverage we’re looking for.
Gregory Henslee
Management
And then, Dan, before we finish the second part of your question was relative to the pricing and the affect on those stores. The pricing adjustments that we’ve made have been generally about a 2% to 4% decrease in pricing across the board. That’s mostly offset by the benefit that we have as buying as a larger company, but it has some affect because in many cases we have not changed the product lines and don’t have full benefit of that yet. So right now it has some affect. To quantify it, I don’t know if you have quantification of that, Tom.
Thomas McFall
Management
It’s difficult to quantify, we don’t have a huge population. What we’re seeing and what we saw when we looked at CSK and the due diligence and what we’ve seen in previous acquisitions, is that we need to go and get them competitive and drive value. That’s a challenge from a comp standpoint, we have to turn more units to make the same sales dollars, but we need to re-establish the stores as A, having good availability and B, having good competitive pricing.
Ted Wise
Management
I might add that we’re seeing a product mix change and that we’re going to sell more hard parts now that maybe their more competitive than what CSK was selling, but the fact was they weren’t selling them. So we’ll see hard parts sells grow, that is typically at a higher gross margin than a lot of the retail or will the accessories.
Operator
Operator
Your next question is from Michael Baker – Deutsche Bank Securities Michael Baker – Deutsche Bank Securities: So one question and a follow-up at the same time, one, on the CapEx, can you break that down the 420 to 470 can you break that down by DC, new stores, total conversions, etc. And then related, because it’s all about the integration, your $100 million synergy number? It sounds like you’re at least on track for that through ‘08, but I’m just wondering, the comp growth that you’re seeing is that as expected or better than expected and, therefore, can there be upside to this synergy number?
Gregory Henslee
Management
I’ll answer the Synergy question first as Tom is getting the detail on the CapEx question. What I would say is that we had given guidance to negative comp store sales growth in the fourth quarter for CSK based on one, the unknown as we convert the stores and just the base that the stores were performing in from a comp guidance perspective. So I guess what I would say is that we’ve been very pleased with the performance so far. If our experience with the stores yet to be converted and then the affect of the inventory changeovers that we do out west, if we continue to have results similar to what we’ve had so far, then, yes, we would do better tan what we’re guiding to. We’re trying to be cautious because all of this is unknown at this point and there’s the economic overhand that, of course, we all have to consider.
Thomas McFall
Management
On the CapEx, still a big range out there. I would tell you that right now we’re looking at about half of the CapEx spend being on distribution infrastructure and the remainder being on stores and a little bit of headquarters thrown in there. Operator Your next question is from Christopher Horvers – JP Morgan. Christopher Horvers – JP Morgan: First a follow-up question to clarify 2% to 4% price declines in CSK stores. Does that mean that you would have comped that much higher X those price declines in the non-converted CSK stores? And then second, the 0.8% comp in those stores, can you talk about the amount of inventory that you’ve added on average to the non-converted CSK stores. You talked about 15,000 skews in those stores O’Reilly stores about 21,000. Where have you taken levels in those stores and as we look forward, where do you think you can get them in the absence of new DCs on the west coast?
Gregory Henslee
Management
Well, on the price changes and the affect that that has on comps, obviously, that has some of that we have to sell more units. The difference is the product mix change. We’re selling more hard parts today than we were and our inventory deployment and pricing strategy is primarily focused on hard parts, although, we’ve made the out front merchandise so the merchandise in front of the counter competitive also. But typically we focus more on the hard parts. So, yes, had we been able to sell the inventory that we sold last quarter as the price that they were selling it at before, we would have comped much better reflective of the price and the price decrease. And then, Tom, do you want to answer the second part of the question.
Thomas McFall
Management
One thing I would add on the prices is we’re in the process of converting CSK from a high low retailer to an everyday low price. So when we talk about the 2% to 4% price changes, that’s on the everyday price, and then we’re going to be a little more rational on what the advertising price is.
Gregory Henslee
Management
That’s right. And then our commercial pricing, of course, has stayed. We’re very competitive on the commercial side so there’s that 2% to 4% I referenced does not include the modifications that we might have made to the commercial pricing. On inventory levels, the comments that I had made in my prepared remarks that the average O’Reilly stores at 482 and the average CSK stores were 161,000 gives you an idea how close we’re getting. CSK probably still has $10,000 to $15,000 of merchandise that we’re not going to carry on a go forward basis. That gives you kind of the gross number, but we have a lot of work to do to get the lines all in place. What we’re seeing is that CSK carried more depth of coverage because they were only delivering once a week, whereas we carry more breadth and deliver five days a week. So we have quite a bit of work to do, which really starts here in February to align the inventory offerings across the chain.
Thomas McFall
Management
Just to add a little bit to that. The 120 stores that we mentioned that we have expanded inventory in, we have primarily brought those up to what an average O’Reilly store inventory would be, with the exclusion of some of them being hub stores, which would have been brought up to approximate hub store inventory, which would vary by location depending on the amount of space they had and so forth. And also the size of the market that that hub store might be in because part of the effort with a hub store is not only to service the population around that particular store, but to make inventory available to other stores. So some of those stores could have gotten up to 30,000 to 35,000 skews or it could be up to that point by now.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from Jack Balos – Midwood Research. Jack Balos – Midwood Research: Regarding the change you’ve made in CSK advertising, how does that end up in terms of a ratio to sales? And my other question regarding CSK is in California, considering the economic weakness there and 9.5% unemployment rate, what has been the impact in California from those conditions on CSK’s retail sales?
Thomas McFall
Management
Well, probably the strongest part of CSK for us, not including the stores that are being converted here in the center of the country, the strongest region for us has been the northwest and the weakest region has been the southwest, which includes part of California. I would say that we have a lot of opportunity in California. There were some underperforming stores there that just have not maintained the market share that maybe they had back a few years ago. They had not grown market share for years. They probably lost market share so we have a lot of opportunity. So I think that we probably not been affected directly by the state of the economy in California because of the market share gains that we can make and the pricing changes that we’ve made with some inventory deployment and making inventory available to the stores around the hub has more than offset the economy there. As far as the CSK advertising sales ratio and so forth, we really haven’t done a lot of advertising. We’ve kind of slowed down some of the promotional things that they were doing. In the winter season it’s not a heavy advertising time of the year for our business, and CSK had previously done that. So we really haven’t had a lot of experience yet with the impact of our advertising efforts. That really is kind of right now kicking off as we start our 2009 advertising campaign year. And our advertising campaign with CSK will mimic what we’ve done with O’Reilly and will include print, radio, price attractive items generally on a front page with oil change specials and motor oils and the most commonly used items in our business, and then more hard parts and various ancillary items in the rest of the flyer. And then our radio advertisements are, of course, just advertisements to improve our brand awareness and then to drive footsteps into our stores with various specials that we might have.
Ted Wise
Management
I might add that going from what we have done and the response from the team members, while it may be too early to actually see it in dollars, the attitude and the buy-in of how we’re advertising compared to the old CSK high low, like Tom referred to, is very positive and they all feel they receive well by the customers going forward. Jack Balos – Midwood Research: Regarding the southern California stores that you say are lower average volumes, can you give us an idea of roughly speaking are they like 10% average volume lower per store, any idea?
Thomas McFall
Management
If I said that they were lower average volume, I didn’t mean to say that, Jack. What I meant to say is that that is the most challenging area for us to grow comparable store sales in right now. Their average volume is actually pretty good if you look at it on a comparative basis to O’Reilly. Now they’ve got a higher fixed cost out there, and I didn’t answer part of your question earlier, I just realized, relative to the volume that we think we can get those stores to. Kind of our plan on average is that these western stores would get to a volume of about $2 million or so on average as we do a better job on the retail side of the business because, frankly, CSK just hadn’t done the job primarily for two reasons. One, availability of inventory and then two, their pricing strategy, so we feel we have much retail market share to gain. And then our commercial program will clearly be much more successful there than what the commercial program CSK was using. I guess to explain the commercial position that CSK was in, when we bought the company what CSK reflected as commercial store sales was reflected as being about 18% of their sales. The way we would measure commercial sales is that would equate to about 10% of their sales.Some of what they look at as being commercial really were just good cash customers that were being considered as commercial customers when really they aren’t running a business that we would consider to be a commercial business. So we’ll gain market share on both and our goal and plan is to get those stores to about a $2 million average.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from Gregory Melich – Morgan Stanley. Gregory Melich – Morgan Stanley: I had two questions for you, first was on a free cash flow standpoint understanding that the CapEx has quite a bit of variability. Is there an overall number that you may have provided that I would have missed, and how should we think about that for the next few years?
Thomas McFall
Management
The number, I guess we had given it in a little different fashion was that we expect to have negative cash flow of about $80 to $120 million, we referred to it in what our debt levels would be next year. We would expect that with the bunch of the cap ex being pulled really from 2010 to 2009, with the success we've had on finding distribution centers that we would return to a positive cash flow in 2010. Gregory Melich – Morgan Stanley: Okay. Then the other question I had was just on SG&A. It sounds like some of the synergy opportunities there are still pretty substantial, sort of as we had thought and just hoping you can detail a little bit more what rolls into that. Specifically, are some of the leases included there that are up for renewal and/or the Phoenix headquarters, and anything you can share there would be great?
Gregory Henslee
Management
SG&A synergies that we talked about would be focused on the headquarters expense in advertising, and as we transition over to the O'Reilly system, we need fewer people to maintain the CSK system and, as we implement the O'Reilly advertising strategy, we will continue to see those savings incrementally increase. One thing I think that was asked on a previous question that I don't think we addressed directly was that we continued to be confident in our ability to reach $100 million of annual synergies starting in 2010. And I think the numbers that we've given in our guidance show good progress to that in 2009. The item we want to focus on is that the buying synergies will incrementally improve as we align the products so until we change over a specific product line across the chain or line it up we will have the best deal. So that why when we look at the fourth quarter, we'll have the most buying synergies as a per cent of sales.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from Brian Nagel – UBS. Brian Nagel – UBS: I want to follow up on an answer to a prior question. You mentioned real estate as an opportunity. Earlier today it was on one of your competitor’s conference calls, they highlighted something similar, and actually in their press release as well, is the potential renegotiations with some of these leases. So I was just wondering, as we look at CSK integration, do you think potential renegotiation of some of these leases could occur, and if so, could that be a meaningful driver and upside your initial synergy estimates for the business?
Ted Wise
Management
Well, we're in the process right now of dealing with the leases as they mature and they obviously being a 100% leased and older stores on the west coast, there's a large class of store leases maturing almost on a monthly basis, so we're dealing with those one at a time. And our effort is obviously to renegotiate the following term at a better rate, more of a market price, of f course that varies from store location to store location. And then we're going back and looking at other options to relocate, cut down square footage. A lot of their stores where in large square footage that, that in itself, drove up the lease price more than what it needs to be for today's auto parts store. So, we're looking at all options of reducing our occupancy costs and including relocating it out of some of the older locations to better facilities at or better lease rates than what they have currently got in the stores. Brian Nagel – UBS: So, would those then be, because we've obviously had a shift in the real estate market recently, would those types of synergies be incremental to your initial estimates of the synergies for the business?
Thomas McFall
Management
They would. That would be something that we would not have been clear in our initial observation of potential synergies just based on the fact that at the time it seemed as though the leases were the leases and something that we would live with. And we were able to gain comfort with our opportunity to grow market share out there in drive volume that could leverage of their existing leases so these renegotiations would be a potential upside to our original synergy estimate.
Ted Wise
Management
And it is obviously going to be a process that takes a year to two years to get through the evaluation.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from [Collin McBranahan – Bernstein]. [Collin McBranahan – Bernstein]: Thank you and thanks for running over a little bit here to get a lot of questions in. A few quick ones, one in the core O'Reilly business, can you talk a little bit about what you saw in terms of comparable store transaction and pricing, or essentially what the explicit inflation factor was. That's the first question. And then secondly, on the CSK comp's post conversion, it looks like they’ve settled kind of in a 15%, 16%, 17% range and I know it is early and there's a lot of unknowns here, but would you expect that then to build a bit through the first year as the retail business picks up and you start to build and develop those commercial customers, because obviously to get to a $2 million kind of volume in some of those California stores you need about, I don't know, a 30% or 40% increase in productivity. So is that 16%, 17% then going to accelerate and you have another year of 15%, 16% to get there, how are you thinking abut that at this point with understandably just about four months under your belt?
Gregory Henslee
Management
Yes. To your point, Collin, what we can speak to is basically is our experience so far, which these stores being converted the time of year that we've converted them, is not the best time of year to lean on the sales results and project forward, because in the dead of winter in these northern states business really slows down. But we've been very pleased with the double-digit comp growth that we've had once the stores gained traction. To your point, we really would expect them to at different points in their progression to becoming a real O'Reilly store, do better than that as we start gaining commercial business and establish ourselves as a retailer that has a great access to a broad array of inventory. And that's going to vary on a store by store basis. But generally, we expect very positive results as we do the things that we're doing to put these stores in a position to sell parts, and particularly in the western half of the country where the CSK stores have really not done a great job of penetrating the retail market because of the support structure they had. Not having good access to inventory, not having the nightly replenishment, and the breadth of skews that we have. We would expect very good sales results from a commercial standpoint out there. The second part of your question, as far as just a contributor to the core O'Reilly comps, what I would say is that both the traffic and transaction average were contributors to our comp store sales. A little heavier on the transaction average than traffic but both were contributors to our comp store sales growth.
Operator
Operator
And there are no further questions at this time.
Thomas McFall
Management
Well, thanks everyone for your time this morning. We're looking forward to wrapping up the quarter. The quarter so far has been strong from a comparable store sales standpoint. We're considering the leap year loss of a day in our guidance, and also the fact that March is the largest month of the quarter and would be weighted in most heavy in the quarter. And we've not had that yet but we'll look forward to reporting our results in April, and we'll talk to you then. Thank you.
Operator
Operator
This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.