Roger S. Penske
Management
Well, I think I touched that when you look at the markets, they were impacted all the way in Atlanta, Washington, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, on the East Coast. And then when you look at the Central area, you have Cleveland, obviously, Indianapolis, Madison, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis, so a significant part. And when we looked at our numbers, we had no flow-through in those particular markets for the quarter. Yet we had strong flow-through, almost 30% in the West and almost 40% internationally. But what I did was take a look at January and February against the budget that we've set up. These budgets are generated based on previous year's metrics and history. And when we looked at February year-to-date, we're about $8 million behind on our earnings before taxes in both the Central and in the East and we caught about $2 million of that back during March because of the strong close on March. So I think before any other cost, we probably had $0.04 impact. That's the easiest way for me to explain it. Obviously, had impact on our SG&A but obviously, there's nothing I can do about that. We'll get some of that business back. I think the new car business probably sits on the sideline, waits for better days to shop. People want to buy a specific used car, certainly, probably went ahead, did some buying through the Internet. The service would be the most area that was affected. And from that standpoint, because our mechanics work on a flat-rate hour, they want to continue to get business. I think we'll see that creep back in. The business that we lost during the quarter obviously, would be the service business, the consumable business, the oil changes, the tires, the mufflers, and some of that work, obviously, went off to some of the other providers. More work will come back to us. So overall, I think it will flatten out. There's no question. And this impacted our flow-through and our gross profit. But again, we had a great quarter and we're moving on and that's the last weather report I want to give you this year.