WING
#Yeah.
And a good question.
The investments we made I think first and foremost, to answer your initial question, it did have a delever impact, but most notably this is not specific to any sort of wage issue or inflation issue, but most notably around a roster expansion that we've consciously made in our company stores to prepare them for the growth.
If you recall, our company-owned stores, same-store sales grew by 6.8% in the quarter.
That's on top of very, very strong growth over the years, and so we felt it necessary as we continue to take care of our guests to expand the roster.
And so as ---+ in doing so, that creates opportunities to train our people, but those training costs come with hours invested in the P&L.
We don't think ---+ we only see this really as a near term investment.
We don't see this as a long-term issue.
So we expect to see labor moderate in the back half of the year for the company store footprint.
Yeah, <UNK>.
Yeah.
So the pre opening expense impacted the margins by about 70 basis points.
Company store margin.
Sure.
And your question certainly calls attention to the fact that we're being very diligent and careful about our pace of international expansion for a lot of reasons.
That is one of the big ones.
As you may know, certainly supply chain is a big piece to the puzzle of establishing a long-term successful international strategy.
And Larry and his team have been working very hard with a number of global suppliers that are built and prepared to help us expand our business overseas and they're addressing very important issues for us that we need to be prepared for, for instance, GMO-free products, as well as halal certified products in certain markets around the world as we expand.
And then, separately, ensuring that we had a sustainable and growing supply chain for chicken to get into the markets that we expand into.
And then notably the ability to produce a lot of these products overseas, closer to the markets in which we operate to reduce just costs overall.
So he and his team have been working with a few, as I mentioned, key suppliers of these products and services across the world.
And before too long, we'll have established what I believe will be a very appropriately sized and robust supply chain for us to continue to grow with.
But one thing I will certainly commit to is that we will not grow too fast in advance of making sure that we've got the infrastructure in place to do so properly.
Nothing specific, no.
I think certainly the Olympics could be helpful to us but we are not anticipating it to be significant in any way.
They do---+ this year, if you look at past years the Olympics have been in various time zones around the world and this year they are in our general US time zone, so that may create some opportunity but we don't expect it to be meaningful.
Can you clarify that, what you mean by next steps beyond that.
Do you mean beyond that timeframe or---+
No, those items, notably the national ad fund are going to be key enablers to our continued progress towards our US development target of 2500 restaurants overall, that can only help us along the way by exposing the brand in markets where people may not know us as well.
Separate and apart from that I think our strategy for the long term is very clear yet very simple.
Its continuing to leverage the great unit economic model that we have in place delivering 10% plus unit growth along with low single digit sales growth that delivers great returns for our shareholders, ultimately.
So, we are very proud of the fact that we have a very simple model and I think the growth to 1,000 restaurants only creates leverage opportunities and scale opportunities for us in the future.
Thank you all for your time today.
We certainly appreciate your continued interest in Wingstop and look forward to speaking with you in the future.
