BKS
#Thanks for the questions.
I will take the first one, then hand off to Al for the second part.
With respect to our comp sales, obviously the trends over the last couple of years have been difficult.
And we've put a lot of good solid initiatives in place to turn things around.
We are not there yet on positive.
We'd love to get there as quickly as possible.
We are first doing the things necessary to make improvements such as we think the gift department ---+ so there's a new selection of product.
That will start hitting our stores probably late summer and early fall.
So I think that will be exciting for us to see.
Toys and games business has been a good performer for us and now we're seeing a little bit of upside given the market conditions in that business.
So, there are parts of the business that have turned positive, but we can't specifically state when the entire business will turn just yet.
So obviously that's metric number one for us and we're very focused on it.
On the second part of your question on the buybacks, as you know, the Board declared a dividend last week.
We regularly review with the Board the best way to return value to shareholders while maintaining flexibility to run the day-to-day business.
So, I can assure you that we look at both dividends and buybacks as options and deploying capital and returning the highest value to our shareholders.
Al, if I could just add to that.
I think clearly that's the balance that we are trying to strike.
And truthfully, we've had a lot of things to correct before really needing investment dollars just yet.
So, for instance, the new store prototypes are smaller, we think more efficient and we think they will work beautifully.
Obviously we've got to prove that out.
In addition to that, given that our entire fleet is bigger, we want to take the learnings and takeaways from the smaller stores and redeploy those, reintroduce those into the chain.
So once we have a model that we feel great about we can think about deploying capital to that much more quickly.
And I think we are all on the same page and ready to do that as it rolls out.
Thank you.
And thank you all for joining us on today's call and for your interest in support of Barnes & Noble.
Our first-quarter earnings release will be released on or about September 6.
We look forward to speaking with you then.
Thank you and have a good day.
