conference, we can talk a little bit about your demand trends, and in particular, how strong they were. I know you reported very robust both sales and traffic, you know, year to date or quarter to date. Maybe talk to us about what the source of that is, you know, how much is idiosyncratic. I know there's a lot that's, you know, you have been leaders in the industry, so clearly that's a big piece of it, and then how much maybe the demand environment looks different or not over the last few months. Yeah. I would say that, you know, our most recent quarter is really indicative of our history. If you look at when we filed to go public, we went back pretty far and showed that kind of traffic growth, and that's really what our growth is based on, is traffic growth. Even when we look forward into our guidance for next year, it's based on positive traffic growth. The makeup of that and why we think that is a number of different reasons. I think we're, you know, we're the leader in the growing segment of the restaurant industry. As you recently reported, you know, it's the only segment in the restaurant industry that's been growing year-over-year. We're fortunate to be in that space. We're fortunate to be a leader in that space. Likewise, I think a lot of the work that we've done over the years to position ourselves to continue to benefit from positive traffic growth is around our focus on relevancy, and expanding our consumer base. I think a great illustration of that is our recent expansion with the alcohol program, for example. We have, you know, we have examples of that to go back to our juice program and just evolution of our offering in general, including the prototype, a lot of the work we've done around the restaurant design, the footprint, and those type of things. I think it's a lot of different things, that play into it, but, you know, things that we have identified and are focused on. One of the big themes we talked about in our earnings announcement was the demand and serving more of that demand. You know, we're fortunate that, you know, that demand is sitting at our front door, and it's really up to us to do what we need to do to increase those peak sales hours. Pretty much any breakfast restaurant that's out there is busy on the weekends. The key differentiator for us, I think, in driving these higher volumes is, you know, our business during the week and weekday breakfast, weekday lunch, but then really focusing on capturing and serving more of that demand on the weekend so that we can have higher peak sales hours and frankly, you know, larger sales days. Right. You know, it's interesting to hear you say it's sort of a continuation of trend, and I'm gonna sort of go through in order of how you touched on different points. Sure. Because, you know, to an outside observer, it looks like there was a sharp acceleration. I guess what I'm hearing you say is, if I look at the underlying business, you know, adjusting for weather or AUVs, that kind of thing, you know, this strength is very consistent. It is. I mean, we've had 38 of 39 years of positive same-restaurant sales growth. When you think about all the things that we've been through over those almost 40 years, you know, 2008, 2009, 2010, we know, you know, what we need to do in challenging economic times. We also know that we have very low brand awareness, and consumers are still discovering us. We're seeing higher volumes in our new restaurants than we've ever seen before. For all intents and purposes, when we're going into some of these new markets, we should have low to no brand awareness. I think as we've grown and people have discovered us, whether either on vacation in Florida or, you know, in Arizona or wherever more. I think that's why, you know, we gave one example on the call about one of our restaurants that's doing volumes we've never seen before. I think we've been really pleased with that kind of reception, and you know this. We're seeing that across geographies. There's. We're not having to weight our openings based on geography to make up for what might be a slow starter or something like that. We're getting that same type of reception across geographies. It's helping us with our development schedule. Right. Right. That's predictable, predictably high demand, which is good. You know, I think it would be easy to jog and lose your breakfast. You know, there was a big, you know, cost of living increase for, you know, older consumers on fixed income, like that was the big driver. I, you know, I wanted to sort of ask you to kind of dig in a little bit into what your customer looks like, because I think it's probably not what we traditionally associate with the breakfast. So that COLA increase is probably, you know, not the driver of your January, February comps. Yeah. That's a great point. We have a very broad consumer base, and it's also, I think, younger than people think, you know, based on what you said. If you think about it, the companies that report publicly that are in our day part specifically are, you know, legacy family diners and whatnot. I understand that the benchmarking universe is quite small, and it makes it challenging for folks in your seat and investors and even consumers to put us in a bucket. We're kind of in a class unto ourselves as far as a at scale, you know, breakfast, brunch, and lunch concept. We have a lot of competitors, but it's a herd of cats. They're different in almost every market. Yeah. Our consumer skews a little bit female, higher educated, higher income, and by that we mean, you know, college and household incomes of 70,000 or more. That represents a big piece of our consumer base. Through some of the actions that I already mentioned that, you know, the alcohol and other things, we started to see a leveling out of our consumer base and really attracting more of what I call the next generation pipeline of First Watch customers. You know, our customer has grown with us, grown up with us over the 40 years that we've been around, but we're really thinking about now in the next 40 years, and we talked about it in terms of having 2,200 restaurants at some point. We're less than 500 right now, so, you know, our big opportunity lies ahead of us for sure. The steps that we've taken to balance out that consumer base will help us as we continue to mature and our customer base matures with us. Right. Yeah. That broad appeal, yeah, to your point, critically important over time and even, you know, and right now in terms of thinking about, you know, whether these sort of volatility or the vicissitudes of individual groups. You know, one of the things, so right, you mentioned the day part. You know, just so we're clear, like, breakfast has been growing, but you have been growing even faster than the breakfast segment. I don't know if you have sort of if you have some numbers behind that, like what the segment grows? Also it sounds like the share gains are primarily coming from independents, or do you know where those customers are coming from? Those are kind of two questions in one. Sure. Well, first of all, there's been a lot of focus on breakfast in our industry, whether it's QSR putting a ton of marketing dollars behind it, you know, we talked about this as we were going public and now that, you know, still 70% of breakfast occasions are eaten at home. That's where the growth is coming from. We believe the more people that are marketed to and told about breakfast away from home, we'll get our fair share and if not more because of our scale. Again, to the second part of your question, I think, we're definitely from independents that herd of cats that I talked about. I think we, you know, our leverage and our scale and our operations acumen allows us to come into markets and compete with independents because we almost position ourselves as an independent. Most consumers don't realize we're as large as we are. We come into a market, there's no two First Watches that look alike. Our menu and our atmosphere, you know, it's very easy to think about us as an independent. It's funny because we actually win like best local restaurant sometimes, and that's a neat accolade to get because that's exactly what we're trying to convey is that we're really just your neighborhood, you know, breakfast, brunch, and lunch restaurant. We might be, you know, a network of restaurants, but we don't talk about ourselves in terms of a chain either. I think that goes to our philosophy of if we can do it in 1, we can do it in 100. If we can do it in 100, let's do it in 1,000. By that I mean when concepts become successful or are successful and grow, at some point they start to think about, okay, how can we shave costs? How can we do things? How can we outsource? Probably forget about what got them there and why they were so, you know, successful in the first place. I would say that, you know, I think we're taking share from large bakery cafe concepts that probably started on a very similar premise to us, but have moved more towards convenience and things like that. That consumer that, you know, went to them for very specific reasons, you know, turns to us because we have those same attributes. I think it's across the board. I think the overall push for relevancy for us has really helped us with the trial, and I think the trial is a big part of our traffic gains. I give our operations team and our culinary team a lot of credit because once they come in the door, I think we do a really good job of converting trial to usage, and then, that's where the traffic growth comes in. I think we've decided our customer shops everywhere. Yeah. That, we get our fair share when the trial is up. Right. How do you, yeah, that is one of the questions. How do you encourage trial? I know you have a, you know, sort of a seasonal menu, which is unique among chains, I would say. To what extent is it menu news that's bringing people in, and, you know, or is that perhaps just translating into increased frequency versus other, you know, channels that might bring social media, that kind of thing? How do you get that first trial? 'Cause to your point, when people try food, they'll come back, but the awareness is low. Yeah. We've always been a word of mouth concept. I think the, you know, the advent or the growth in social media has allowed us to amplify that. What I, what I say is we used to whisper, and now we're a little bit above a whisper, and we're able to be much more targeted. We don't do traditional marketing or advertising like on television and whatnot. We still are a word of mouth concept. Social has helped us. Social and digital specifically has helped us amplify that word of mouth. We do it from a kind of an inside out approach where we really focus on the brand voice, and we allow the food to be front and center. The freshness of the food. The seasonal menu specifically I think are a key driver for us because, our teams get excited about it, our customers get excited about it, but they're also... I mean, they're beautiful dishes that also if we target the imagery the right way and to the right consumer at the right time as we're learning, it can really be that driver of trial. I think it's a big component of Frequency with our current customers, but I also think it plays a role in the trial, and then that gets them in. There is a rhythm to that. Yeah. To the five seasonal offerings. Mm-hmm. You know, we meet them with the rest of the menu is, you know, with an everyday value. I think our customer, part of their loyalty is just in trusting us to be there with a, you know, with an everyday value, something that they can return to. I think, I think that's part of the secret sauce is just that regular news, plus we're a reliable and trustworthy operator for them to frequent. Right. To your point, the value, I think the average check is still at fifteen and a half dollars, something like that. Right. you know, relatively low, especially as we talk about for some, you know, seasonal and fresh offerings. Right. One of the things that you mentioned that was interesting and has sort of been, I think, a through line for this conference is that, you know, your teams get excited about the innovation and sort of, you know, happy employees, happy guests. That dynamic has really, I think, been, you know, there's been a bright spotlight shown on it, especially as labor challenges have presented themselves. Maybe talk a little bit about that too, the model as it appeals to, you know, somebody who's gonna work at a First Watch. You know, we never. It's interesting. The strength of our labor model really paid off a great deal during the very worst of the initial wave of COVID, where we never experienced the kind of challenges that I think some of my peers have told me that they had experienced. We operate from 7 in the morning till 2:30 in the afternoon. That one shift is a, you know, a benefit, where there's a certain cohort of hourly employees who just, you know, prefer to have their evenings. Mm-hmm. to themselves and some ability to either do another gig or be home to do homework or coach baseball or something like that. We never experienced the kinds of dramatic shortages that I think other concepts ran into, particularly late night and the dinner day part. We ran thin from time to time. We didn't have the bench strength that we were accustomed to having. Once our applications picked up, I guess it was really this time a year ago, I think the applications for our hourly positions resumed the same kind of pace that we saw prior to COVID. We've never, I mean, we've never experienced, you know, a downturn since then. Whenever your applicant pool is big and deep, then just the ability to continue to operate your crews at maximum levels, that's just a huge help. But I think it's that advantage of the promise we make to our employees is, "Hey, one shift, work, you know. Nights. Yeah, no nights. You're gonna enjoy working with one crew. You're working on one menu. We're not changing menus during the day, so they're getting reps on the same on the same thing. It simplifies their life, and it also meets their, you know, needs. A lot of processes and procedures that we're putting in place right now, have a goal of an out the door by 4. Have everybody in our restaurants out the door by 4. If you think about that's plenty of time to get home, you know, pick kids up from school, those type of things. You know, whether it's new technology that we're putting in to help the managers do their job, you know, scheduling tools, things that happen after we're closed can be done in that hour and a half, from 2:30 to 4 and get everybody out the door by 4. Yeah. that's a good segue because I did wanna talk about, you know, to your point, serving the demand you have, right? Mm-hmm. You have the high quality problem of having, you know, too much demand. Right. What is, you know, can you talk about some of the process improvements or technology that you've deployed and, you know, whether it's to address on-premise or off-premise? Also it is interesting to hear you say that it actually improves the experience for, people working at First Watch-. Mm-hmm. Not just for the customers. maybe just give us some thoughts on that. Yeah. We think about it in terms of an ecosystem as everybody would. There's some of those pieces within the ecosystem that have been either highlighted or we've talked about more than others, but I can tell you it's not a small list, and some of them are big, like KDS and include an investment, but some of them are time and motion studies and process improvements and sometimes something as simple as moving where something is in the kitchen to reduce the steps. We've also, you know, done the dedicated make line for off-prem. You know, just to remind everybody, we had, you know, 3 or 4% off-prem prior to COVID, and now we sit around anywhere from 18%-20%. By the way, our dining room traffic is, you know, at the same level as it was pre-COVID now. When you think about, you know, how our kitchens were designed and frankly, a lot of them were designed to do $1.2 million in AUVs, and now we're talking about over 2. Yeah. That's the, you know, that's a component of being around for 40 years. We have restaurants that have been open for 35, 36 years, and they just weren't designed that way. What we've tried to do is develop this kit of parts that we can apply all, some or none. In many cases, there's not an opportunity to do any of them. You know, we've scoped out each one. We kinda know what they're worth, if they're implemented properly. When we're either updating restaurants, we see which ones we can put in there. More importantly, again, when I talk about the less than 500 restaurants now and the 1,700 we're yet to build, those we're able to control which ones we put in there, and that's why we're seeing these volumes that we are. There'll be some volume limits on some of the older cohorts, but really this is about unlocking the value in the ones we're gonna be building over the next, you know, 2, 3, 5, 10 years. Right. You know, you mentioned sort of a toolkit and, you know, as you said, you know, some, all, some, none. You know, so you talked about kitchen display, you talked about second make lines. Mm-hmm. What are the other kind of big tools, if you will? Yeah ...we should see in every kind of new Fresh Lodge? When possible, a dedicated to-go pickup area on the side of the building. We've optimized dining rooms. We talk a lot about our waitlist management system and how many of our customers go through that system when we're on a wait on the weekends. That helps us determine average party size. You know, the dining room optimization one is that's one that's really interesting because we actually did that work before COVID. Mm. We saw that when we were full, we were about 70% full. Excuse me, when we were on a wait, we were about 70% full, and because the tables weren't optimized. Right. What we learned was that our average party size on the weekends was 1.9 people when we were planning for fours. 4s, right. By optimizing that dining room, we get that 70% to 85%. It's never gonna be 100%. You know what I mean? It might be by accident, but, you know, getting that to 85%. We had that plan. Mm. COVID came, and it was just the opposite. You had to have tables six feet apart from each other. Right. You know, all those different things. It wasn't until post-COVID that we started to revisit that and say, "Okay, let's optimize the dining rooms." If you're gonna do that obviously puts additional pressure on the kitchen because now there's more people- Right ...in there eating at once. That's when we started to focus holistically on the, you know, within all four walls and say, "Okay, what do we need to do to accommodate that?" So the indoor-outdoor bar is a big piece of that. Believe it or not, adjusting and optimizing our busing procedures is a big contributor to faster table turns. We had a philosophy of busing tables in 4 and a half minutes that started from the very first restaurant that opened. That's what the founders did, and it was just one of those things that we just hadn't revisited for so many years. We looked at it and said that we can do better than that. You know, we now have a goal of 90 seconds or less. Wow, okay. That, if you time that well with the seating procedures and having people on deck ready to go to the table, all of that is just helping with the throughput. Again, everything you do in the front of the house, you have to make sure that the kitchen in the back of the house is optimized to be able to handle that increased volume. Right. Two things. One is what is the average table turn? it's 29 minutes or less. Oh, okay. Our food comes out typically in 10 minutes or less. Okay. You know, although I'll tell you, it's, I don't wanna call it anecdotal, but it's not as scientific or quantitative as we'd like it to be because we didn't have a kitchen display system that told us. It was, it was more manual tracking of it. Sure. Now with a lot of this technology, it gives us that kind of input, the party size, the ticket time. You know, now when they pay, we can tie it back to when we seated them, things like that. We're getting, I would say we're setting up a really nice benchmark now of what those data points are. Right. Yeah, I mean, you can tell by Renaissance. I didn't realize it was, it was that tight. you know, I always think about breakfast, people are pressed for time, but it's actually not as nearly as big a time commitment as like a, you know, what I would think about with casual diner. Just to clarify, that's across all 7 days, right? There's gonna be times where there's no wait, and there's times where there are. That averages out to 29. I think, you know, if you're talking about seat to eat. Mm-hmm ...that's 29 minutes even on the weekend, but obviously there's a wait time... Right ...component that happens before that. Right. We've put some tools in place to reduce that friction, and really, it's not even so much friction. It was psychological anxiety around waiting. If you think about it, before the digital waitlist management system and putting it on the app where you can put your name on our list, you'd come in, you'd give us your name, your party size, we would write it down. Probably every 6 minutes you'd come up and say, "Where am I on the list?" You don't have to do that anymore. It's on the phone. It tells you how many parties are ahead of you and when it's time for you to come seat. We're able to send you an SMS that says, "Your table. You're up next. Come be ready," so that we're not waiting for you to come when it's time to seat you. All of those things. I mean, we're talking about shaving seconds. Yeah. When you do it 1,000 times, it makes a difference. Yeah. Yeah. It makes a difference to the operations and also to the customer experience. Mm-hmm ...for sure, 'cause waiting is on something is probably one of the most painful experiences that, you know, people have, I would say, on like a regular basis. It certainly seems like it's a, you know, it's an important point to address. I guess, you know, the other sort of. Besides that, one of the things you mentioned, like bigger, you know, get more efficient or optimized seating means more demand, and that's, I would say that is like a theme throughout COVID, right? Was like you just had a lot more demand. Yeah. It could be first year or it could be, you know, because you didn't have, to your point, seating wasn't necessarily the gatekeeper that we're used to seeing. How have you know, and you've touched on it, but how have you adjusted to address the fact that off-premise is so much bigger? Does it change your day part mix? Does it change, you know, sort of the flow throughout the day, or is it really just about making bigger kitchens so that, you know, the demand that comes in the dining room and through the, you know, digital ordering can all be met? First, I'd say that we're thankful for the business. Yeah. It wasn't there before, right? We did have to kind of fuel the jet in midair to figure out how best to do that. We've addressed it with the second make line. Our focus all along was do not let it degrade the in-restaurant dining experience. Like, that's our bread and butter, that's where we shine. We also wanna meet our customers where they are. By focusing on it separately, and embracing it as opposed to treating it as a, you know, as a, as a burden. I would say I don't think anybody internally thought that we would still have 20% off-prem, once the dining rooms recovered. I really thought it was a COVID phenomenon for us. Mm-hmm. When I think about our percentage of off-prem now compared to the restaurant companies who I've always, you know, looked up to that do it really, really well and have been doing it for years, and our percentage is pretty close to theirs, I'm pretty amazed actually. Right. You know, it just wasn't something that we had before. Doing more than accommodating it, but embracing it is really what changed for us and a lot of that comes from the internal leadership and getting the teams to understand that it is a core part of our business now and making sure that we do it the right way. it did take time to get enough reps in... Yeah ... that we were good at it. I mean, we had to learn ourselves how to get it done. During part of the time, we actually had to throttle it on our peak times. Yeah ... in order to be sure that we had a great experience in the restaurant that we were proud of. We didn't want it to affect the dining room. Once we got enough reps and the teams were ready for it, we were able to take the throttles off and accommodate both. We must be doing a great job with off-prem 'cause it is holding up. Yeah. You know, regardless of what you thought the promise of it was originally, it's, it continues to be a really big part of our business. You don't have to turn it off on weekends or peak periods, right? Correct. Which is something that. Yeah. Yeah, we were turning it off on weekends so that we could accommodate the in-restaurant. I mean, just to give you an insight into it, when you order a traditional breakfast at First Watch, it comes on one plate. When you order it to go, it's three different vessels. We have only so much room in our pass-through window, and we were realizing that if the off-prem was coming from the main line, it was clogging up the whole window. I mean, it was just learnings like that along the way of, okay, well, this is, they're not gonna work, you know, trying to just squeeze it into our existing system. We had to think about accommodating it differently. Right. Right. All right. I mean, I think we could talk about this for a long time, but it wouldn't be a conference if I didn't grill Mel on margins. Let me back up. Yeah, you don't wanna get between us. I guess let's can we talk broadly about the cost outlook? Last year, 2022, it took everybody by surprise, I think particularly. Felt like just a big step change in March of last year. Right. I think now, you're guiding to, you know, sort of commodity inflation that will moderate, but I know it's very dependent on some specific categories. Sure. Maybe you could talk a bit about that. Commodities. Look, we're still paying more for everything now than we were a year ago, but the growth and the increase in inflation has slowed down a great deal. We have taken the steps the last 2 years, where we have 2 commodities, bacon, excuse me, eggs and potatoes, where we have locked the prices for the full year. Now, eggs have been an interesting environment for the last 2 years. By locking the price for the year, it's allowed us to at least have clear line of sight. I think as we go into this year, we, you know, we feel like we're, 1, we're at least controlling for some of the pricing exposure associated with eggs. For most of our other commodities, we generally are priced out maybe 45 or 60 days into the future. We have kinda near-term, you know, near-term clarity of sight. I think as we expect for the year to kinda see that growth of inflation tapering down, that'll be a win for us right now. We're living in a world where my 6% inflation would've made my ears bleed two years ago. Now I'm thinking, "Boy, that sounds like a relief. We're lucky. Yeah. Right. On the labor side, that's another place where we've seen, you know, relatively high inflation. Yep. I think this year you have said, kind of in that, I think it's high single digits, primarily because of the impact of, I think, minimum wage. A lot of it has to do with. Right ... your geographical exposure. Yeah, that's the hourly input in hourly employees inflation. We operate in states where there are step function changes in the regulatory minimum wage. We pay more than minimum wage in our restaurants, but as the minimum wage increases, you know, we'll wanna continue to keep that kind of delta between the statutory rate and what we pay. Right ... in order to be sure that we have the, you know, we have the right advantage when it comes to actually hiring our crews and keeping them happy. Right. You wanna avoid that compression, that wage compression. Yeah ... that can happen. You know, I guess, you know, the sort of the other side of, to your point, like probably 6% a few years ago, we would've never seen it, but also pricing. Yeah. The same thing. Like if somebody said, you know, "There are gonna be companies that'll have 15 points of pricing on the menu in 2022. Right. I would've, yeah, I would've very much struggled to believe that. In that context, you've been a price, you know, you haven't been a price leader. Let me put it that way. You've sort of been very circumspect about pricing. Maybe talk a little bit about the philosophy and the prioritization of traffic, you know, first and foremost. You bet. Is there room to recover some margin, you know, after having, you know, been a price laggard? Right. if you will, last year? Philosophically, I think, is a great way to ask the question, what's the philosophy? Because the company's got a 40-year history of building traffic. Part of the secret sauce there has been to be sure that we are there with a everyday value for the customer. We don't discount, we don't, you know, we don't do dealing deals in the restaurant. We wanna be sure that we're there every day. When we start talking about pricing, we go there very carefully. We think we have pricing power, obviously with the pent-up demand out there that continues. When we've taken pricing actions, we haven't seen that affect our traffic or that pent-up demand. We believe we have pricing power, but we're very careful about exercising it because we wanna be sure that we're not out in front of the customer, and that they do have something that they can afford to visit more frequently, every day. Our typical cadence, we've talked about, is that we'll take price, or we'll look at taking price early in the year, and then revisit based on where margins are going in the middle of the year, and make a call then. Until we get out there, we don't start thinking about it until we start seeing how the year is trending. You know, again, to sort of think about it back to the philosophy of it, broadly speaking, you know, like I said, margins kind of came down last year. Yep. I guess what I'm hearing is that, you know, the preference, the strong preference would be to get back via traffic and sales leverage as opposed to pulling the pricing leverage. Right. Yep. I, you know, I think we'll recover margin over time, as sort of the pace of inflation slows. Moreover, we're focused on driving traffic, so, and traffic will deliver more dollars even if the margins are still having to grow back to where they were. Right. Right. The margin rate, you know- You bet. What we really care about is, right, the margin, the dollars. You bet. We're trying to win this game for the next three decades. Right. We think that's the winning formula. Yeah. Yeah. I would suspect your investors would agree. You know, one more thing on labor. You talked about specialized roles, maybe just a little bit more on that. It doesn't sound like you're adding more labor, you're just, you know, deploying it more efficiently or effectively. For clarity, I think it does add labor, but it comes with additional sales. Okay. Okay. I think you'll see our labor percentage stay relatively the same. Okay. We're able to apply roles in, within the operation that improve the customer experience, actually improve the employee experience. The one I talked about was a dedicated beverage position, for example. If you think about it right now, our servers take your beverage order, go in the back, they have to make a Kale Tonic, a hot chocolate, you know, a iced coffee, something like that. Whereas now with the KDS, that's part of it can direct the ticket right to the bar and somebody who's there doing the beverages. It allows the server to spend less time in the back of the house and more time with their customers and just walk by, grab their drinks, and bring them. It actually allows the server to turn the tables faster. Mm-hmm. It drives sales. These are positions that we've looked at that more than pay for themselves. Okay. When, you know, when people ask about is it incremental hours? Technically, yes. But they're very efficient. Right. because they come with the additional sales. Okay. Sarah, I tell people who have never worked in restaurants that working in a restaurant with our kind of complexity is an athletic event. Right? I mean, people are moving in different directions. You know, you've got things located in the restaurant either inconveniently or conveniently. The hard work of a restaurant team is sorting out some of those complexities so that you are more efficient. Just like Chris said a few minutes ago, it's cut in seconds 1 million times, right? Right. It doesn't come in huge, you know, huge clumps at once. It is, it's shaving basis points. It's shaving seconds in the delivery time over and over and over again on the kind of transactions that we have in all of our 480 restaurants. Right. It's making your employees happier. Yeah. Right. Which is, you know, again, that's as we talked about at the beginning, so critical to the guest experience. you know, so we don't have too much time left. I did wanna talk a little bit about the unit growth, and, you know, from a cost side, that is another area where we've seen, you know, a lot of inflation. I guess you could talk a little bit about what you think. This is, you know, I know what you've guided to into your returns, so remind us on, like, what that is. Obviously some excess returns, I'll put that in quotes, you know, in 2021 and 2020, but maybe now more normalized. If you could just sort of level set us, so we can think about what is a, you know, what is a normalized run rate. This is something that I talk about with all my companies. Some of them, we have a little more history than others. Right. You know, we can benchmark against 2018 or 2019, or the decade prior. We might need a little more help from you. Well, in 2020, we had to kind of put our development pipeline into a little bit of a self-induced coma. We've been resurrecting it since then. Our long-term goals are to grow the system by 10% or more each year in terms of the number of units. You mentioned the increasing cost of the restaurants. Frankly, most of it's elective. I mean, we, our cost probably three or four years ago for building a new restaurant were just under $1 million net of tenant improvement dollars. That number looks more like $1.4 million now net of tenant improvement dollars. We're building restaurants with bigger footprints. We're building restaurants with now with a bar element that cues the customer that we have an alcohol program. Chris mentioned that we're building restaurants with a larger or a second make line, larger patios, larger footprints, and those are the restaurants that are delivering on this, on these higher volumes. When we underwrite a project, we don't use any different criteria than we used, 3 or 4 years ago in terms of their returns. We expect more. If we pay more for a restaurant, we expect them to deliver more at the top line, and as they get to that 18%-20% restaurant-level operating profit, We know that that's gonna deliver that, you know, north of 35% cash on cash return. We're just underwriting bigger projects now, but we haven't sacrificed anything on the, on the expectation in terms of what they deliver at the bottom line. 40 years from now, you're not going to have the issue. Maybe 40 years may be a little bit too far in the future to commit, but, you know, you talked about how you have these early restaurants that were built for $1.4 million. Right. What are the new restaurants, you know, are there any foreseeable capacity constraints where you have now or you know, these will serve you well into the future? I think, you know, we talked about the one on the call that's, you know, might be our first $4 million restaurant. That's really been encouraging for us because we did apply all of these things there, and we can see that we can do $90,000-$110,000 in a week. To me, that's raised the theoretical ceiling so that we may not have that problem 10 years from now that we're dealing with right now, that there's really no reason that the restaurants that we're building now can't build to that kind of volume. That's. You're talking about almost double what our AUVs are right now. I feel good about our opportunity to take advantage of that going forward. That has to come with the trade area growth and maturation. Some of these markets we're going into are a little bit green. We know we're going in a little bit green. Again, as Mel said, we're signing a lease for with 10 years and two five-year options, it's okay to be a little early, you know, if we're getting to maturity in two and a half, three years. System average AUV now at over $2 million, and some of these restaurants doing $3 million and $4 million. That's in 1 seven and a half hour shift. I mean, it's astounding. Right. Certainly suggests that there is room for the 2,200 that you targeted and maybe more. Mm-hmm. given that, the demand. I think this is a good place to end it. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been great. Sarah. Thank you. We enjoyed. Yeah, thanks for having us.