Thank you, everybody. I'm Michael Lasser, the hardline, broadline and food retail analyst from UBS. Welcome to the afternoon session of our UBS Consumer and Retail Conference. I don't think we could find a better way to kick off our afternoon sessions than with the team from Monro. To my immediate left is a fixture of the UBS Consumer and Retail Conference, Brian J. D'Ambrosia, who is Monro's Chief Financial Officer. To his left is Felix Veksler, who is the Vice President of Investor Relations. I am very grateful to both gentlemen because I think this might be seven or eight years where Brian's been very graciously attending our conference. We've had wonderful updates, conversations, and stories throughout that time, which is where I wanna start. Because, Brian, you have been a very stable force in the Monro organization against the backdrop of what's been a lot of change. You've seen three CEOs over the last several years, you know, some different strategic initiatives that have been put in place, some changes to the footprint. Today, there's around 1,100 locations. Can you give us a little bit of the retrospective, a little bit of what has happened, and where does Monro stand today as a place for us to frame our conversation? Yeah, absolutely. First, Michael, thank you for having us. I've enjoyed all, six or seven years, as you mentioned, and looking forward to our conversation today. I've been with Monro since 2013. I've been in the CFO role for about eight, nine years now. I would characterize Monro's history as one of really unit growth. Yeah. That kinda frames a lot of the conversation about what we're working on now and what we've been working on. That unit growth was one where the company started from a small local regional business centered in Upstate New York to one that grew through significant acquisitions and bolt-ons to become at its peak, about 1,300 locations. Originally only focused on service and limited services. Now, broad range of automotive repair and replacement services, and inclusive of 50% of the business being tires and tire services, which all happened through that acquisition and M&A process. With that, I think creates the growth, the scale, and the relevance to the consumer that comes with a national footprint. I think what it comes with is some of the growing pains and some of the integration or even missed integration opportunities that you have to truly build a 1,300-location platform. A lot of the work that's happened over the last handful of years has been really putting in place the tools and processes to operate as a platform, not only in our merchandising in terms of how we go to market, how we buy, our supplier relationships, where our specific brands are positioned and how we think about our different brands and their role in or the geographies we participate in, but also in store, how we really leverage the capabilities we have across the chain to deliver a good experience in all of our locations through a standardized, repeatable process using standard tools, and ways of going to market and doing business. That's where a lot of the work has been, is standing those tools up. There was a lot of foundation building, I would say, over the last five years, getting our stores wired and ready for the technologies we wanted to implement, standardizing across things as simple as phone systems, as complex as digital courtesy inspection tablets, moving from paper-based to electronic scheduling, right? Just things that are blocking and tackling for a large operator. With a lot of that foundation building behind us, where we're at today is really implementing the tools, processes, and guest experience we want that sits on top of that. It's leveraging a lot of those tools that we've already put in place, but it's also bringing new tools to market and to bear to enhance that. That's a lot about what we'll talk about today, is the focus that we've had over the last couple of years on our internal operations, having brought the platform to something that can be now the foundation for the next round of unit growth at Monro. Got you. Very helpful. That is a great starting point for our conversation. Before we get into some of the strategies that are at the heart of what Monro is trying to achieve, I wanna talk a little bit about the industry, because it's been a fascinating industry. It has been a bastion of fragmentation for a long period of time. Monro was very at the forefront. It was a pioneer in creating some of the consolidation across the auto services sector. Where does that consolidation stand today? You know, it's still reasonably fragmented. There's a few larger players, but how do you see that playing out? Yeah. It's a great question. I think that what we identified during our roll-up opportunity has become more widely known. Yeah. Certainly, you know, starting with the industry, the auto aftermarket is a place that has really strong, durable long-term trends at its back. The first is the aging vehicle parc, right? We know the cars are getting older. I think it was 10-year-plus years when I first started, maybe even nine, and now we're over 12, 13 years old for the average age of vehicle on the road. We know that those vehicles are being driven. While we had a step back during COVID in terms of vehicle miles traveled during shutdown, we're back to higher than pre-COVID levels in terms of vehicle miles traveled. The complexity of those vehicles, we know continues to increase, making the do-it-for-me section of the aftermarket a faster grower than the DIY, which is obviously where Monro plays. On top of all those really good long-term trends and the fact that most of the categories are nondiscretionary, your car needs them whether you want them or not, it makes it an attractive and a very investable space in nearly, you know, all economic environments. That on top of the significant fragmentation, you know, really lends itself to the M&A activity that I would say, like you said, Monro pioneered. Yeah. Ultimately has been really expanded upon by other strategic and financial buyers. There's 120,000 service locations in the U.S. I would say that if you looked at the number of locations that the top ten have, it's probably only about 15%. Mm. There's a significant tail in terms of undone consolidation or remaining consolidation to happen. I think it remains an investable space. If you look at the overall market, you know, there is significant competition in addition to those 120,000 or 20,000 locations, which includes not only mom and pops, but the national chains. We also obviously compete with club stores and mass merchandisers. You've got dealership locations on top of that as well. Of course, you have online sellers of tires like, you know, Amazon and other online tire Tire Rack other online tire sellers. It's a pretty diverse market we compete in a very fragmented as it relates to the physical location. Got you. Very helpful. You know, the recent topic that folks have been very in tune with is just the geopolitical conflict and what the rise in the price of oil might mean for consumer behavior. What have you seen in the past? How are you thinking about this? Could this? Is there a level where gasoline gets to that it starts to create demand destruction? What's been the case of how you looked at that? Yeah. Traditionally, we only have history to go on, and every economic cycle is different. Traditionally, we would have to see up towards $5 oil, well, gas. Yeah A gallon of gas for us to see any of that significant demand destruction. I think currently, you know, we're a ways away from that. Obviously, those are the levels that we would see a change in consumer behavior. Yeah. What has been your observation around the state of the consumer? There's been a lot of talk about these bifurcated trends. Monro's seen it a little bit in terms of, you know, its tire business, where some of the more opening price point tires have done a little bit better and maybe that's more a price-sensitive consumer. How would you describe the overall state of the consumer? Yeah. I would say that the K-shaped recovery is what we see across our consumer base, our customer base. To your point, we have a wide demographic of customers that we serve. We serve the low-end consumer who's looking for true value and price point. Yeah. In terms of tier four tires. We serve a middle to higher-end consumer who might just be moving away from the dealer and coming into the aftermarket. We see different behaviors. We see still the need to invest in those in their vehicles because, again, it is a needs-based purchase. We do see the lower-end consumer continuing to push down towards the lowest possible ticket that they can have on each visit. We see that middle to higher income consumer continuing to invest in bundle services with the reason that they came in upon recommendations that we find. I think that because of that, it is. We've done some segmentation work, and we'll probably get into it as we talk here. There's different ways that we talk to those consumers now. There's different ways that we're thinking about our marketing efforts is in terms of attracting certain segments of that. It certainly is affecting the way we're thinking about our lower tier offerings in order to provide maximum value, but also, preserve and protect growth and margins. Got you. Monro's on a little bit of a different fiscal year, have yet to provide an outlook for the year. Not asking you to do it, so Felix, don't give me those looks. It has been a very, I think the technical term, funky winter. I'm sure you have experienced that in Rochester. This is, you know, it's a very treacherous pothole season, which is going to have a strong influence over some of the spring maintenance that's done, especially as those vehicles ride over and that has an influence on the underbelly of the car, the struts, the shocks. How are you thinking about all of this? On top of that, some inflation that's being passed through as a result of, you know, all the factors that we've that have long been talked about. Yeah. It certainly is a dynamic environment. I think that what we saw, at least if we look back, what we've seen is the trading down, like you said, we talked about earlier of the consumer to opening price point tires, from tier one down to two to three to four. We've seen that not as a new phenomenon, but just a continuation. I think this was something that we may have even talked about. Yeah Last year or perhaps the year before even. That post-COVID and post-inflationary, I would call it shock, of the stimulus post-COVID. You know, as prices stepped up, consumers definitely balked at some of those increases from the branded manufacturers and started to trade down into maybe brands that they were less familiar with or even non-branded tires. That dynamic has continued. You see a continued kind of pile up in the tier three and four levels of consumers, and it's come at the expense of some of the tier one and two volume. That persists and that kind of stays in the background and we've got strategies in place to make sure that we're sorted for that new dynamic. Make sure that we have opening price point tires in our FY27 that allow us to make better margins than we did in FY26. That's, you know, a lot of effort by Kathryn Chang and our merchandising team. We also have consolidated a lot of our volume and continue to align behind fewer strategic brands and expect to be able to execute in the stores to sell more of our tires out of those brands, which keeps more tires in our assortment being sold, which provides better value for our guests, but also helps us to achieve volume rebates and better pricing. That's one way that we've combated that kind of prolonged trade-down that doesn't really show many signs of reversing. If anything, a little bit of a barbell is occurring where the tier one and for the high-end consumer, the tier four, they're piling up and maybe leaving tier two and three. As it relates to other economic pressures, you know, we expect that, you know, and plan for a continued current environment. Yeah. We know that the consumer may get a little healthier here over the next couple of months as tax refunds start to hit their bank accounts. We've positioned our marketing efforts, our merchandising efforts around capitalizing on that hopefully disposable income that they have to be able to reinvest back in their vehicle. As it relates to the weather dynamics on top of all that, you know, we benefited from an on-time winter this year. November was a good amount of snow in the Northeast. That got our tire selling season off to a good start as we reported in our last earnings call. You know, since then, the industry, and we talked about it in our January call, and I think Goodyear talked about it on their call, and it just shows up in the syndicated data, that it remains soft and tire units were soft in January. Some have an outlook for a continued soft quarter for this quarter ending in March. You can't control, you know, all of that. What you can control for is the things that we're working on to take share, win share, and sell more tire units in any environment. Two last questions in this regard. Number one is, are you seeing deferred maintenance in other areas of your business? You know, classic behavior where instead of replacing two struts, instead of replacing four struts or shocks, someone might replace two or other indications that prolonged deferral cycle is continuing. Yeah. I would say that, the most pronounced trade-down in deferral is occurring in tires. Yeah. I think mostly it's the most economically sensitive because of the higher price point. It's the highest ticket that we have on our service menu. But at the same time, as you move down into lower tier tires, we see lower attachments to those consumers. Okay. A more economically sensitive consumer is gonna buy lower tier tires, and they're also less likely to attach an alignment to that tire or to buy road hazard or to potentially get those other services you mentioned done. We do have still a lot of our consumers that we would kinda consider in that bundler where they're gonna come in and they're gonna listen to the recommendations that you give them, and they have the financial wherewithal and the commitment to that vehicle, knowing that perhaps the ultimate thing they can't do is afford a new vehicle. Yeah. The trade-down into maintaining their current vehicle is one that they can afford and they'll invest in. Those are the consumers through our marketing efforts that we are really targeted on bringing more of into our store. We've done a lot of things tactically and technically to put more of our advertising and more of our marketing in front of their eyeballs. Got you. Last one on the Two more on the bigger one. One is, given all this, disruption that's happening in the Middle East, could you envision any supply chain disruptions that could interfere with your ability to service your customers? You know, we have not seen anything in our planning. Yeah That would cause that. I think there is a good amount of supply onshore as we speak, and still other parts, manufacturing that isn't necessarily dependent on some of those areas that are under the most pressure right now. Got you. Very helpful. Then on tariffs and pricing, obviously, there's a lot of noise and change, and it's quite a dynamic environment. How do you think about the rollback of IEEPA tariffs, sectoral tariffs that could come in place that will impact the categories that you service, and then the various dynamics on pricing? Yeah. It's not easy. Yeah. To say the least. It's, you know, because, you know, we as a buyer through distribution and from manufacturer, you know, when we went through this when we were looking at the first round of tariffs, we don't have perfect visibility in the country of origin, right? Mm-hmm. We really, as a strong vendor partner, we are able to work with our suppliers to get to that level of detail, but it's not initial visibility that we have. When we work through that, and we've done a lot of cost segregation in terms of what are the costs subject to tariff that are in our costs and not, you know, I think we're able to have robust conversations with our vendors on the appropriate level of pass-through that we should bear relative to the manufacturer or distributor, as you look at the overall value chain to the consumer. That being said, with the rollback of IEPA, first of all, that doesn't change the Section 232 auto tariff. Yeah. That remains in full effect. Which is an important point because they An important point because that's where it was affecting a lot of our costs was related to that. We had on the tire side very little product coming out of China, which I think is the biggest beneficiary of the IEEPA reduction. But at the same time, you know, certainly some of the hard parts are still being sourced from China, from distribution and manufacturing. So any relief that they experience certainly needs to make its way through the inventory cost because there are weeks of supply on hand already at those higher levels. I don't think anyone's counting on the rebates yet, given the complexity of how. Yeah How it seems like to even be able to apply for those, and the systems needed to be stood up before that could even begin. We're beginning the conversations just like we did, when tariffs were announced. We began the conversations with our vendors, getting aligned on what the data is saying, and what their strategy is around it. Certainly, you know, expect that, we'll be part of those conversations with all of our strategic partners, and cost relief that benefits them will benefit us. Two questions. Are they impacted by non-IEEPA tariffs at this point, such that if there's already sectoral tariffs in place for a lot of the goods that you're installing on cars, the great news is you have a little bit more certainty because there'll probably be some other categories that are now subject to this. How do you think about it? Yeah. I think that, you know, we don't see. You know, our initial pass, particularly in the tire category, doesn't show that we'll see a significant amount, like as I said, of change related to this because we weren't sourcing a significant amount of tires from IEPA jurisdiction. That being said, if there's a change in the global tariff regime to help offset the loss of those, that tariff revenue, we'll have to see how that impacts the jurisdictions that we are buying from, right? We buy tires from Southeast Asia that don't have the IEPA tariffs, surcharge, I'll call it, on top of the auto surcharge currently. That doesn't mean that the Section 232 tariffs or other tariffs may not be put in place against those Southeast Asian areas to make up for the loss of the Chinese. Got you. ...tariff. Okay. Are you expecting pricing in a level of increase across the assortment that you're installing to moderate a bit? One of the things that I think is important to understand is we've seen an increase in Minimum Advertised Pricing from the branded manufacturers in response to the cost increases that have been passed along. These are mandatory price increases that the manufacturers do to help protect the installer. But that's some of that MAP increase is what has also stimulated the trade-down. Yeah. Behavior by the consumer. I think that any relief from the minimum advertised price will be helpful in stemming and reversing some of the trade-down activity. Got you. Very helpful. Pivoting over to some of the actions Monro has taken to improve the performance of the business. There was some tough decisions that have been made, closing some locations, probably the right decision, even as they were difficult. What does the portfolio look like now? Which locations were closed? How healthy are the rest of the locations? Yeah, it's a great question. We announced in our earnings call in May the closure of stores in June, which we did. In our Q1, all stores were closed, 145 locations. The way we identified those locations was we really looked at, first of all, performance obviously, but went beyond that to look at the drivers of that performance and really looked at areas where the market had either moved away from the business or the demographics had changed within the areas that those stores were located. There were also some locations where, when we purchased them, maybe that was the only store we owned, but we did a couple of bolt-on acquisitions afterwards, and all of a sudden the landscape got a little bit crowded with those additional acquisitions that we purchased. We looked at all of that and made the decision based on store density, based on demographic data and also our upcoming renewal terms that we had coming up that might've been onerous on these lease locations, and made a decision that these were the 145 stores that really we felt wouldn't make the journey from a financial profile that we needed them to be at. We moved swiftly and closed those within a couple months, and moved very quickly then, got the inventory transferred the sales to other locations to the extent that we had that ability, and then moved quickly to monetization of the assets. Of the 145 stores, about 82 of the stores are now fully off of our books and divested. That's resulted in over $20 million of divestiture proceeds, which has allowed us to, you know, continue to invest in things like marketing and fund all of our capital allocation priorities as well. The importance of that is it's in our rearview mirror. We're focused on growth. We believe that we've got the right store portfolio as we stand today. Certainly, we're pressure testing that decision. Every time a lease comes up for renewal, you know, the store, as we say, is on trial for its life in terms of what's its role in our portfolio, and we make sure that that store still has the right place in our portfolio. You know, we anticipate that we will still have closures, but they'll be of that kind of lease renewal type. Yeah. Versus something that will be more proactive like we just did. One last point is a good amount of the 145 stores is moving back to our M&A strategy. You're gonna pick up some stores that, you know, are less well-situated than others. If you buy 10 locations, you might have two that you know down the road might encounter some problems. I think a lot of that, the closures that we did in Q1 were some of that hygiene. Yeah. Got you. Very, very helpful. What does the store strategy look like from here? Like, how aggressive can Monro be from a M&A standpoint, opening new locations? Because there is a big opportunity. It's just a question of pacing against that opportunity. 100%. We definitely believe that the M&A opportunity that is there for the entire aftermarket is one that Monro is well positioned to capitalize on. We've been internally focused on really delivering what we consider to be kind of the first leg of the stool of our long-term comp algorithm, which is our long-term top-line algorithm, which is consistent comp growth. Mm-hmm. We've done that. Over the last four quarters, we've delivered four consecutive quarters of comp store sales growth. First time we've done that in a few years. We delivered our first quarter this past quarter of two-year stack growth. First time we've done that in a few years. That's awesome. We're starting to see those green shoots and some of those proof points related to the platform stabilization strategy that I talked about earlier. I think as you start to move on from that, unit growth becomes the next logical conversation, particularly given the fragmentation, but also the white space that Monro has. We don't have stores in Texas. We don't have stores in Arizona. We don't have stores in Colorado. Three very good states in terms of new vehicle registrations and population migration into those states. The question is one of timing. You know, we still want to make sure that we don't take any foot off the gas and any distraction away from what we think is really important work that we're doing now. At the same time, acquisitions don't always show up exactly when you want them. I think our best way that I would describe us is we're preparing to prepare and talk, thinking about kind of thing. Yeah. Making sure that, you know, we have the most, first and foremost, which I think we've accomplished, we have the balance sheet available to do it. If you look at our balance sheet, I think we have $45 million at the last quarter in bank debt. You know, that's a 0.5x, 0.4x on our bank debt to EBITDA leverage. Really affords significant amount of dry powder for us when we're ready to deploy it. What we'd like to see is continued progress in our initiatives, and that truly and really translate into improved operating margin performance. Because I think as that improves, we start to see the ROIC move, and we start to see the path towards really earning our right to grow. Makes total sense. Let's dig into the factors that have driven those, the string of same-store sales increases, because it seems like it's a lot of internal initiatives, a lot of difficult execution factors that have led to more consistency. As you think about what has contributed to the success that's happened over the last four quarters, how would you rank the various contributors to what has enabled the organization to achieve this? Yeah, absolutely. I'll talk about it through the lens that we have talked about it on our earnings calls, which is through the four work streams. We touched a little bit upon each one, that maybe I'll just double-click. Yeah. On a few of them. The first, the closure of the stores. I don't think we need to spend more time on that, but it was very important to execute that quickly because what we didn't want FY26 to be was an exercise in drawn out store closures where the organization was distracted from its growth initiatives by the store closures. The truly important thing of that was our ability to get it done in two months. Then obviously a small team of our real estate and facilities are working on the monetization of the assets. The organization itself really was able to move on from that before Q2 even started. That's allowed us to focus on I would say the next mature area for us, which is our marketing efforts. I would say that the first thing I'll highlight is Monro brought in a new marketing executive, Tim Farrell. Tim came to us with experience at a private equity-owned auto service provider as well as a publicly traded oil business. In digital marketing, really strong, with the needs that we had in terms of acquiring new customers and retaining our existing customers. Tim, you know, in partnership with our AlixPartners consultation team, was able to first start to test out some of our marketing attributes. One of the big ones being really going after that higher value customer. As we talked about the value chain, we know that we have a lot of our customers are in the low income cohort. We were looking to get more of customers in that moderate cohort that really showed higher lifetime value and the propensity to spend on all of the services and value the services that we offer, not just looking for a price point. Through our partnership with the two parties and then also working with Google and Meta and things like that, we were able to find some lookalike customers that we can now market to through digital marketing and be a little bit more targeted. It's not a perfect science, but we can weight towards more of those, the customers that we want to see our ads. That marketing initiative was scaled in our Q2, and then by the end of our Q3 here, we're over 900 stores. Seen good results from it. Seen really good results. You know, we don't need to see it in all 1,100 of our stores because there are certainly areas where it makes sense to not make the investment. I'd say we're pretty much scaled- Yeah at that number of stores. We've seen really good returns in terms of return on ad spend and also margin return on investment. That means we're delivering more margin dollars than the advertising spend that we're making. That's the first, I would say, big thing that is driving our business. A lot of that spend is geared towards the tire category. I think you can see the performance in our tires, while has been pressured like the rest of the industry, we continue to believe we're taking share in the tire category, particularly tier one through three. if you optimize the partners you're dealing with, the way you're deploying your dollars, it can drive a much better return than how the allocation of those marketing dollars has been previously. Is Is that correct? That's correct. It's been incremental spend as well. What we did in Q1 and Q2 was really a rearrangement of the spend away from some channels into digital acquisition marketing. When we proved it out, we then ramped up the spending on the digital marketing. In our Q3, we spent $6 million more in marketing acquisition marketing than we did in the prior year. That was largely funded by a $7 million reduction in G&A related to our store closures. Mm-hmm. We're taking the benefits of the store closures, reinvesting it back in the marketing program for our go-forward stores. There's still more optimization to do. We're gonna start spending on different categories like oil, in a more meaningful way, and also trying out different channels than just pay-per-click. You know, we've started a little bit of streaming, but there are other opportunities for us as we look at the digital channel. That, that's the marketing benefits. More to come on that, and, like I said, we didn't get to a full run rate on the marketing spend till the end of December, so we expect to continue another good investment in our fourth quarter marketing spend. The next piece would be the merchandising. Another leader that we brought in, Kathryn Chang. Katie came to us. I knew her from a previous life. She worked for one of our big tire distributors, and also had experience at Lowe's, working in strategy and in categories. Really good balance of industry contacts, industry experience, well-respected in the industry that we operate in, but broad-based retail experience as well. With Katie, we've gone on another in a two-pronged path, the first being pricing. With help from the AlixPartners team, we've launched a machine learning tool that's really taking multiple elements from that can affect where the price should be of a tire, whether it's competitive set, whether it's place in the screen, price relative to the step above or below it, the promotions that it has available to it, either company-funded or vendor, and the ultimate elasticity of that SKU, that brand, to know, you know, how sensitive the consumer is to a price change. We've optimized our pricing using that tool, again, testing it in Q1, roll out in Q2, full roll out in Q3. The result of it is that, you know, we've taken price up in some SKUs, down in other SKUs, but on balance, we're finding that it's more supportive of tire volume. Yeah. And tire profitability. We're expanding that into other categories, but started with tires, clearly our most important category in terms of being sharp on price. On top of that has been the transformation of the screen from one that was maybe a little bit watered down, too many selections at each tier. Mm-hmm. to one that's much more focused, and I think I talked about this just a little bit earlier, wanting to sell more out of our screen to drive better margin, to drive easier in-store selling for our teammate and the guest. They don't need, and the guest doesn't want a million choices. They can only put four tires on their car. Yeah. They can't put them all. They really just need our recommendation and to know that whatever we recommend, we have in stock and we stand behind. For us, we've done that through partnering with our most trusted and valued strategic partners. It's very similar on the parts side. Concentrating a lot of our volume through fewer parts suppliers allowed us to take advantage of the scale that Monro has grown to enjoy. These are contributing to the margin expansion. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's why we expect as we look forward into next year, while we didn't talk about guidance, but, you know, we expect it to be a year. Not yet. Yeah. We expect it to be a year we can grow, and we can expand margins. Yeah It's on the backs of these initiatives. The final piece I would say is just the store operations, 'cause obviously, you can talk about all these other things, but if you don't deliver a good store experience, you know, it's all for naught. We're driving more cars to our stores, is the intent through our marketing. We have better assortment while they're there across all of our services, and now we just gotta do a really good job. Yeah. To do that, we've really leaned on the ConfiDrive Courtesy Inspection is the backbone of that guest experience. The number one thing that you want a guest to leave with is the feeling of trust. Mm-hmm. The way you can kind of institutionalize trust is to create a tool and a process that builds that trust, no matter who is working in the store that day. ConfiDrive, we believe, helps us do that because it takes the recommendations and the update to the guest about their vehicle a little bit out of the store manager's hands and standardizes the way we present that through standard measurements, a standard red, yellow, green form measured against MAP standards. Even more importantly, now as we move into this year, we're really leveraging photos. Where maybe a year ago, you would say one or two photos per ConfiDrive was the average, we're now at around six photos per ConfiDrive. Just to clarify, this is a tablet-based technology that will take pictures of the underbelly of the car, where you can directly point to the car, the vehicle owner to say, "Listen, you're gonna eventually have to address this. Your tires should be this thickness. They're this thickness. Your shock is on the verge of X. That's correct. Just for background, Monro has always had a paper-based courtesy inspection form. It used to be really, I'll call it ugly. We updated it to be the red, yellow, green MAP standard, but it was still paper-based. Just like a paper-based schedule, as I mentioned earlier, from a corporate standpoint, from a field management standpoint, you don't really know if the store is doing it unless you get into the store and flip through every invoice. Yeah. Make sure that there's a courtesy inspection completed attached to the invoice. Now you can just. Which now it's all structured data because it. That's the biggest managerial change, is your ability to hold people accountable to the structured data that comes out of the system because it's now electronic. Not to mention the trust and the benefit that it provides the guest by actually now having pictures and true measurements attached to the form. Two questions in this regard. What is the internal thinking on being able to use artificial intelligence with this seemingly very congruent process that where AI could be deployed? Just to give you a little bit of perspective, we had a session during lunch where we had an artificial intelligence expert came in and did some demonstrations. Coincidentally, one of the demonstrations was he typed into ChatGPT or one of the LLMs, "Go find me new tires for my Tesla." It went through Tire Rack. It went through all these different places where he was able to look. The question is, how are you able to deploy technology for doing some of the processes you have and to tap into some of this changing way that consumers are seeking the services that you offer to be best positioned to capitalize on that? Yeah, it's a great question. When we obviously have an AI roadmap that we're working through with our partners, I would say some early places where we see generative AI being deployed in our business, some no-brainer kind of places. First of all, we have a call center- Mm-hmm. Where currently we have a bunch of agents who are tier one. They take that call. Originally, the call would always go to the store. We launched the call center a couple of years ago and now have all of our stores on the call center to the point where most of the calls are going to the call center, not the store. The call center is then better equipped to handle that call. They don't have a guest in front of them. They're not running around through the bays. They can handle that store in a professional way, make sure we get their appointment scheduled for them at a time that they need, have visibility to other stores, and then also send the call back to the store if they need expertise from the store manager. That tier one can, you know, we're moving towards basically a completely AI bot experience, AI agent experience. What that'll allow us to do is invest in a tier two call center, where the people will be, and they will then be able to handle the questions that used to go to the store for clarification. Now we'll have a team of experts that can handle that next level, moving the cost to higher value add activities and further allowing the stores to truly be about walk-ins and the guest in front of you versus having to deal with the guest who's on online. That now moves over to the same experience within our website, obviously in our appointment scheduling, to move into kind of that virtual artificial intelligence-based scheduling program and scheduling system versus the more point and click that we currently have. That's the first wave. The second place that we're starting to use it is just through the reporting that we provide our field teammates. We have dashboards that allow our field teammates to assess the health of their business. We've since rolled something out called the DM Toolkit, which connects the daily scorecard that shows you all your output metrics with KPIs, which are all the input metrics that affect the output metrics. In between, we're leveraging artificial intelligence to come up with the recommendations that say, "This metric is being moved because this metric is moving over here. To improve this metric based on what we see, these are the three actions that should be taken in the store. From there, we develop a formalized action plan that both the store manager and the district manager sign off on. Now that's the accountability that we hold the store to make improvements. Of course, on the customer side might be a little bit further of a journey in terms of our artificial intelligence on the customer side other than you know the call center. But we are exploring ways where we can improve the guest experience through true artificial intelligence, including things as simple as helping them to diagnose their own problems on the website. Yeah. they can better understand maybe what is happening to their vehicle before they decide to begin the shopping process. If we were to bring this all together, we established that the auto services industry is still very fragmented, and meaning you probably still have a lot of small mom-and-pop players who are not able to do some of these things, and there's still meaningful market share. Monro has improved and optimized its asset base by closing stores and ensuring that the stores are properly supported. It's improved its merchandising, store operations. Now, if you take all of that and layer in what seems like some interesting artificial intelligence tools, does it enable Monro to achieve some of its goals and success faster than it would've otherwise? You know, we probably couldn't have had this question a year ago given some of the, not only progress that Monro has made, but how fast this technology has developed. Are you more excited about the future given what's already taken place and what you know? Absolutely. I would say that, you know, a good example of it already, I didn't even talk about it 'cause we talked about it earlier, is the machine learning on the pricing tool, right? There's also back office behind the scenes. We're looking at demand planning through artificial intelligence as well in our sourcing strategy for mins and maxes in the stores to optimize inventory. I think a lot of these work streams that we have are going to be technology AI enabled, where to your point, a few years ago, last year, we wouldn't have even considered that. I think that the initial reaction I would have though is, you know, we've done a lot of the foundational work already, maybe to bring the conversation full circle. Yeah That has been underappreciated, I think. You know, nobody loves a good-looking basement, you know. I mean, maybe you do. Yeah. Maybe not the cinder block part of it. No. We've built that foundation, but I think what we're building is the house on top of it at this point. We think that there's a lot of, I think, value that will be unlocked for a lot of the work that we've already done, and that these other opportunities that we have ahead of us will be accelerators. We cannot wait to see how this all plays out. Please join me in thanking both Brian as well as Felix from Monro on a great session. Thank you.