By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
I wonder, as you’re kind of breaking out what you’re kind of feeling in the customers and what you’re hearing from customers versus, and stacking that up against, what you’re seeing, the data that’s coming through on a per ticket basis. What is that average ticket looking like if you’re kind of thinking about some of the comparisons that you would normally run?
00:23 Stu
Hey, you know what? Right now, Brad, sales feel brisk right now. We’re coming into Easter. Our catering orders are up with, uh, customer. Our catering orders are up, um, and, and, uh, you know, we feel good about the sentiment of customers. You know what everybody’s really happy about? These guys right here. Eggs, okay? The egg prices are almost going down in half, so people are happy. I’ll tell you what I’m worried about. How about this guy right here? Look at this. Okay. How about this guy? That’s one of our salmon, right? So this is what we get from Canada, um, every year. We get this, we get them every week. We do a half a million pounds of salmon. So that price, I just talked to our fish fire this morning. No increase in price. The thing that makes me a little worried, like right now is bananas. We get from Costa Rica, uh, and down south, those, and, and same with these pineapples. These are all southern, you know, so those have been bumped 10% on the tariffs, but our suppliers are holding. So sort of the mood right now, it’s a lull before the storm. None of our suppliers have been raising their prices. A lot of them are just saying, let’s hold on and see what’s gonna happen here over the next two, three weeks. Because in our business, we gotta do volume. We gotta do a lot of volume. When you raise prices, sales go down. So we are not raising prices right now. We’re trying to hold and, and, and we’re taking it day by day.
04:11 Speaker A
Stu, uh, first and foremost, you always know that I love having you on the show because I never know what you’re about to pick up. I did not have you picking up a whole salmon on my bingo card here. So thank you for surprising to the upside, as always here. You also picked up a carton of eggs, and wholesale egg prices have dropped significantly in recent weeks, according to the USDA. Are you seeing this fall in wholesale trickle down to consumer prices?
05:04 Stu
Well, you know what? A lot of this has to do with energy. We’re still spending a lot of money, um, you know, our kilowatt hours, even in our company, have have almost doubled this year now. Um, and so energy’s a big thing, transportation costs to get, you know, bananas, to get bananas and pineapples and, you know, like another thing that worries me, all the lamb that, that’s coming in from New Zealand right now. We have our own little, quote, tariff, uh, negotiation going on with our supplier. But here’s the thing. It’s Mary Beth. They have a beautiful little family farm in, in New Zealand. They raised the best, you know, uh, uh, animals and sheep, of course, New Zealand, more, there’s more sheep than humans. But, you know, and the, and their beautiful little family business. I’m gonna try this afternoon and work it out. She’s gonna want the 10%. I’m gonna try to say, hey, Mary Beth, you could hang on and do 50/50. I’ll eat half of the tariff plus 5%. You eat half the tariff plus. I did that during COVID. She kept our shelves full. It’s my turn to help this small family business out. I don’t want them to, to, to be harmed, uh, uh, too much.