Dick's Sporting Goods Inc

inventory and having that excitement, assortment and the newness that is resonating so well at the exporting goods with the gross margin expansion and the much margin expansion that you're seeing is going to be the first and foremost order of priority as we look to the building blocks for how can this business be accretive. And keep in mind, you know, we talked about as part of the cleaning out of the garage that there are other unproductive assets that We are looking into the store portfolio where there are some unprofitable stores. But the opportunity we are looking that that is not only deciding if the store should be closed, but actually the opportunity is the reverse to say if those stores had access to the right product and the right innovation and the newness, can those stores be turned around and made profitable? So we are looking into that. We are absolutely looking into some of the unproductive assets that won't be part of the core business going forward. But to your point, it starts with sales and margin. And in addition to that, we'll look into cleaning up the garage to position the business for a profitable growth into 2026, especially from the back-to-school season of next year. Got you.

And my follow-up question is one of the key debates on the combined enterprise story right now is how do you ring-sense the Cordix business in order to ensure that that the integration of Foot Locker does not become a distraction to slow the momentum of the core business. It does look like in the fourth quarter you are anticipating a significant slowdown, guiding to a flat to slightly positive comp for the core business. So, A, what is fostering that expectation? And, B, given you have owned this business for a matter of months now, give us a sense of, how you anticipate that they won't become a distraction such that the core business can accelerate into next year and drive some growth on top of the accretion that you're anticipating for Foot Locker. Sorry, there was a lot of words in that question.

I got it. Thank you, Michael. One of the absolute prerequisites for us to do this acquisition was exactly what you're saying. We needed to ring-fence the the Dix team, and Dix needs to stay completely focused on driving our growth and our strategic priorities. And that is exactly what we are doing. I mean, eight, 10 weeks in now, I'm even more confident that that is how we're doing it. We've set up the team at Foot Locker. Ed is very much spending time over there. The Dix team is fully focused on the Dix priorities, and we're going to continue to just keep the team's sharing learnings, but not remotely working, not distracting each other from what their core priorities are. When we look at Q4, you mentioned the deceleration. I want to be really clear about this. We just came off of a 5.7% comp, and we're up against a 6.4% comp last year. So the fact that you see our comp slightly moderating in Q4, we actually just raised the comp, and the high end of our previous guidance now is the low end of our guidance. So We are really bullish on the holiday. We are just balancing that with an appropriate level of caution, as we always do. We don't ever guide to the best possible outcome. But we are pumped and ready to go on the Dix side for Q4.