Shoe Carnival, Inc. has announced that due to lower customer traffic, sales for April and the first quarter ending May 3, 2003, are below previous expectations. Consequently, the Company has revised its sales and earnings expectations for the first quarter of fiscal 2003.
The Company now expects comparable store sales to increase 6 to 10 percent for the month of April, but decline 4 to 6 percent for the first quarter. Due to deleveraging of buying, occupancy and distribution expenses along with the promotional retail environment, gross margins are trending below plan for the quarter. Earnings for the first quarter are now expected to be in the range of $.38 to $.41 per diluted share.
Mark L. Lemond, president and chief executive officer commented, “Due to the Easter shift, we had expected customer traffic and sales to dramatically accelerate during the first two weeks of April. While sales increased during April, they have been below our plan. Geographically, our northern stores performed substantially better than our southern stores. The stores in the North experienced low single digit increases in both customer traffic and comparable store sales during the two weeks preceding Easter this year compared to the two weeks preceding Easter last year. During that same time period, our southern stores saw decreases in the low teens in customer traffic and comparable store sales. Our success in the North supports our belief that we are fashion-right with our product offering. Despite the lower than expected sales, our merchants continued to effectively manage inventories and we expect to end the first quarter with inventories flat to slightly up on a per-store basis compared to last year.”
