Conn’s Estimates It Lost 100 Selling Days From Hurricane Harvey, Says CEO
Retail performance at Conn’s “remains strong,” despite the impact of Hurricane Harvey on stores in southeast Texas, said CEO Norm Miller on a Thursday earnings call. Harvey made landfall Aug. 24 near Rockport, Texas, as a Category 4 storm. Conn’s…
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estimates it lost about 100 selling days from Harvey, he said. About 30 percent of Conn’s customer credit accounts “portfolio” is based in markets the storm “impacted,” said Miller. “However, we believe only a portion of these accounts were directly impacted by the storm.” The requirement that all in-house credit customers have property insurance “helped insulate the company’s net exposure to credit losses” from the storm, he said. Of those customers who were hard hit, many “may have experienced a temporary reduction in wages, job lost and shift in priorities,” he said. Banks and other financial companies “offered various degrees of financial relief to their customers,” such as “automatic payment holidays,” he said. Conn’s took a “disciplined” approach, such as by offering credit “due-date extensions” with no penalty, and “sought to show appropriate compassion to impacted customers, while staying very focused on our credit performance,” he said. “We believe that these concessions provided affected customers with necessary flexibility during this challenging time and minimized our exposure to credit losses from the hurricane.”