“including rapidly changing consumer preferences, inflation at 40-year highs, volatile supply chain conditions and rising fuel and transportation rates that are expected to add well over $1 billion of cost this year.”

In context

“e and downside potential when we make any forecast, the macro and consumer risks in the back half of this year feel skewed to the downside. That's why even in the face of consistent business trends in recent months, we've undertaken the significant cost and effort to remove risk from our inventory commitments. It's why we're stubbornly focused on real-time monitoring and communication of evolving conditions, and why we've asked our team to build flexibility and agility into their plans. With that mindset, if trends move away from what we're seeing today, we're ready to quickly adjust. So now before I turn the call back over to Brian, I want to emphasize why we're so confident in our long-term potential, even as we navigate a very challenging environment in a year of multiple challenges, including rapidly changing consumer preferences, inflation at 40-year highs, volatile supply chain conditions and rising fuel and transportation rates that are expected to add well over $1 billion of cost this year. Our business continues to generate historically strong traffic increases, low to mid-single-digit revenue growth and unit share gains across all of our core merchandising categories. And even in the face of unprecedented profit rate pressure driven by the host of factors I just listed, we remain profitable with an after-tax ROIC in the mid-teens. In fact, if our performance in the fall is consistent with the revenue growth and operating margin rates I outlined earlier, we remain positioned in 2022 to generate higher operating margin dollars than we did in 2019. That's what we mean when we say we have built a durable model. And today, while we expect conditions to remain challenging in the near term, the operating margin rate improvement we're projecting in the back half of the year sh”