“This holiday season, we'll be supplementing our existing team by hiring nearly 100,000 seasonal team members to meet expected demand and ensure we can deliver a joyful shopping experience.”

In context

“rom them. And as I've mentioned, throughout this holiday season, we'll be focused on highlighting value, helping families to celebrate the joy of the season in a way that fits their budget. Beyond our assortment, as we work to provide a great guest experience, we've enhanced our training of retail fundamentals to our teams. This is an important shift after years of operating in an environment that was anything but normal. After all, given the large number of team members we've hired over the last few years, a meaningful number of them have never experienced ordinary sales trends. As we've said many times, investments in our team are the most important ones we make. And today, we remain on our front foot, investing to ensure they can deliver a joyful industry-leading shopping experience. This holiday season, we'll be supplementing our existing team by hiring nearly 100,000 seasonal team members to meet expected demand and ensure we can deliver a joyful shopping experience. So now as I get ready to hand the call over to Christina, I think it would be useful to pause and assess how this year has progressed in comparison to our expectations. As a reminder, at the beginning of this year, we said we were expecting a challenging environment with the sales guidance range centered around flat comparable sales. In terms of profitability, we said we expected to grow our full year operating income by $1 billion or more with an expected EPS range of $7.75 to $8.75. So today, with 3 quarters of the year behind us, top line trends have obviously been tougher than expected, and we're firmly focused on getting back to growth. But the story on profitability has been very different. Through the first 3 quarters of this year, we've already grown operating income by more tha”