David Edmondson Quotations

We believe that the company's strategy is sound. But we must move at a much faster pace with a greater sense of urgency. The poor fourth quarter performance caused us to take a much deeper look at the state of our business and resulted in the launch of a turnaround plan.

There is a reason, obviously, to be prudent as we go into the fourth quarter.

Hundreds of children have been recovered through the Amber Alert plan, and the ability to ultimately deliver these alerts directly to the phones of nearly 200 million wireless subscribers can dramatically increase the reach of the program. Bottom line, if you have a wireless phone of any kind, there's no excuse for not being a subscriber to wireless Amber Alerts.

We have made significant progress in executing our improvement initiatives this year, yet it's clear that we need to move much faster, more aggressively and with more urgency to enhance company performance.

Sales results were good in many low-margin non-wireless categories; however, we experienced lower sales in high-margin categories. In addition, wireless sales and profits were below our expectations. The poor fourth quarter performance caused us to take a much deeper look at the state of our business and resulted in the launch of a turnaround plan including the significant fourth quarter inventory write-down.

The most profitable categories of the business saw a sales decline in the fourth quarter. We saw very significant low-margin category growth, but frankly the dollars were simply not large enough in terms of gross profit dollars to offset the other things that were happening in the business.

At this time the board and I have agreed that it is in the best interest of the company for new leadership to step forward so that our turnaround plan has the best possible chance to succeed, as I know it will.