Big Lots reports Q1 adjusted EPS ($4.51), consensus ($3.91)

Reports Q1 revenue $1.0B, consensus $1.04B. CEO Bruce Thorn stated, “While we made substantial progress on improving our business operations in Q1, we missed our sales goals due largely to a continued pullback in consumer spending by our core customers, particularly in high ticket discretionary items. We remain focused on managing through the current economic cycle by controlling the controllables. As we move forward, we’re taking aggressive actions to drive positive comp sales growth in the latter part of the year and into 2025, and to maintain year-over-year gross margin rate improvements, all driven by progress on our five key actions…While near-term conditions have been challenging, we’re not slowing down on making progress to transform our business. The current financial performance does not yet reflect the stronger business model that we’ve created through our five key actions, but we expect the fruits of those efforts to become more apparent in the back half of the year.”