Brad Beckham
Chief Executive Officer at O'Reilly Automotive
Thanks, Jeremy. Good morning, everyone and welcome to the O'Reilly Auto parts third quarter conference call. Participating on the call with me this morning are Brent Kirby, our President and Jeremy Fletcher, our Chief Financial Officer. Greg Henslee, our Executive Chairman and David O'Reilly, our Executive Vice Chairman are also present on the call. I would like to begin our call today by thanking our over 92,000 dedicated team members across North America for their incredible commitment to our customers during challenging conditions.
Our teams continued to deliver positive comparable store sales results and market share gains, which I will discuss in more detail in a moment. I'd first like to highlight the tremendous resolve our team showed as they persevered through major weather events since our last call. Hurricane Helene at the end of our quarter in September and Milton following shortly after our quarter end in October, along with substantial flooding in North Carolina created some very trying circumstances for our teams, our customers and our communities.
These events impact not only in the direct path of the storms, but also multiple teams across our store, distribution and support network, who actively prepare for the storms and navigate the recovery. Our business is built on people and relationships and our relentless commitment to providing excellent customer service to our customers is more critical than ever in a time of need. Our thoughts and prayers continue to be with the individuals and communities facing significant challenges in the aftermath of these storms.
I'm so very proud of the continued dedication of Team O'Reilly to our customers and we stand ready to do our part as these communities rebuild. As we noted in our press release yesterday, our third quarter comparable store sales increased 1.5%, stacked on-top of impressive 8.7% and 7.6% third quarter increases in 2023 and 2022 respectively. As impressive as our multi-year sales growth has been, our sales results for the third quarter of 2024 were below expectations and our high-performance standards.
We had a solid start to the quarter in July. However, sales softened at the end of the month and these trends continued throughout much of August and September. As a result, the cadence of our sales performance relative to our expectations was fairly consistent during the third quarter, with our team driving positive comp growth each month. We attribute the sales softness to a challenging industry demand backdrop I'll discuss in a moment and view the weather impact in the quarter as neutral with the exception of the final week in September where we saw a modest headwind from Hurricane Helene.
Overall, our comparable store sales growth continues to be driven by the strength in our professional business, where our team delivered another quarter of mid single-digit comps. Consistent with the first half of the year, the majority of our professional sales growth is being driven by growth in ticket counts. Our team is continuing to generate these share gains on top of mid-teens professional comps in the prior year. In a industry built on service, availability and strong customer relationships, our ability to not only defend the share we have taken, but also to capture incremental business is concrete evidence of the incredible consistency and execution of our team.
We are pleased with the sustained momentum we've been able to create in our professional business and see a long road of opportunity ahead of us in what remains a highly fragmented market. Our professional comps continued to be partially offset by pressure to DIY comparable store sales, which were down approximately 1% in the quarter due to negative ticket count comps.
Average ticket values were positive on both sides of our business and included a benefit from same SKU inflation of approximately 1%. On a category basis, we remain encouraged by solid performance within maintenance categories such as oil, filters and spark plugs. We also continue to see customers prioritizing the better and best level products on the value spectrum with as many customers trading up on the spectrum as those trading down to entry-level products.
Both of these dynamics reflect strong support of the value proposition for our consumers of maintaining and investing in an existing vehicle. The softness we are experiencing continues to be more pronounced in our discretionary category such as appearance chemicals, accessories, tools and performance parts. As we've noted in the past, these categories do not comprise a significant portion of our business and typically are not primary drivers of comparable store sales performance.
That said, this is an area where consumers can pull-back when being more cautious with their spend and in-turn create some volatility during pressure times. We are also seeing a trend of softness across some repair categories impacted by cumulative wear and tear on vehicles. We firmly believe that our experienced store teams of professional parts people supported by our robust tiered distribution network offer the best combination of service and availability in the industry.
We remain confident in our ability to outperform the market within these repair categories as conditions improve. While we are relentless in pursuing every opportunity to improve our service levels and capture incremental business, we view the results we are experiencing now as indicative of broader pressure across the industry. We believe current industry headwinds will be short-lived and remain confident in the long-term fundamental drivers of demand supported by the value proposition of investment in the repair and maintenance of existing vehicles.
Having experienced these cycles many times within our industry, we have confidence that the pressure we are experiencing today is not reflective of any change in the core demand drivers in the automotive aftermarket. The North American car park continues to grow and age and consumers place a heavy reliance on well-maintained vehicle to meet their daily transportation needs.
In our view, the average consumer is still reasonably healthy, but we believe is exhibiting an element of caution when managing their pocketbook in an environment of uncertainty surrounding price levels, macroeconomic conditions and an upcoming election. Caution as demonstrated by consumers is more impactful in our DIY business, as these consumers tend to be more economically pressured and perform work on their vehicles out of necessity.
Our DIY customer base continues to represent slightly over 50% of our business. Even with the non-discretionary nature of most of the products we sell, we are not completely insulated from a consumer who is motivated to limit spending wherever possible. However, consumers in our industry are very resilient and eventually adjust to adverse economic circumstances and will prioritize keeping their vehicle in good working condition.
This is especially true as our customer base is incentivized to keep their existing vehicles on the road at higher mileages in order to avoid the cost of replacement vehicle. While we are cautious that the current macro pressures could persist as we finish out 2024 and enter next year, we are confident our industry will return to more historical growth rates in the short-term.
Against this backdrop, we are tightening our full-year comparable store sales guidance and are now expecting a full-year increase of 2% to 3%. This update reflects our third quarter performance and how we're viewing the remainder of the year. As a reminder, our fourth quarter can be quite volatile given the variability of winter weather and consumer demand dynamics during the holiday season, as well as potential impacts this year from the November election.
We do expect a benefit in the fourth quarter as we lap our easiest comparisons of the year and have one less Sunday in our quarter. So far, our October sales performance has been consistent with our third quarter trends and in line with our updated guidance expectations. It's important for me to note that the update to our outlook has absolutely no impact on the attitude and aggressiveness of our field teams as they demonstrate as they go to the market on a daily basis.
No one inside our company thinks our high bar of performance and the standards we have set are impacted at all by conditions outside of our company, nor do we change the amount of hustle we demand of ourselves each and every day. We are very bullish on the future of our industry, but more importantly, the tremendous opportunity our company has to grow our share of both the DIY and professional markets. We will continue to execute the playbook that has driven success for our company for 67 years and are more committed than ever to providing the best possible customer service in every one of our markets. As I wrap-up my prepared comments, I'd like to once again thank Team O'Reilly for your commitment to our customers, our company and to your fellow team members.
Now, I'll turn the call over to Brent.
