An economy that was clearly bad has gone to worse after those (Sept. 11) tragedies took place,

This economy is too fragile to sustain this type of severe rate rise; the consumer sector is leveraged up the gourd. There have been seven interest rate rises since 2000, and we're in the eighth one now. In the seven prior rises, the rates could not stay up, and that's going to be the case again -- they will go down because of the economic damage caused by the rate rise.

The risk to the economy is that we lose the consumer -- and I think we are losing the consumer.

We're acquiring a great brand, [and] introducing it into our stores will attract new shoppers...who will connect with our apparel departments better than they would have in the past,

Clearly business is slowing down. Everybody is cutting back a bit, but our focus has been to structurally change how we do business because how we do business is not working,

We probably are going to become a little bit less of a department store, with less emphasis on apparel, ... I think the exit from cosmetics is an example of this. We are very much in the process of reworking our business model and how we go to market and how we spend money.