As a group our Home Depot vendors are up 9% YTD over the prior year comp for US stores, Canadian stores are up 96%. (the Canadian sample is smaller)   Lowe’s stores are up 2% YTD over the prior year comp for US stores.   Home Depot will be releasing Q3 2012 earnings results on November 13 and Lowe’s releases their earnings on Nov 19.  We typically find that our vendors who are aggressively using POS data to drive business improvements are out in front of their competitors so I wonder how earnings overall will compare to our sample group of vendors who are doing pretty well on a year over year basis?