You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: Joining me on the call today are Gene Lee, Darden's Chairman and CEO; Rick Cardenas, COO; and Raj Vennam, CFO.
We plan to release fiscal 2021 fourth quarter earnings on June 24 before the market opens, followed by a conference call.
It's hard to believe it's been a year since the pandemic began to significantly impact our business.
When I reflect back on everything that has transpired, it is clear to me the strategy we developed six years ago provided a strong foundation to help us navigate this period of unprecedented change and uncertainty.
Our portfolio of iconic brands has been focused on executing our Back to Basics operating philosophy while leveraging our four competitive advantages of significant scale, extensive data and insights, rigorous strategic planning and our results oriented culture.
And while our four competitive advantages were critical to our business and operational success this past year, our significant scale and results oriented culture have played an outsized role in our ability to emerge stronger.
Our significant scale enabled us to quickly react to the turbulent operating environment.
The depth and breadth of our supply chain relationships ensured that we could adjust our product supply as needed without experiencing any significant interruptions.
We have our own dedicated distribution network, and the assurance of an uninterrupted supply chain provided consistency and a high level of certainty for our operators.
Our scale also enabled us to significantly accelerate the development of online ordering and several other digital initiatives and cascade them across our brands quickly and effectively.
The robust expansion of our digital platform over the past year has provided us a richer set of first-party data on new and existing guest.
Finally, our scale provided us with multiple levers to pull to ensure we have the liquidity we needed during the early days of COVID-19.
As soon as our liquidity needs were solved for, our brands were able to focus on strengthening their value propositions and transforming their business models.
As our Founder Bill Darden said, the greatest competitive advantage our Company has is the quality of our employees, evidenced by the excellent job they do every day.
Throughout this past year, Darden and our brands have emerged stronger and our success is a direct result of our team members and their relentless commitment to delivering safe and exceptional guest experiences.
That is why we've continued to invest in our team members throughout the past year.
Since March of 2020, we have invested more than $200 million in our people through programs such as paid sick leave, COVID-19 emergency pay and covering insurance payments and benefit deductions for team members who were furloughed.
These investments also include our recent decision to provide all hourly restaurant team members up to four hours of paid time off for the purpose of receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.
In addition, these investments include the one-time bonus we announced today, totaling approximately $17 million, which will impact nearly 90,000 hourly team members.
Beginning Monday, every hourly team member, tipped and non-tipped, will earn at least $10 per hour, inclusive of tip income.
Additionally, we are committed to raising that amount to $11 per hour in January 2022 and to $12 per hour in January 2023.
These investments further strengthen our industry-leading employment proposition.
Lastly, I continue to be impressed and inspired by our team members who have shown extraordinary resilience and passion during the past year.
You are the heart and soul of our Company and on behalf of the management team, we're extremely grateful to you.
As Gene said, it's hard to believe we've been operating in this environment for a year.
In addition to executing our Back to Basics operating philosophy, our restaurant teams have continued to successfully manage through this situation by remaining focused on the four key priorities we established at the onset of the pandemic: one, ensuring the health and safety of our team members and guests; two, simplifying operations and strengthening execution; three, deploying technology to improve the guest experience; and four, transforming our business model.
The health and safety of our team members and guests remains our top priority.
Throughout the past year, our team members have done a fantastic job of upholding our safety protocols while taking great care of our guests.
Today, even as restrictions are easing in some parts of the country, we continue to follow our enhanced safety measures.
This includes daily team member health monitoring, requiring masks for every team member, enhanced cleaning procedures and social distancing protocols.
Our second priority has been to continue finding ways to simplify our operations and drive in-restaurant execution at each of our brands.
This environment gave us a once in a lifetime opportunity to evaluate every aspect of how we operate and make decisions we would not have been able to do in a normal operating environment.
A good example of this work all of our brands have done to streamline menus and remove low preference or low satisfaction items.
This focus makes it easier for our restaurant teams to consistently execute our highest preference items which means we are serving our most popular dishes to more guests.
In fact, a year ago, the top 10 entrees at Olive Garden accounted for about 48% of guest preference, and today they account for approximately 55%.
Reducing the bottom selling items eliminates distractions and allows us to execute at a high level.
We have dramatically reduced low volume items which reduces the need to prepare them, saving time and reducing food waste.
For example, at LongHorn Steakhouse, the number of total items with less than 1% preference is down to eight from more than 25 pre-COVID.
Third, we continue to deploy technology to improve the guest experience and build on the progress we have made over the last 12 months.
When the pandemic began and our dining rooms were closed, we were able to quickly roll out online ordering at our brands that had yet to deploy it.
We also streamlined the curbside to-go pickup process by rolling out the Curbside I'm Here text message notification feature so guests can easily alert us when they arrive.
These technology enhancements and other process improvements helped Olive Garden achieve new all-time high guest satisfaction ratings for delivering on time and accurate off-premise experiences during a quarter that included three busy off-premise days: Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day.
In fact, Valentine's Day was our highest sales day since the start of the pandemic.
Also during the quarter, several brands, including Olive Garden LongHorn implemented enhancements to their websites to streamline the online checkout process.
This resulted in a meaningful reduction in order abandonment rates.
Our continuous digital transformation is resonating with our guests.
In fact, during the quarter, nearly 19% of total sales were digital transactions.
Further, 50% of all guest checks were settled digitally, either online or on our tabletop tablets or via mobile pay.
We have made great strides in our digital journey over the past year and we will continue to strengthen our digital platform and provide our brands with the tools to compete more effectively.
And finally, the investments we've made to simplify our business through menu and process simplification have resulted in significant transformation of our business model.
For example, across Darden, our hourly labor productivity has improved by over 20%, with some brands improving by well over 30% such as Cheddar's.
We thought it would be helpful to provide a bit more insight into what the business model transformation has done to Cheddar's P&L.
Year-to-date through the third quarter, Cheddar's has grown the restaurant level margins by over 300 basis points on a year-to-date sales retention of 75%.
When Cheddar's reaches 100% of the pre-COVID sales, we expect their restaurant level margins to be well in the high teens.
While we don't intend to continue to provide this level of detail in the future, this illustration helps to highlight the business model improvements our brands are making.
As we have mentioned previously, the simplifications across all of our businesses are expected to result in a 150 basis points of margin improvement with 90% of pre-COVID sales.
Our business model transformation also strengthens our belief in our ability to open value creating new restaurants across all of our brands.
Due to this transformation, the sales required to exceed our return expectations are much lower today.
In fact, we opened six new restaurants during the quarter and each is exceeding our expectations.
As Gene said, our success is a direct result of their hard work.
Being of service is at the heart of our business and our team members demonstrate that every day through their commitment to our guests and each other.
For the third quarter, total sales were $1.73 billion, a decrease of 26.1%.
Same restaurant sales decreased 26.7%.
EBITDA was $236 million, and diluted net earnings per share from continuing operations were $0.98.
Turning to this quarter's P&L.
Food and beverage expenses were 80 basis points higher than last year, primarily driven by investments in food quality and mix.
Restaurant labor was 20 basis points higher.
As Gene mentioned, we invested approximately $17 million in team member bonuses this quarter.
Excluding the team member bonuses, restaurant labor would have been 80 basis points favorable to last year.
The favorability to last year was driven by hourly labor improvement of 280 basis points due to efficiencies gained from operational simplifications Rick discussed.
The hourly labor improvement was partially offset by deleverage in management labor due to sales declines.
Restaurant expense per operating week was 16% lower than last year, driven by lower workers' compensation, utilities, repairs and maintenance expense.
Restaurant expense as a percent of sales was 250 basis points higher than last year due to sales deleverage.
Marketing spend was $52 million lower than last year, with total marketing 200 basis points favorable to last year.
This all resulted in restaurant level EBITDA margin of 18.4%, only 150 basis points below last year.
Excluding the one-time hourly team member bonus, restaurant level EBITDA margin would have been even stronger at 19.4%.
We impaired one Yard House restaurant this quarter, resulting in a non-cash impairment charge of $3 million.
This location was in Portland, Oregon, and had been temporarily closed since April.
We finalized the legal recovery during the quarter, resulting in favorability of $16 million.
This favorability was partially offset by $8.8 million of mark-to-market expense on our deferred compensation.
Excluding these two items, G&A would have been $86 million this quarter.
As a reminder, the mark-to-market expense is related to significant appreciation in both the Darden share price and equity market this quarter, and due to the way we hedge this expense, it is mostly offset on an after-tax basis.
Our hedge reduced income tax expense by $7.2 million, resulting in a net reduction to earnings after-tax this quarter of $1.6 million.
Our effective tax rate of 2.3% this quarter was unusually low due to two factors.
First, the tax benefit from the deferred compensation hedge I just mentioned reduced the tax rate by 5 percentage points.
Second, the stock option exercises this quarter drove approximately $7 million of excess tax benefit, reducing the tax rate by 4.8 percentage points.
After adjusting for these factors, our normalized effective tax rate for the third quarter would have been 12.1%.
Looking at our segment performance this quarter, Olive Garden saw segment profit margin increase versus last year despite sales declines.
Our continued focus on simplified operations, which significantly reduced direct labor, combined with lower marketing expenses, drove this margin improvement.
Segment profit margin declined for LongHorn as higher than average beef inflation and other investments drove higher food and beverage expense.
In addition, both labor and restaurant expenses were higher as a percent of sales due to sales deleverage.
Segment profit margin declined for Fine Dining and Other segments due to deleverage across the P&L from the significant sales decline year-over-year.
We generated over $240 million of free cash flow this quarter, ending the third quarter with over $990 million in cash.
Our recent performance has given us better visibility into the durability of our cash flows.
Therefore, we will return to our 50% to 60% dividend payout target applied to future earnings to determine our dividend.
To that end, the Board declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.88 per share, matching our pre-COVID dividend level.
The ability to resume pre-COVID dividend levels just 12 months after suspending it is a testament to the strength of our business model and the durability of our cash flows.
And finally, today we announced a new share repurchase authorization of $500 million which replaces all previous authorizations.
Turning to the fourth quarter.
As of today we have 99% of our dining rooms open with some capacity.
Taking that all into consideration, we currently expect, for the fourth quarter, total sales of approximately $2.1 billion, EBITDA between $345 million and $360 million and diluted net earnings per share from continuing operations between $1.60 and $1.70 on a diluted share base of 132 million shares.
We've also updated our full year outlook for capital expenditures to be between $285 million and $295 million, and we anticipate opening 33 net new restaurants for the year.
We continue to believe we can achieve pre-COVID EBITDA dollars on 90% of pre-COVID sales, resulting in 150 basis points of EBITDA margin growth, and our Q4 outlook falls within this framework.
As we move beyond the fourth quarter, there are additional costs such as training, travel, growth cost, incremental marketing and other investments that we expect will need to come back into the P&L.
And while it's too early to provide insights into fiscal '22 sales and earnings, we did want to provide some preliminary guidance for a few items.
We expect total capital spending between $350 million and $400 million and open approximately 35 new restaurants in fiscal '22.
We also anticipate an effective tax rate in the range of 12% to 13% for fiscal '22.

user
compname reports q3 revenue $1.73 bln.
compname reports fiscal 2021 third quarter results; announces team member investments; declares quarterly dividend; authorizes new $500 million share repurchase program; and provides fiscal 2021 fourth quarter outlook.
sees q4 earnings per share $1.60 to $1.70 from continuing operations.
q3 revenue $1.73 billion versus refinitiv ibes estimate of $1.61 billion.
qtrly reported diluted net earnings per share from continuing operations were $0.98.
sees q4 2021 total sales of approximately $2.1 billion.
anticipates opening 33 net new restaurants and total capital spending between $285 and $295 million for full fiscal year.

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