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: On a per share basis, third quarter earnings were $1.52 compared with $2.52 last year and $1.16 for the third quarter of 2019.
During the third quarter of 2021, the Company recorded pre-tax adjustments to earnings, including a $30 million impairment in one of the company's minority investments, $13 million of costs related to the wind down of the Footaction banner, and $14 million of acquisition and integration costs related to WSS.
As a reminder, last year's third quarter included a pre-tax non-cash gain of $190 million related to the higher valuation of GOAT.
On a non-GAAP basis, earnings per share were $1.93 compared to $1.21 for the third quarter of last year, and $1.13 for the third quarter of 2019.
Andy Gray, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer will then provide color on the key product and customer engagement highlights from the quarter.
Andrew Page, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer will then review our third quarter results and provide guidance for the current fiscal year.
We are pleased to report that the third quarter was another great performance for our company, as we comped a strong back-to-school season from last year, battled supply chain challenges and delivered impressive bottom line results.
We also successfully completed the WSS acquisition during the quarter and subsequent to the quarter end, closed the Atmos transaction as well, bringing both of these great companies into the Foot Locker family of brands.
As we begin the fourth quarter, in the all-important holiday season, we continued to see three macro trends working in our favor.
Number 1 is the democratization of sneaker culture, with more brands and more consumers participating in the ecosystem of sneaker culture.
With our position as a multi-branded retailer through Foot Locker, Kids Foot Locker, Champs Sports x Eastbay and now, WSS and Atmos, we have an incredible connection to the marketplace and consumers.
Second is the growing emphasis on fitness and self-care, as people look to offset stress and work-from-home conditions by getting up and staying active to maintain their physical and mental wellness.
Whether it's home fitness, running, training, hiking or any number of other sport fitness categories, we see consumers are turning to and returning to Foot Locker to meet their fitness needs, and we see this trend increasing.
And third is the overall athleisure trend and further casualization of society.
Some of this is aided by the continued work-from-home environment, some of it by the new return-to-work hybrid model.
But overall, people want to be more comfortable, and that certainly plays into our strengths, especially around footwear, but also in our apparel business, which has been performing extremely well this year.
All of this to say, consumer demand remains strong, driven by mega trends and consumer adoption and demand that favors the brands and the categories we sell.
Spending continues to be fueled by people wanting to look good as they venture out again.
In terms of the global supply chain, we're all aware of the challenges.
It's a fluid situation that we are making every effort to manage, and we do have a few advantages.
First, we are a truly multi-branded retailer, with a diversified product mix serving a broad range of consumer needs across price points.
We like our position in terms of our assortment of brands, and we benefit from the very strong partnerships we have built with them over many decades.
In times like these, our partnerships are mutually beneficial, enabling us to look together as far into the future as possible to plan, collaborate and be solution-oriented.
Second, carrier capacity is something we always keep a close eye on, and we are much better positioned this year than in the past with FedEx, UPS and our pool carriers and with the US Postal Service as another alternative.
We've got better visibility than we've ever had on where their hot spots are, so we can manage customer expectations appropriately.
Third, we feel good about our distribution center staffing and capacity levels.
We are building in some additional flex capacity for the fourth quarter to ensure we are doing everything we can to effectively mitigate any macro pressures.
And fourth, we are focused on leveraging the advantage that having approximately 3,000 stores globally offers us to serve our customers and deliver the types of diversified product offerings, inclusive of apparel, accessories and complementary products that our customers come to us for.
In the third quarter, we successfully launched our controlled brands.
We are especially excited about this offense.
Our teams have been working hard to bring it to life in a big way and we are poised to push these brands meaningfully forward in the coming seasons.
At the same time, we are expanding our range of brand partners using programs like our innovative greenhouse incubator and LEED initiative to invest in up-and-coming designers, new concepts, exclusive collaborations and curated partnerships, all of which will ultimately help us provide a broader range of product offerings to our consumers.
And finally, but perhaps most importantly, we are benefiting from great connectivity with our consumers.
Elevating the customer experience has long been one of our strategic pillars.
We have great brand awareness and consumers continue to come to Foot Locker first.
I believe we have the best team in retail, the best partners in the business and we feel very good about where we're headed for the upcoming holiday season and beyond.
Turning to our recent acquisition of WSS.
It's been a great start with our back-to-school and overall Q3 results.
Some of the early progress includes setting up our team addition offense for WSS, which we believe is a big operational opportunity to get speed-to-market to support their apparel business.
We have also looked at our supply chain, technology and other operating contracts, and we've been able to secure some wins here as well.
All that to say, the early integration work is off to a good start.
We are very bullish on WSS, driven in part by their strong connection to the Hispanic consumer and because it's very complementary to our existing portfolio from a consumer perspective, a merchandise assortment and pricing approach and the geography and real estate standpoint.
We are encouraged to see new WSS stores perform above their budgets, giving us confidence to continue to expand the store base in the coming year.
Texas is our next WSS growth market.
Plans are well underway for Dallas and Houston, and we also see some fill-in market opportunities.
We continue to open stores in Northern California.
Turning now to Atmos.
We are excited to have closed the acquisition earlier this month.
This premium globally recognized, digitally led brand sits at the center of sneaker culture.
We are thrilled to have Hommyo san and his talented team officially onboard.
Similar to WSS, we are bullish on this high-growth business and are well underway with the integration process.
Turning to Champs Sports x Eastbay.
It's been about 18 months since we combined these operating units.
And in late January, we will be opening our first home field store in South Florida, which is the new concept where these two banners come together bringing the best of what they do individually to one singular location.
Our first home field store will be the largest format we have in our global fleet at about 35,000 gross square feet.
We will have several features that drop on the equity and the DNA of Champs Sports and Eastbay, inclusive of the best global brands and sport lifestyle performance.
We'll also have a dedicated zone for Eastbay training and performance footwear and apparel.
It will feature an athlete fuel station for guests with protein shakes and smoothies, nutrition bars and post-recovery workout-type supplements that consumers can enjoy in the space itself or buy products to take home with them.
There will be several digital and interactive parts of the store, including an activation space where we will hold coaching clinics training sessions and skill development or yoga workouts.
We will be live and interactive in bringing sport into the space, and we are excited to be able to connect with the community through those experiences.
We'll also be able to leverage our Eastbay Team Sports division through existing and new relationships with key schools.
In fact, there are 12 high schools within a 10-mile radius of the home field location.
We will look to expand the relationships with those schools, building bridges and opportunities with the athletic directors, coaches and athletes themselves.
We are very excited to see this experience come together as we pilot this new concept.
Our team has done an incredible job executing on the wind down and transitioning some of the locations to other banners.
To date, we've converted 18 locations, and there are another nine under construction, with over half of them rebranding as Foot Locker.
About 40% is Champs Sports and the remaining 10% of Kids Foot Locker.
Without exception, we have seen encouraging productivity gains with these stores performing above expectations and well above their previous results.
We have negotiated or worked with our lease flexibility to close about 85% of the total fleet by year-end.
We are continuing our negotiations with landlords for the approximately 35 stores that will remain open into fiscal '22.
We've had a great partnership with our vendors and are pleased with the vendor community's reception to the Footaction transition.
We've been able to transfer not only inventory, but also access to some brands and concepts that will bode well for some of our go-forward banners, especially Champs Sports and Eastbay.
Yesterday, we announced some exciting organizational enhancements to advance Foot Locker's long-term growth in omnichannel objectives.
Frank Bracken, Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer, North America, has been named Chief Operating Officer effective immediately.
In his new role, Frank will oversee the company's global operating divisions, the omni customer experience, inclusive of global technology services and supply chain, and our global franchise JV partnerships.
Susie Kuhn, Senior Vice President, General Manager of Foot Locker Europe, has been named as President of EMEA and General Manager of Foot Locker Europe, also effective immediately.
Andy Gray, Chief Commercial Officer, will expand his responsibility by leading our global commercial unit including product, the powering up of our controlled brands, omni-marketing, membership and commercial development and the LEED initiative.
Together, the announced leadership appointments and organizational enhancements underscore our focus on aligning our commercial, operations and finance functions to drive organizational productivity.
With a more agile operational structure, we will be in an even stronger position to expand our customer base and grow our connectivity with sneaker culture and the communities we serve.
Overall, our financial position remains strong.
Our vendor relationships are very strategic in nature, and we continue to obsess around our customers, whether it's through our digital channels, social media, FLX or an in-store customer experience.
Our solid Q3 performance is why we remain optimistic about the strength of our portfolio, the power of our assortments and the loyalty of our customers.
We are confident that this positive momentum will continue into 2022 and beyond.
It is their dedication and hard work that made these outstanding results possible and will enable us to continue to drive our business forward and fulfill our purpose to inspire in a power youth culture.
Throughout the quarter, we remain laser-focused on continuing to strengthen our relationships with our existing consumers and bringing new ones into our business.
This enabled us to beat our results from last year and continued to outpace 2019.
To give you a breakdown of our performance, our footwear business decreased low single digits, while our apparel and accessory businesses were both up double digits.
All families of business were up relative to 2019.
While our total men's business was down slightly, we saw acceleration in women's and positive momentum in kids' driven by our success at drawing in more consumers and the expansion of our sneaker community.
Again, all areas were positive to 2019.
We often saw a great vendor diversity showcasing the health of our category and the expansion of our consumers' taste preferences as they fill their sneaker and apparel closet.
The majority of our top 20 vendors posted gains driving excitement in their respective categories, all of which helped to offset supply chain disruption that impacted the flow of some of our franchisees and launch products.
Another area of our business that continues to gain momentum is apparel, which was up double digits in men's, women's and kids' versus both LOI and 2019.
Our branded business remains strong across categories, and our own brand business has expanded and accelerated.
In addition to our CSG business, which is our Champs Sports private label offering, we reimagined our Eastbay performance wear in the third quarter with a cross-category launch featuring Jalen Hurts.
And we introduced our Locker brand for the first time to great reception from our customers.
This momentum continues into Q4.
We are launching more own brands, including Cozy, a new apparel brand tailored for our female consumer.
We just launched All City by Just Don, a lifestyle brand created with Don C rooted in basketball and sneaker culture that is inspired by the spirit of community.
Don C has been a part of the cultural vanguard for decades as a music executive, fashion designer, sneaker collaborator and brand storyteller and this launch immediately resonated with the next generation of streetwear enthusiasts.
And we have upcoming exclusive partnerships with more taste makers and celebrity curators like Melody Ehsani as we continue to add dimension to our apparel business.
Store retailing continues to evolve and enable us to connect with our consumers as we work with all of our partners to deliver a strong pipeline of exciting exclusive product concept that set us apart in the marketplace.
We delivered 15 exclusive concepts in the third quarter, which were significant in terms of scale and consumer engagement.
And our powerful consumer concept offense continues throughout the holiday season, including Alter and Reveal with Nike, Adidas and Trey Young, Crocs and AWAKE collaboration, Louis De Guzman and New Balance, and a whole host of excitement from PUMA, including LaMelo Ball, LOL surprise and Staple.
This offense, together with our positioning in the key footwear franchises, continued seasonal expansion with an increased focus on boots and fleece and a very strong pipeline of product and inventory in apparel, leaves us well positioned to delight the consumer in the holiday season.
Local areas of development for the team in the quarter included enhancing our mobile and app experience where we see 90% of our online traffic come from evolving our launch reservation process with new data algorithms to improve fairness and work toward ensuring unique individual winners and enhancing our buy online, pick-up in store experience, leading to greater adoption.
Lastly, the ongoing expansion of our community stores and geo offense is a critical component of our strategy.
During the quarter, Downey in LA and Brixton in London opened their doors to great reaction from our consumers.
We also continued to build community through the rollout and expansion of our FLX membership program.
We now have over 28 million enrolled members with over 3 million joining in this quarter alone.
We remain encouraged by the results and engagement of our members who spend more and shop more often than nonmembers.
And there's still a lot of opportunity ahead of us with the program recently launching in Italy, Germany and Spain.
As we push our consumer-led offense forward, it's a combination of product leadership and diversity, enhanced omni experiences and our focus on community and purpose that continues to drive our leadership in the industry and strengthen our relationship with our consumers.
Let me now pass the call over to Andrew.
As we navigate the ongoing supply chain challenges, our strong third quarter results demonstrate the resilience and flexibility that our diversified product mix and our strong vendor relationships afford us.
During my review of the results, I would like to note that in addition to comparing to last year, I will also reference comparisons to the third quarter of 2019 where it is helpful.
On a year-over-year comparable basis, our third quarter sales were up 2.2% and earnings per share grew almost 60%.
Impressively, this strong result was on top of the robust 7.7% comp gain in last year's third quarter and speaks to the strong connection we have built with our customer base.
This connection was apparent during the back-to-school period where we saw strong customer engagement in our stores, digital and social channels, and growing attachment to our key initiatives like our FLX membership program.
From a cadence perspective, with school openings on a more normal schedule, August led with a low double-digit comp gain, while September comps, which benefited last year from the later school openings, declined high single digits.
We then saw momentum turn meaningfully positive in October with comp sales up low single digits.
Total sales for the quarter rose to $2.2 billion or a 3.9% increase over the prior year and up 13.3% versus the third quarter of 2019.
This includes a $56 million contribution from WSS since the close of the transaction in mid-September.
For the third quarter, our global fleet was open for 97% of possible operating days with temporary closures in Australia, New Zealand, certain markets in Asia and Germany.
Our year-over-year comp sales through our store channel increased 4.2%.
Store traffic increased approximately 30% compared to fiscal 2020 as our customers continued to want an in-store experience with our multi-brand product assortment.
When compared to fiscal 2019, traffic was down high single digits, and conversion was up significantly.
In our digital channels, which continued to be an important connection point with our customers, sales were down 4.6% in the third quarter as we lapped an approximate 50% increase from last year.
Digital sales penetration rate was 19.8%.
While down 160 basis points in 2020, it was well above the 15.3% from 2019.
Our customers continued to overwhelmingly start their shopping journey with us digitally.
And as we continued to create a seamless omni experience, they can easily close their transactions through our apps, our websites or in our physical stores.
Turning now to some highlights of our three geographies.
In North America, our Champs Sports, Foot Locker Canada and Kids Foot Locker banners led the way with low single-digit comp gains, at the top of last year's double-digit increases.
The other North American banners posted comp declines with Foot Locker in the U.S. down low single digits, Eastbay down high single digits and Footaction in wind-down mode closed the quarter down over 20%.
In EMEA, pent-up demand continues to drive growth as stores reopened across all countries with strength across apparel, women's footwear and strategic brands like Converse and New Balance, leading to another double-digit comp gain at Foot Locker Europe and high teens comp gain at Sidestep.
Our EMEA fleet was opened 99% of possible operating days in the quarter compared to 96% in the third quarter of last year.
Our APAC region was down slightly due to ongoing challenges related to COVID.
The fleet was open approximately 55% of possible operating days, down from 82% in Q2 of this year.
Foot Locker Pacific leveraged strong demand through the digital channel to offset the impact of the store closures and finished with a low single-digit comp gain, while Foot Locker Asia was down mid-single digits.
We continued to make progress on our expansion strategy within Asia as we opened two new stores and sold during the third quarter.
And earlier this month, we completed the acquisition of Atmos giving us a strong presence in Japan, one of the key markets in sneaker culture.
Across our markets, regions and channels, the combination of more limited promotional environment, solid demand and a higher penetration in our stores led to a low single-digit increase in average selling prices while units were down slightly.
Moving down the income statement.
Gross margin was 34.7% compared to 30.9% last year and 32.1% in the third quarter of 2019.
The improvement in our gross margin was driven by many of the same trends from the first half of 2021 as the combination of robust demand and fresh and lean inventory drove meaningfully lower levels of promotional activity.
Our merchandise margin rate improved 470 basis points over last year and 80 basis points over 2019, driven primarily by the meaningful reduction in markdowns.
Looking into the holiday season and the fourth quarter, we expect the promotional activity to remain favorable relative to both 2020 and 2019.
As a percent of sales, our occupancy and bias compensation costs delevered 90 basis points over Q3 of 2020.
As a reminder, in last year's third quarter, we benefited from $32 million of COVID-related tenancy relief versus $3 million this year.
When compared to Q3 of 2019, we leveraged our occupancy expense by 180 basis points.
Our SG&A expense came in at 20.9% of sales in the quarter compared to 20.1% in the prior year period.
When compared to 2019, our SG&A rate improved by 40 basis points.
For the quarter, depreciation expense was $49 million, up from $44 million last year.
Interest expense rose to $4 million from $2 million in the prior year due to the incremental expense related to the company's new bond issuance.
Within other income, there was a benefit of $26 million or $0.18 per share from the mark-to-market of our investment in Retailers Limited.
As a reminder, Retailers Limited is our partner in the joint venture that manages our Foot Locker stores in select Eastern and Central European market and is also our franchise partner in Israel.
Our non-GAAP tax rate came in at 27.8% compared to last year's rate of 30.7%.
Turning to the balance sheet.
We ended the quarter with approximately $1.3 billion of cash, down $54 million from a year ago.
At the end of the quarter, inventory was up 9.1% to last year, driven by our supply chain and logistics team efforts to position us well for the upcoming holiday season combined with the inventory that was included in the WSS acquisition.
On a constant currency basis, inventory was up 8.5% and sales increased 3.6%.
In terms of capital expenditures, we invested $50 million in the quarter, bringing the year-to-date total to $137 million.
This funded the opening of 32 new stores, including new Foot Locker community stores in Downey, California and Brixton, UK.
Champs Sports Power stores in the Bronx, New York and Torrance, California; the expansion of Sidestep in Belgium; and the conversion of 18 Footaction stores.
We also relocated or remodeled 29 stores and closed 80 stores in the quarter, including 50 Footaction stores.
With the addition of WSS stores, we finished the quarter with 2,956 company-owned stores.
For the full year, we now expect to open approximately 144 stores, including eight new WSS stores, remodel or relocate 200 stores and close 370 stores, including about 205 Footaction doors.
Looking forward, we now expect to invest approximately $240 million in capital expenditures this year, lower than our prior guidance of $260 million due primarily to supply chain challenges with the balance shifting into 2022.
Turning to capital allocation.
We and our Board are confident in the financial position of the company and continue to believe that returning cash to our shareholders is an important aspect of the company's capital allocation strategy.
First, we returned $30 million to our shareholders through our quarterly dividend program.
Next, we saw opportunity given the value of the company's stock, and we repurchased 2.75 million shares of common stock for $129 million during the quarter.
In total, we have returned $242 million to shareholders through the first nine months of the year through share repurchases and dividends while continuing to make strategic investments to fuel our growth.
We also returned to the capital markets during the quarter, taking advantage of favorable market conditions to create more flexibility by issuing $400 million worth of 4% senior notes due in 2029.
Proceeds from the issuance will be used for general corporate purposes such as repaying $98 million of senior notes due in January 2022 and replenishing our inventory levels.
Of note, following the capital raise, our liquidity position is comparable to pre-pandemic levels.
In summary, we are still on track with our capital allocation program investing in our business first, with a continued focus on returning cash to shareholders through our dividend and opportunistic share repurchase programs.
Finally, turning to our full year outlook, which now includes the benefit from WSS and Atmos.
We believe we are well positioned for the holiday season in terms of both strong customer demand and inventory levels to support that demand.
Like other companies, we expect global supply chain constraints, including factory shutdowns and port congestion to continue to be a headwind through the fourth quarter and into 2022.
As such, we remain appropriately cautious in the near term.
Based on our current visibility, we expect to deliver sales growth in the high teens for the full year, with comp sales in the mid-teens.
We are expecting the gross margin rate to be up 540 basis points to 550 basis points for the full year versus 2020, mostly driven by a more rational promotional environment.
Our SG&A expense rate is expected to leverage between 40 basis points and 50 basis points year-over-year.
Moving down the income statement.
We expect depreciation and amortization expense to be approximately $190 million, interest expense of about $14 million and our year-over-year effective tax rate of around 28%.
We now expect our non-GAAP earnings range to be approximately $7.53 to $7.60 per share.
This guidance reflects our strong performance in the first nine months of the year and our increased visibility in the fourth quarter while recognizing the supply chain challenges that we discussed.
As we look ahead to fiscal 2022, powered by the strength of our portfolio, the breadth of our assortments and the loyalty of our customers, we look forward to providing our fiscal 2022 outlook on our fourth quarter earnings call.
In closing, we believe the combination of our financial strength, strategic relationships with our vendor partners and deep connection with our customers provide us with flexibility to maneuver in this rapidly evolving marketplace through the fourth quarter and beyond, executing toward our long-term strategic imperatives and driving shareholder value.
We remain very confident in our strategy, are pleased with the trajectory we are currently on, and we look forward to updating you on our progress in the coming quarters.

user
q3 non-gaap earnings per share $1.93.
q3 earnings per share $1.52.
q3 same store sales rose 2.2 percent.
expect global supply chain constraints to persist throughout q4.
foot locker-as of oct 30,2021, co's merchandise inventories, which included addition of wss, were $1,301 million, 9.1% higher than at end of q3 last year.
believe we are positioned for holiday season, with positive momentum and inventory levels ready to meet customer demand.

assistant