Hal Lawton
President and Chief Executive Officer at Tractor Supply
Thanks, Mary Winn, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call this morning. I think the opening video was a great recap of the highlights of a record year for Tractor Supply. Year-end is when we reflect on our accomplishments, and I'm pleased to share the results from the team in 2022. We had sales growth of 11.6% and diluted earnings per share growth of almost 13% and this is on top of a record performance in 2021.
We had solid market share gains across all our product categories, and these gains continue to contribute materially to our sales growth. At Tractor Supply, it all starts with the team. And my sincere thanks and appreciation goes out to the more than 50,000 team members of Tractor Supply who work diligently every day to live our mission and values. Regardless of the operating challenges throughout the year and really over the last three years since we entered the pandemic, the team has delivered impressive results while also making significant progress on our Life Out Here strategy.
I commend and thank the team for stepping up to every challenge that has come at us over this time period. Our team plus our business model are the reasons why we have a record of consistent and stable growth across all economic environments.
With this year's results, we've now posted three consecutive years of exceptional sales growth. The highlight of this phenomenal track record continues to be the consistency of our results and the broad-based strength of our performance. Including new stores in the 53rd week, our revenue on a three-year basis has increased about 70%, with a three-year comp stack of 46.5%.
Over the same period of time, we've invested nearly $1.7 billion in our stores, distribution centers, technology and other strategic initiatives as part of our Life Out Here strategy. We also have significantly improved our operating capabilities, including relaunching our Neighbor's Club program, creating our field activity support team, expanding our mobile footprint, and delivering on the increased volume of our consumable, usable and edible products.
We've remained focused on introducing new capabilities, improving the shopping journey and ensuring we have scalable platforms. All with the underlying goal to be the dependable supplier that our customers count on. As a company, we hit several significant billion-dollar milestones in 2022. We grew our sales to a record $14.2 billion, increased net income to over $1 billion, achieved $1 billion in private label credit card sales and returned more than $1 billion in capital to shareholders for the second consecutive year. This culminated with diluted earnings per share of $9.71.
Now turning to our fourth quarter and fiscal 2022 performance. Our business continues to be incredibly resilient, and the quarter unfolded much like we anticipated. Albeit, comp sales performance was stronger than forecast as the late December winter storm provided a comp sales lift of approximately two percentage points. Excluding the impact of the winter storm, importantly, our underlying results were in line with the high end of our expectations for the quarter.
Now let's go through some of the highlights for the quarter and the fiscal year. For the fourth quarter, our comparable store sales growth was 8.6%, and it was driven by strong ticket growth of 6.3% and transaction count increase of plus 2.3%. And importantly, even without the winter storm benefit, our comp transactions would have been positive for the quarter.
All months of the quarter, comped positive. October, December were our strongest comp sales months. Both two and three-year comp stacks were relatively consistent across the quarter. On e-commerce, it achieved mid-single-digit positive sales growth, and we continue to build out our ONETractor capabilities. As of year-end, the Tractor Supply app has had over 4.4 million downloads since it was launched mid-2020.
For the seventh consecutive quarter, we continued to see our consumable, usable and edible products outperform our overall comp sales results. And this is the fourth consecutive quarter for C.U.E. to run at about three times the rate of overall comp sales growth. This strong performance was driven by dry dog food as well as feed for poultry, equine and wild birds.
As we've talked about many times, C.U.E. is one of our structural advantages and the products represent the strength of our core business and they're what drive trips to our stores. Our outperformance in year-round categories offset the declines in big ticket categories. And we continue to gain share across our categories, both online and in-store.
Shifting now to Neighbor's Club. Our Neighbor's Club membership exceeded 28 million members and represented nearly 75% of our sales for the year. Neighbor's Club is successfully helping us migrate customers to a higher threshold of spending with us. During the quarter, we reached a new record in the number of high-value customers. Overall, our best customers are shopping with us more frequently and spending more money per transaction.
On Petsense, the rebranding of Petsense, the Petsense by Tractor Supply along with our expansion of our Neighbor's Club program to Petsense by Tractor Supply is really resonating with our customers. This expansion is allowing us to deepen relationships with existing customers in our enterprise and help attract new pet customers to both brands. Our customers' response to these initiatives is very encouraging, with Neighbor's Club membership already representing nearly 50% of sales at Petsense.
During the quarter, we launched Tractor Supply, Visa Credit Card. This new co-brand credit card allows our customers to earn more on their everyday purchases, both in-store and anywhere Visa is accepted. This marks exciting progress on our journey to drive sales, build loyalty and reduce tender expense through our credit offerings. And as I mentioned earlier, this past year, we crossed over $1 billion in private label credit card sales.
For the fourth consecutive quarter, our overall customer satisfaction score hit a new all-time high as we continue to invest in our team to provide best-in-class customer service. Our team continued to make advancements in our supply chain through the expansion of our mixing centers to a total now of 15 as well as the grand opening of our ninth distribution center just last week.
During the quarter, we also broke ground on our tenth distribution center in Maumelle, Arkansas to support for the higher volumes of our existing stores, the continued build-out of our new stores as well as the acquisition of Orscheln. Our supply chain continues to be a competitive advantage for us.
In 2022, we moved more than 8 billion pounds of consumable, usable, and edible products through our supply chain as we are the world's largest seller of back feed and food for livestock in campaign and animals. Our scale and reach provide us with the cost to serve that is lower than our competition. We continue to advance on our commitment to be stewards of Life Out Here. We're making progress on our absolute carbon reduction goals to further reduce emissions from our operations by 20% by 2025 and by 50% by 2030 from our 2020 baseline. We are committed to achieving net zero emissions across all operations by 2040.
Additionally, in 2022 of April, we announced an ambitious three-year water conservation goal to conserve 25 million gallons of water by 2025. These commitments to the climate and society reinforce our vision that a healthy environment, properly managed resources and vibrant communities are key to secure and prosperous future for Life Out Here.
As a result, our efforts to enhance our sustainable business practices have been recognized by various third parties. We now have nearly 30% of our store base that are in our Project Fusion layout and our Garden Center build out is now active in over 300 locations. With nearly 1,800 team members, our field activity support team has made powerful contributions to our in-stock performance and execution of our sales-driving initiatives.
We continue to be pleased with the strategic benefits and financial returns of these store-level investments. This was a year that we made significant progress on our Life Out Here strategy. And building on our performance for 2022, our outlook for 2023 is right in line with our long-term guidance. And Kurt will share more details on our outlook as well as more details on our performance in 2022 in just a moment.
Now shifting a bit to 2023. As we planned for the year, we anticipate continuing to operate in an ever-challenging and changing macro environment. Our operating assumption is that the economy in the near to medium-term will remain resilient with flat to modestly positive real growth. Wages are increasing and consumers continue to tap pent-up savings to support spending.
We expect consumers will continue to be judicious in their spend, but resilient, while prioritizing needs over discretionary. We believe inflation has peaked, but will remain sticky as we move through the year. It is our view that an orderly loosening of the labor market will be a key determiner of the country's ability to return our economy to sustainable conditions in the second half and 2024.
The effects of secondary markets on our consumer spending in areas such as housing, agriculture and oil markets are expected to be collectively neutral and individually modest. Whatever economic environment plays out this year or any year for that matter, we're confident that our business will remain resilient and build on our strong track record of consistent and stable growth across all economic environments.
Tractor Supply is a unique, highly differentiated retailer. We are the leader in a large, fragmented market. We're a need-based business that is tailored to the Out Here lifestyle. Our customers have a passion for the Out Here lifestyle and over-indexes homeowners, landowners, pet owners and animal owners. We live our mission and values and our culture defines our relationship with our customers. We're celebrating our 85th anniversary this year. As we begin the year, we take great pride in our path and are equally excited about our future.
And with that, I'll turn the call over to Kurt.
