burlington stores inc stock burl slid 17 in premarket trade tuesday before reversing those losses to trade flat after the discount clothing retailer posted weakerthanexpected thirdquarter earnings and chief executive michael osullivan said it was not happy with its performance the company had net income of 17 million or 26 cents a share for the quarter up from 14 million or 20 cents a share in the yearearlier period adjusted pershare earnings came to 43 cents below the 52 cent factset consensus sales fell 11 to 2036 billion also below the 2055 billion factset consensus samestore sales fell 17 while factset was forecasting a 166 decline as we said on our august earnings call as an offprice retailer we should be able to perform better in this environment despite the significant macro headwinds said osullivan recent results from other offprice retailers reinforce this view the customers frame of reference for value shifted significantly in 2022 he added and burlington did not react aggressively enough but the company is upbeat for 2023 and believes it can set up well for offprice we also recognize that we will be lapping our own execution mistakes and underperformance from 2022 based on these factors we believe that we can start to drive significant sales margin and earnings recovery next year he said the company is now expecting fullyear samestore sales to fall 15 to 14 compared with a factset consensus for a decline of 146 it expects adjusted eps of 377 to 407 compared with a factset consensus of 400 shares have fallen 46 in the year to date while the sp 500 spx has fallen 17