Management believes that free cash flow is an important liquidity measure because it represents the amount of cash provided by operations that is available for investing and defines it as operating cash flows less capital expenditures for property and equipment. Management believes that excluding purchases of property and equipment provides a better understanding of the underlying trends in the Company’s operations and allows more accurate comparisons of the Company’s results between periods. This metric may also be useful to investors, but should not be considered in isolation as it is not a measure of cash flow available for discretionary expenditures. The most comparable GAAP measure is net cash provided by operating activities.

Forward-looking Financial Measures

The forward-looking financial measures in our 2022 guidance provided above do not consider the potential future net effect of foreign currency exchange gains and losses, certain discrete tax items and any other impacts that may be identified as pro forma adjustments in calculating the non-GAAP measures described above.

The estimated impact of foreign currency gains and losses cannot be reasonably estimated on a forward-looking basis due to the high variability and low visibility with respect to non-operating foreign currency exchange gains and losses and the related tax effects of such gains and losses. The impact on diluted net income per share of foreign currency gains and losses, net of tax effects, was $0.21 per share for the 52-weeks ended December 25, 2021.