And so, as we’re able to deliver more product to them, hopefully that situation gets better. We can confidently recommend the graco travel system 4Ever 4-in-1 Convertible Car Seat as a great buy. It’s easy to clean and keeps your child safe through all the ages and stages until they’re out of a car seat for good. In terms of overall size, convertible car seats tend to be some of the largest car seats on the market as they must be versatile enough to convert from rear- to front-facing and beyond. The Graco is 21.5 inches wide , 20 inches deep, and 24 inches high.
Again, I don’t feel that it’s a meaningful driver for Graco’s business. It’s one of many key markets that we participate in. Of course, we’re in like a lot of different end markets. And that business has been soft, as you might expect.
So, I would speculate that some of that is happening, but we haven’t been able to quantify it. I think we’re experiencing really the same things that all other industrial companies are experiencing. We haven’t really seen anything with respect to Graco that’s too dissimilar from what we’re hearing from our competitors and what we’re picking up from the channel partners that we deal with around the globe. I would like to thank all of our employees, suppliers and distributor partners who continue to work long hours keeping up with customer demand while navigating logistical and supply chain challenges. Our full-year adjusted tax rate is expected to be approximately 18% to 19%.
As Kathy mentioned, I think in her opening comments, we have seen the impacts of the higher costs coming into the factory now that maybe we didn’t see quite so much of in late last year and early this year. But as we roll forward our forecasts and we kind of look at how we think the year is going to play out, we feel pretty good about where things are lined up. Operating expenses increased $27 million or 26% in the quarter. Sales and volume-based expenses increased $18 million against a very low comparable in the prior year. New product development and currency translation rates each increased operating expenses by $3 million.
The easiest way to identify the features you want is to head over to Graco and filter your search results by safety, comfort and convenience. The result will be a customized car seat just for you. And all of Graco’s infant car seats easily connect with Graco strollers to become combo travel systems, or you can connect them with other popular brands using a car seat adapter. The Graco 4Ever 4-in-1 is not a cheap car seat; it retails for $299.99, though you can often find it for less through online retailers like Amazon. For my family, the price is worth it as the car seat offers quality and longevity. If we bought a cheaper car seat, we’d likely be replacing it before our children were out of car seats or booster seats.
Founded in 1993 by brothers Tom and David Gardner, The Motley Fool helps millions of people attain financial freedom through our website, podcasts, books, newspaper column, radio show, and premium investing services. designs and manufactures thousands of fluid handling products and solutions for the industries we pursue around the world. Air Power is proud to be an authorized Graco Distributor and highly recommend them to our customers.
Obviously, our outlook is probably a little — from a growth rate perspective is probably stronger in the businesses that were weak last year versus what we might experience for CED. CED is really the only business that I would characterize as being seasonal. And they typically do have their strongest quarters in Q2 and Q3 if you look back historically. And at least as we sit here right now, like we said a couple of times, Puerto Rico look pretty decent and absolute demand sort of fits back that overall pattern.
Of course, we’re trying to get ahead of the curve like everyone else when it comes to some of the key components that go into our products. And I think we did a good job of that early on this year, pre-buys and some of the categories that were mentioned to stay ahead of things. And given our cash position and ability to execute on those, I think that those decisions paid out well for us. We all know that, but we have really good levels of customer service and support that’s needed.
Since the Gray brothers founded graco booster seat nearly 100 years ago, we’ve built the company on the idea that great engineering and meticulous manufacturing leads to high-quality, long-lasting products. So, we’re really doing this to improve our ability to drive profitable organic growth. And when you look at the pieces here that the move really is combining our contractor-focused businesses all under the contractor group.