Daily News
From Home Furnishing Business
Smith Leonard Reports on the State of the Economy
November 30,
2023 by HFBusiness Staff in Business Strategy, Industry 
The report from Smith Leonard this month expands on what is happening not only in the furniture industry but has highlighted insights into other economic and consumer trends.
The results of this survey require taking more history into account. New orders in September were up 13% over September 2022. But September 2022 orders were down 26%. As with the previous surveys, comparisons to 2021 and 2020 are even more difficult. Year to date, new orders for the first nine months were up about 1%.
Shipments were down 20% in September 2023 from 2022 and down 18% for the year to date. The September 2022 shipments were up 5% over 2021 and up 6% year to date. The shipment comparisons are difficult to deal with percent changes as 2020 shipments were up significantly, setting the bar very high.
Overall though, shipments in dollars are ahead for the year over order dollars. All of this means that shipments have continued to pull from the backlogs. Plus, the increase in shipments in 2022 was also so large due to the extremely high backlogs, the comparisons of 23 to 22 are not what we would normally expect. Hopefully, all of that is confusing enough.
Backlogs actually increased a bit over August but were down 43% from September 2022. It appears that backlogs are getting to something closer to pre-pandemic levels if one can determine how much price increases are included in the numbers.
Retail trade sales were down 0.2% from September 2023, and up 1.6% above last year. Gasoline stations were down 7.5% from last year (primarily due to drops in gas prices), while non-store retailers were up 7.6% from October 2022.
Sales at furniture and home furnishings stores were down 11.8% for the month, bringing year-to-date sales to a reduction of 5.2%.
The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) was unchanged in October on a seasonally adjusted basis, after increasing 0.4% in September. Over the last 12 months, the all-items index increased 3.2% before seasonal adjustment.
The other stats are at least somewhat in line with expectations as you can see from the full report.
Click here to read the full report on the Smith Leonard website.