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With Charlie, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne knocking down our doors, it is tough duty to focus on the specialty part of the housewares industry. Florida business has been punched in the gut and is still sucking air from the repeated blows.
Spendable income flows to $2.00-a-gallon gas, generators, bottled water, tarps, plywood, home repairs, and for many, hotel bills, insurance deductibles, and new roofs. Toasters are not in much demand without power, AC, running water, and sewage disposal. Jobs are interrupted as families must attend to personal needs before employment. Hospital workers have worked around the clock, as have the thousands of power and tree-cutting workers amassed by FEMA and state anticipatory
planning.
With estimates of $35 billion in damages, retail recovery will be slow. Perhaps it takes repeated natural disasters to better appreciate what we have, how fragile it is, and how quickly it can disappear. Try going 20 days without power and running water and the impact sinks
in solidly.
The election-period political pump priming had a good economy perking in most of America, despite the negative campaign rhetoric. Florida was rolling, as was Georgia, the Carolinas, and throughout the Midwest, even with Ohio's job losses. This clearly projected well for retail sales and profitable ticket items. My guess is that the storms and their fallout will set back some holiday spending as families dig out and rebuild basics. Yet to be calculated are the illnesses, stress-related problems, and exhaustions that follow repeated physical and mental pressures. Better add new health insurance costs to that growing list of
money needs.
These thoughts paint a bleaker picture than what actually exists. Yes, the Iraq brier patch costs lots of tax money. So does homeland security and other national defense spending. Even with those drains, we still seem to have a pretty resilient economy, especially if we can find the right way to create new jobs caused by evolving technologies that are not yet exported to Asian workers who live in countries who are our friends, not our competitors.
American ingenuity still leads the world, and it will do so so long as our confidence in our future and collective ability and willingness to be productive and hard working remain. A relapse back to Jimmy Carter-type days would be a big national setback.

Future Development
Merchants claim they listen to consumers and hear what they say. Vendors claim they tune into consumer needs and do their best to meet known, unknown, and emerging needs. After having spent many years in product development and introducing both good and bad products to the marketplace, I'm not so sure we know how to listen anymore.
Most vendors figure out how to distribute their products so consumers can assess and purchase them. Most retailers have a clear knowledge of display, resupply, and promotional actions. But who has a fix on what buyers want? How do you acquire that information? How do you commit in advance before any market is created? How many vendor and retail chieftains have studied how successful products were conceived, developed, and marketed? Maybe the flops provide better intelligence than the winners. Designers, merchants, and entrepreneurs might do well to find studies that feature why products happened and why they succeeded. Otherwise, we seem constricted by lots of smart men and women so busy with selling and distributing that they don't have time for dreaming, scheming, and inventing.
Currently, the housewares industry is pretty mundane in action and product development. Think how quickly the food industry reacted to the low-carb craze. Many of these products are ingredient-complicated and serious caution is required when dealing with an ingested product. But wow, today, a year later, we are overwhelmed with low-carb, no-carb, few-carb products, a healthier array of eating opportunities. The housewares industry follows these developments but could benefit by a closer association with food leadership. Celebrity cooks are nice, but the anonymous Ph.D. of chemistry developing a new anti-cholesterol potato chip may be more worthy of your sponsorship dollars.
We will absorb the general election, stash it behind us, move forward with whichever party emerges a winner, and go about our business of buying and selling. You and I are not going to correct Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and deficit spending in a short movement. But, we can think about supporting health savings accounts, some form of personal savings improvements, income tax simplifications, permanent tax cuts, and improvement in home ownership opportunities. Donkey or elephant, our lives will go on and it is up to us to make the most of them.

Jack Eikenberg operates Eikenberg Management Services, an experienced consulting team committed to servicing housewares and the specialty retail industry. Jack may be reached at 239-498-0040 and via e-mail at JMEmgmt@aol.com.