Ports and Infrastructure

Recession-proof?
Some consumer goods are actually selling
more than last year

By Peter Hull

As 2008 wore on, container volumes at the nation’s ports dropped like a stone, but not everyone was staring the recession in the face.

Cargo Business News has found some reasons to cheer among the doom and gloom of the economic meltdown.

Federal government data show that certain retailers were actually doing better in 2008 than they did in 2007, albeit by fairly slim margins.

Take American Apparel, for example. The Los Angeles-based clothing company reported that comparable store sales for the month of November last year increased by six percent compared with November 2007.

That’s slim growth, but in the current climate, growth is growth — and the “G-word” is music to the ears of the world’s shippers and port operators.

The upward curve suggests that even in the bleakest economic climate, some consumer goods remain “must haves.” While item-by-item breakdowns are hard to find, government and private research company data show that certain sectors clearly are doing better than others.

Here’s a rundown of what we found.

Sometimes, More is More
In what likely will be music to the ears of steamship lines, mega-shipper Walmart remains the consumers’ retail favorite, according to separate reports by the National Retail Federation (NRF) and retail trends tracker America’s Research Group (ARG).
The NRF again placed Walmart at No. 1 on its annual list of Top 100 Retailers. The Bentonville, Ark.-based giant was followed by The Home Depot and CVS Caremark in second and third spots, respectively. Target and Sears also made the top 10.
Separately, in a customer survey released in December, ARG found that 69 percent of consumers surveyed said they had shopped at Walmart during the early stages of the 2008 holiday shopping season.

Walmart was followed by:
• Sears (23.3 percent)
•  Target (19.8 percent)
• JC Penney (13 percent)
•  Best Buy (12.6 percent)

In the all-important “What did they buy?” category, the top Walmart purchases were:
• Toys (39 percent)
• Video games (29.8 percent)
•  Electronics (28.8 percent)
• Children’s clothes (21.6 percent)

Cyber Infrastructure
“ECommerce” retailers are trying to keep pace with the sector’s rapid rise in market share during recent years, which should be encouraging to truckers and delivery drivers.

Michael McNamara, vice president
of SpendingPulse, which tracks national
retail and service sales, says that eCommerce sales are showing significantly better year-over-year comparisons relative to other areas of retail.

The sector posted a gain of 10.4 percent for the week after Thanksgiving, compared with the same period in 2007.

“While some of this was due to the calendar shift, it is still a noteworthy increase,” McNamara says.

Web tracking firm comScore found that online retail spending jumped 15 percent to more than $845 million from the prior year on the all-important Monday after Thanksgiving, dubbed Cyber Monday.

And the Winner is…
Federal government data show that a host
of retail and service sectors did better through the first 10 months of last year, the most recent data available at press time, than in 2007.

As of the end of October, jewelry, clothing, book, and shoe stores all saw slim increases in sales. Most notably, electronics and appliance stores increased by 1.7 percent to $86.4 billion for the first 10 months, and sporting goods stores saw a 3.7 percent increase to $30.4 billion.

And we don’t know if this is a reflection of the current economic climate, but the data show that sales at “drinking places” spiked 10.6 percent to $21.4 billion.