Back-to-school shopping season a bust
NEW YORK, Aug. 15 (UPI) -- This year's back-to-school shopping season promises to be the worst one in decades for retailers, industry analysts say.
Halfway through the season, consumers are continuing to hang onto their wallets as job fears trump spending, making for gloomy sales projections, The New York Times reported Saturday.
The average family with school-age children is spending nearly 8 percent less this year than last, the National Retail Federation estimated, while retail researcher ShopperTrak called for back-to-school traffic to be down 10 percent from last year's levels, the newspaper said.
"This is going to be the worst back-to-school season in many, many years," added Craig Johnson, of retailing consultant firm Customer Growth Partners.
Research company IBISWorld reported this week that back-to-school spending would take a tumble in nearly every category compared with year-earlier figures, including clothing (down 5.4 percent), footwear (4.4 percent) and electronics (1.8 percent), while old-fashioned school supplies such as notebooks are set to remain steady, the newspaper said.
More Americans are ditching landlinesATLANTA, Aug. 15 (UPI) -- Traditional landline telephones seem to be going the way of the telegraph in America, analysts say.
The phones are being unplugged for good in favor of cell phones at a rate of 700,000 a month, and one in four households now relies solely on cell phones, statistics show.
At the current rate, the traditional plug-in telephone will disappear from American homes by 2025, The Economist reports.
In 2005, only 7.3 percent of households relied only on cell phones, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which collects the data because it uses landlines for health surveys. By the end of 2008, more than 20 percent of households used only cell phones.
The trend carries far-reaching implication for polling firms, businesses, telemarketers and emergency responders, who rely on call-tracing software that works on landlines, but not on cells.
Three Madoff homes to be auctioned offNEW YORK, Aug. 15 (UPI) -- Three opulent homes owned by U.S. Ponzi scheme perpetrator Bernard Madoff will be auctioned off to help his victims, authorities say.
U.S. Marshal Service spokesman Roland Ubaldo said Friday that Madoff's cliffside summer home on New York's Long Island, a penthouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side and a palatial mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., would be sold to pay restitution to those who lost billions in the former financier's Ponzi scheme, The New York Daily News reported.
Together, the marshal service says, the homes are worth about $20 million.
"Our goal since day one is to maximize returns for the victims," Ubaldo said. "Obviously, our top priority is restitution for the victims."
Madoff this year pleaded guilty to a massive investment scam that affected pension plans, hedge funds, charities, celebrities and ordinary retirees $65 billion, the Daily News said.
'Relaxation drinks' touted as newest thingNEW YORK, Aug. 15 (UPI) -- U.S. marketers are touting the soothing qualities of a new breed of "relaxation beverages" as an alternative to still-popular energy drinks, analysts say.
Such non-alcoholic beverages as Drank, with its motto "Slow your roll," are capitalizing on a generation that has become overly hopped-up and stressed out on energy drinks for the past 10 years and are now looking to slow down, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.
"I wasn't the only person speaking 50 miles per hour," Drank inventor Peter Bianchi told the newspaper. "It was my personal quest to relax the world."
Other relaxation beverages such as Vacation in a Bottle, which calls itself "the happy relaxation drink," Superliminal Purple Stuff Pro-Relaxation Formula and iChill are being marketed to consumers as a way to "unwind from the grind," the Journal said.
Research firm Mintel has indicated that energy drinks, while still the fastest-growing sector by far in the beverage industry at about $896 million in sales last year, are starting to level off after years of triple-digit percentage growth.
"There is room for so much diversification within the beverage market," NPD Group analyst Harry Balzer told the newspaper. "The one thing we do like as humans is new things."
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