Word: unsold
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...consumer. But in a high-volume business, where the shelf life of a book is measured in days, the average $2.25 per paperback could no longer be considered an impulse-buying item. The result: of the 900 million paperbacks shipped last year, nearly one-third were unsold. The paperback recession was echoed in the diminishing rewards to writers. Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift brought $313,000 back in 1975, but The Dean's December earned about two-thirds of that sum this year, even though the author had become a Nobel laureate in the interim...
TIME's economists predicted that the recession should hit bottom in late spring or early summer. By then, many businesses that are now cutting production in order to reduce bulging inventories of unsold goods will have exhausted excessive stock and begun to increase output again. In July a scheduled 10% cut in personal income taxes could give a boost to consumer spending. Recovery, though, will be painfully slow. "We may just have a long, flat bottom with very little growth," said Feldstein, adding wryly, "Only professional economists will know that the recession is over." Even by year...
...developments most worrisome to TIME'S board concerned the steadily swelling inventories of unsold goods. Commerce Department data released during the week showed business stockpiles increasing by nearly 1% during October, while sales of finished goods fell...
Bulging inventories frighten economists because the stockpiles have the unavoidable effect of creating a vicious circle of economic decline. As unsold goods build up, businessmen are forced to pare back production and lay off workers, and this in turn drives up unemployment, which currently stands at 8.4% of the labor force. As jobless lines lengthen, consumer spending shrinks, and this in turn causes inventories of unsold goods to grow even more. Said Alan Greenspan of the Townsend-Greenspan economic consulting firm: "Involuntary inventory accumulation by business will be an absolutely critical piece of evidence in gauging the severity...
...last week, visions of profits had vanished into a black hole of exploding costs and collapsing sales, and the biggest challenge facing Carl Sagan Productions Inc. was what to do with a Los Angeles warehouse jammed with unsold Cosmic Calendars ($7.95), Cosmospheres ($19.95) and a book titled Visions of the Universe ($29.95). Said Lee ruefully as he strolled past an empty desk in the firm's eight-employee office: "We used to have an international division, but we closed it down. It used to sit here...