Word: unsold
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Faced with returns of thousands of unsold newsstand copies, Playboy has now cut back its circulation guarantee from 5.4 million copies a month, to 4.5 million-exactly the same as its upstart rival Penthouse. (Hustler and Playboy's naughtier younger brother Oui are the other two top sellers.) Since with age and success Playboy has become the most "conservative" of the sex magazines, some might argue that its newsstand decline only proves Gresham's law. But this morality play isn't all that simple. It has more to do with society's shifting sexual standards...
Part of the responsibility for the growing wheat surplus rests on the farmers themselves. Sensing last fall that an expanding "carryover" of unsold wheat would depress prices, they paradoxically overplanted. Reason: federal price supports are based on the percentage of acreage seeded, and farmers wanted to get as much of their land covered by the supports as possible. In addition, record-breaking wheat crops were harvested worldwide last year, cutting into American farmers' export markets. The U.S. consumes only about two-fifths of its wheat crop, relying on foreign buyers to gobble up the rest. Another bounteous global grain...
...that does not include home-mortgage debt. If consumers in any month go into hock less rapidly than they did the month before, economists view their self-denial as a worrisome sign. And if Americans ever start to pay off old debts faster than they take on new ones, unsold merchandise piles up at an alarming rate...
...drop in its reputation for quality. Though its sales in Sweden last year hit a record 75,000, its exports have slumped so badly that the company's plants are operating at only 70% of capacity-and even so, Volvo is running out of space to store unsold cars...
Political Help. Bad as it was, last year would have been much worse except for some promotional windfalls. The auto industry, caught with a massive pile-up of unsold cars, launched lavish ad campaigns to boost sales by offering rebates. Bicentennial promotions also helped. But the most surprising source of ad revenues was the spate of new brands, from toothpaste to cigarettes, turned out by companies seeking a sales edge in a newly competitive climate. In all, 1,023 new brands were introduced in 1975, the largest annual outpouring in twelve years. This year, the pace of new-brand offerings...