Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

Coca-Cola has shut down Odwalla, a line of juice smoothies that failed to grow, and will do the same with other under-performing brands, CEO James Quincy said. Coke will continue is shutdown-era practice of focusing on best-selling products to streamline supply chains. The company fields about 400 different brands, many country-specific. Combined sales of more...

For U.S. stores open at least one year, the pizza delivery chain Dominos reported 16-percent better sales in 2020’s second quarter, compared to just a 3-percent bump a year previous. Among Domino’s 11,000 overseas outlets, sales nudged up 1.3 percent against 2.4 percent a year earlier. During the peak of the shutdown, about 2,400 Domino’s...

The Chipotle Mexican Grill chain reported online sales tripled during the economic shutdown, due in part to the company’s previous investment in digital technologies. Online sales made up 61 percent of revenue in this year’s second quarter, compared to 26 percent in the first. As a result, Chipotle was able to hold its second-quarter sales...

Sales of existing homes jumped 20.7 percent in June from the month before, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). It was the biggest one-month increase since 1968, when records began being kept. However, the number was 11.3 percent lower than in June 2019, as many potential buyers, fearful of losing their jobs, or...

The Arkansas Teacher Retirement System has sued Allianz Global Investors, charging the financial management firm pursued a “reckless strategy” during the economic shutdown that cost the pension fund $800 million. The retirement fund says Allianz’s Alpha Funds made bets that investment markets would not lose money during the shutdowns in an attempt to cover losses...

Long before the COVID Pandemonium struck, there was a college debt crisis in the U.S. The 43 million Americans carrying student loan debt – averaging more than $32,000 per borrower – were allowed to skip payments during the economic shutdown, a measure implemented as part of Congress’s CARES Act bailout plan. The reprieve ends on...

With many schools not reopening until some time after Labor Day, Target, Walmart, and other companies relying on back-to-school shopping for a late summer sales bump are unlikely to see it this year, analysts and retailers said. About 37 percent of parents already have enough school supplies and another 32 percent think it’s too early...

Colleges, faced with vanishing revenues, have reached a point where many are considering the previously unimaginable: laying off faculty. Colleges are dealing with rising cleaning and sanitation costs due to the virus, having to stockpile protective equipment and other supplies. At the same time, they are losing revenue from the absence of foreign students, locked-down...

A bad situation will get terribly worse. IHS Markit forecasts the U.S. economy contracted at an annualized rate of 35.3 percent in the quarter just ended… its sharpest quarterly crash since 1947. As the economy goes down, so, too, will businesses. Roughly 60 percent of the 26,160 restaurants listed on Yelp’s review website that closed...

This comes as no surprise to Trends Journal subscribers. Small businesses are recovering more slowly from the economic shutdown than are other sectors of the economy, reported Womply, a data and technology company with about 500,000 small-business clients. Key reasons: A large proportion of small businesses rely on person-to-person contact, such as restaurants, barber shops,...