New York SBDC Research Network

To echo Roger's post earlier this week, I wanted to mention that the Consumer Product Safety Commission recently released a handbook meant for owners of resale and used merchandise stores. It was written in response to the recent passing of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (which Amelia wrote about here last February). According to the CPSC, it was created to help sellers of used products understand the new law and existing regulations. In their words, "[t]he purpose of this Handbook is to help you to identify the types of products that are affected and to understand how to comply with the law, so you can keep unsafe products out of the hands of consumers." It's only 28 pages long. If you have clients in this industry, it's best if they read this.

Here's an unsurprising bit of info from the U.S. Census Bureau Used merchandise stores employed more than 131,000 people with $2.1 billion in annual payroll and nearly $9.3 billion in sales in 2007, according to new economic census data released by the U.S. Census Bureau. As part of the 2007 Economic Census Industry Series, these new figures for the retail trade sector provide data on the number of establishments, sales, payroll, number of employees, value of product line sales and other data items at the national level by industry. Other findings include: * Women’s, juniors’ and misses’ clothing product line sales accounted for more than 15 percent ($1.4 billion) of total used merchandise store sales. Sales of antiques made up almost 13 percent ($1.2 billion) of the total sales of the 17,779 used merchandise stores in the United States. * Total sales from used merchandise stores increased $1.5 billion (nearly 20 percent) since 2002, while the number of used mer