Consumer Confidential: Retail sales up; coping with digital overload; Ford recalls trucks
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Here’s your that’s-all-folks Thursday roundup of consumer news from around the Web:
-- Retailers are feeling the love. Most leading retailers said sales in January were unexpectedly strong as consumers shook off the lingering sourness of the recession and did some shopping. According to Dow Jones, 28 retailers tracked by Thomson Reuters posted same-store sales gains of 4.2% on average for January, compared with analysts’ projections for a 2.7% gain. The figure compares with 3.3% a year ago and follows December’s 3.1% gain and 5.6% growth in November. Analysts say retailers were able to move their winter merchandise and open up space for spring inventories. That leaves them well positioned for continuing sales gains.
-- We’re drowning in digital media. USA Today reports that consumers bouncing among Facebook, Twitter and other social-media services are suffering from information overload. Workers received about 110 messages a day in 2010, says market researcher Radicati Group. There are 110 million tweets a day, Twitter says. Researcher Basex has pegged business productivity losses due to the ‘cost of unnecessary interruptions’ at $650 billion in 2007. ‘Consumers don’t have bandwidth to process so many fragmented convos online and, often, at once,’ says AOL executive Brad Garlinghouse. ‘The industry needs to address it.’ (Convos? Is that what conversations have become?)
-- Heads up: Ford is recalling nearly 363,000 F-150 pickup trucks because of a potential problem with the door handles not working properly. According to Reuters, model years 2009 and 2010 F-150 trucks produced from January 2008 to November 2009 are being recalled because, in the event of a crash, ‘the door handle spring can fail, causing the door latch to open,’ federal regulators said in a filing. As of Jan. 21, there had been no reported accidents or injuries related to this issue. Even so, some 280,946 trucks will be recalled in the United States, about 68,000 in Canada and about 14,000 in Mexico.
-- David Lazarus
