Housewares: the industry that isn't

THE housewares industry in the I United States is a modern economic miracle. It is vital, it is dynamic and, as its growth record of the past four decades documents, it has the strength to meet successfully the challenges of an everchanging economy.

Yet, housewares is not an official industry. "Housewares" does not appear in the Stondsrd Industrial Clossffication Manual and fails, technically, to qualify officially as an industry because of its great diversity of unrelated products.

Despite this paradox, annual retail sales of housewares totaled nearly $35 billion at last count and sales of housewares products at the manufacturing level passed a record $17.5 billion mark. Manufacturers' sales were nearly three times greater than a decade earlier; and it is expected retailers' sales may well double throughout this decade as the accelerating growth of housewares continues.

Housewares is not a localized or parochial industry. Its thousands of manufacturing plants stretch from cities on the Atlantic Coast to those overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and from those along the Canadian border to cities throughout all of the South and the Sun Belt states.

Housewares is a mass production industry, eating up millions of tons of steel, rubber, wood, copper, tin, chemicals, plastics and other materials. It has created its own needs for mass distribution and mass merchandising. To serve those needs, housewares are sold in practically every type of retail outlet where homemakers shop.

Housewares are sold by mass merchandisers, department and variety stores, food and drug stores, and catalog showreoms as well as home centers and hardware stores. Millions of dollars worth of all kinds are sold each year through mail order, and by house-to-house salesmen, the modern version of the Yankee peddler.

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Housewares to double before 1990. semi. annual exposition shaPes in. dustry.. soft.sell benefit retailers.

The industry produces everydaY products for everyday living, all loosely related to home furnishings and home improvement. Housewares constantly change and expand with new and exciting products to meet peoples' new and challenging needs. But the semiannual National Housewares Exposition staged by the National Housewares Manufacturers Association really is thought to have shaped housewares into a vital industry. Without the cohesive force of this January and July show, the disparate lot of home-use products of more than four decades ago could never have become an industry at all, according to many in the field.

In 1938, housewares buyers first suggested to manufacturers that they conduct an annual trade show, where buyers could see and compare the industry's complete product out-

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