This was the year to invest in makers of lawn and garden products. Cotter & Co., which operates more than 7,000 True Value hardware stores, peddled a whopping half-a-million shovels this winter-up 75 percent from the year-earlier period. When its supply of aluminum, steel and plastic shovels (ranging in price from $7.99 to $24) finally dried up, customers scooped up the chain’s gardening shovels. Other results: Ace Hardware’s sales soared 149 percent-the company transferred most of its winter inventory from warehouses in Washington state and Arizona to Hartford, Conn., and Baltimore to keep up.
Consumers lugged 50 million pounds of de-icer out of True Value stores, doubling last year’s sales. Even more expensive ice melts-calcium chloride sells at $8.99 for a 20-pound bag compared with $1.99 for plain old rock salt-were in short supply. As Ace marketing manager Ed Mohan says, “when it came to rock salt, you never could catch up.” His sales were up 1,110 percent this season. Akzo, the Clarks Summit, Pa., maker of road de-icer, shipped 7 million tons of rock salt-that’s 2 million tons more than in a normal year and roughly the equivalent of 300,000 tractor-trailer-size dump trucks. it also broke its single-day shipping record by about 150,000 tons. “We were treating this like war,” says a spokeswoman. How bad was it? In Parkesburg, Pa., ServiStar invited local retailers to stock up on winter products. Before workers could unload, the desperate merchants were pulling bags of rock salt off the delivery truck.
Kmart and True Value each sold nearly I million gallons of windshield fluid in January alone. True Value, which normally sells about 100,000 gallons of the cleaner in the dead of winter, also sold a five-year supply of antifreeze products.
ServiStar’s sales in December, January and February equaled sales of the past four years combined. At True Value, Americans purchased 1.3 million scrapers from November through January. Says True Value’s Brian Murphy: “People were buying anything that wasn’t nailed down. If you bad it, you sold it.”
Kmart doubled sales, selling 12 million pounds of bird food this January. But it didn’t all go to feeding cold and hungry pigeons. When supplies of salt shriveled, drivers in the Northeast used birdseed (as well as Kitty Utter) for traction. ServiStar’s birdseed sales nearly tripled.
Long-underwear sales for Lands’ End doubled from October through January, wiping out its inventory; sales of glove and sock liners were five times more than projected. L.L. Bean sold out its winter and spring inventory of wool socks: “Customers were calling us with no catalogs in a desperate search for anything warm,” says a spokeswoman. As for the venerable L.L. Bean boot, the Maine marketer of New England-style clothing sold about 350,000 pairs-normally, it sells 150,000. Nationally, the NPD Group, a market-research firm, reports double-digit increases in winter-clothing sales. Hats were up 13 percent. Gloves sold: about 95 million pairs.
