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Grand Rapids' most famed furniture man, Robert W. Irwin, chairman of the Furniture Code Authority and president of Robert W. Irwin Co., had no exhibits at the Chicago Mart. Buyers could roam its 16 floors without seeing a single stick of Grand Rapids furniture. Grand Rapids held a show of its own last week sponsored by an association of which Mr. Irwin was president for ten years. In recent years Chicago has surpassed Grand Rapids as a distributing centre and manufacturer of upholstered furniture.
Furniture is one of the first things people stop buying when Depression comes, one of the last they begin to buy again when it goes. Even before Depression, a 50% increase in the number of apartment dwellers reduced the demand for furniture in millions of families to little more than a few sticks. Meantime manufacturers piled up inventories of distress furniture, which led to inevitable price cutting and the ruin of 1,000 manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers in a single year (1932). The manufacturing industry managed to right itself last year, has been running on a fairly even price keel since last summer when business booked by wholesalers increased 100% over 1932, and prices on some lines went up as much as 60%. The Furniture Code, which went into effect last December, helped stabilize prices by forbidding sales below cost. But the boom of last summer and autumn has died away, and the seasonal upswing stimulated by June weddings has been weaker this year than last. A tremor ran through the industry fortnight ago on reports from Chicago, hastily denied, that some manufacturers were about to cut prices.