Kickstart: Mixed signals on home sales, improvements

After two summers of staycations and home improvements, is the housing boom about to slow down?

It depends on who you ask.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, says there is still more demand for home purchases than there are homes on the market, even if sales have slowed slightly.

Home prices likely are going to continue to rise, but not as quickly, he said.

But Robert Dietz, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, says home sales in April fell to the lowest point of the pandemic era.

"While the nation needs additional housing, home sales are slackening as tightening monetary policy continues to put upward pressure on mortgage rates and supply chain disruptions raise construction costs," Dietz said in a news release.

I bring this up because of the news earlier this month that Armstrong Flooring Inc. has entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as it seeks a sale. That move seems like an unexpected U-turn after all the big expansions in luxury vinyl tile flooring manufacturing that has happened the past few years.

When it filed for bankruptcy, Armstrong officials cited rising costs that "outpaced its pricing power."

So which side of the supply and demand scale will win out? Guess we'll have to wait and see.

The return to "normal" from COVID-19 isolation, however, has been very good for the cosmetics industry, as well as the companies that supply packaging for lipstick and other items.

Ulta Beauty Inc., based in suburban Chicago, said sales rose 21 percent in the first quarter of 2022 vs. the same period in 2021.

The company attributed the increase to the lifting of COVID restrictions, which rekindled interest in beauty products, our sister paper Crain's Chicago Business writes.

Demand plummeted early in the pandemic, as masks covered the bottom half of customers' faces and all but eliminated any need for lipstick and other types of makeup, leading to a 35.5 percent drop in sales early in 2020.

Here are a couple of trends to expect from your candy in the coming months, at least as the National Confectioners Association sees it: "new-stalgia" and new packaging.

At the Sweets and Snacks Expo at Chicago's McCormick Place, NCA coined the term "new-stalgia" to note new products coming out that build on nostalgic candies and brands, our sister paper Advertising Age writes. That means new products from Bazooka bubble gum, Nerds candy and Pop-Tart pastries.

The new packaging push is coming from snack makers eliminating plastics from multimaterial boxes to make them fully recyclable.

Mars Inc., for instance, recently launched theater boxes of M&M candies that eliminate a plastic overwrap, eliminating 98 tons of plastic from those products, the company said.