Day: October 27, 2021

U.S. holiday sales could rise over 10% this year, a trade body said on Wednesday, as major consumer goods makers and retailers work to prevent supply chain disruptions from leaving shelves empty of in-demand toys and games.

The National Retail Federation (NRF) forecast sales to increase between 8.5% and 10.5%, to between $843.4 billion and $859 billion, during November and December, compared with a previous high of $777.3 billion last year.

Rising income and household savings have never been stronger and would help people pay more for goods at a time when companies have raised prices to deal with inflation, the NRF said. It added there is exceptional demand for holiday products this year, although a survey last week showed customers were worried about availability.

“If retailers can keep merchandise on the shelves and merchandise arrives before Christmas, it could be a stellar holiday sales season,” NRF Chief Economist Jack Kleinhenz said.

NRF also said the arrival of international travelers to the United States amid relaxed COVID-19 restrictions would further drive sales higher.

“That’s going to give a jolt to the retail side, because there is a high correlation between international travelers and tourism in the U.S., and retail sales,” NRF President Matthew Shay told reporters.

Several retailers had also begun their holiday selling as early as September, warning their customers their favorite items could sell out or delivery could take longer than usual.

“There may be some categories in which there will be some shortages or which consumers will need to do some switching or trading … they won’t go home empty-handed,” Shay said.

Amazon.com, Inc. has secured more shipping storage, while Levi Strauss & Co and Crocs Inc. have been redirecting their goods to come in through East Coast ports, away from the congested West Coast.

Source: Voice of America

Three U.S. retail giants have pulled products made by tech surveillance specialists Lorex and Ezviz, following revelations by the tech press that the companies are linked to human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region, home to Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups.

According to reports from American online news outlet TechCrunch and video surveillance news site IPMV, big-box retailers Best Buy, Home Depot and Lowe’s terminated contracts with Lorex and Ezviz after the two news outlets questioned their partnerships.

In an email statement to VOA Mandarin, Home Depot said it has stopped selling products from both Lorex and Ezviz. “We committed to upholding the highest standards of ethical sourcing and we immediately stopped selling these products when this was brought to our attention,” said the statement, which is also on the company website.

Best Buy told TechCrunch that it was “discontinuing its relationship” with both Lorex and Ezviz. Lowe’s did not respond to a request from VOA Mandarin for comments, but a recent search shows neither Lorex nor Ezviz surveillance products are available on its website.

Lorex is a subsidiary of Dahua Technology. Ezviz is a brand of video surveillance cameras owned by Hikvision. Dahua and Hikvision were added to the U.S. government’s economic blacklist in 2019 for supplying Beijing with technology it uses to surveil ethnic groups.

Yet because the 2019 sanction covered only sales to the U.S. federal government, Lorex and Ezviz remained free to sell to private-sector buyers.

The proliferation of Chinese companies in the surveillance equipment sector reflects Beijing’s growing reliance on advanced technological tools to monitor the lives of its citizens in Xinjiang and to expand an already extensive surveillance infrastructure throughout China.

According to Human Rights Watch, the Xinjiang Bureau of Public Security uses what it calls the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, a system that gathers data on residents through iris scanners, digital cameras with face recognition, DNA samples and cellphone data.

In the China section of its 2020 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the U.S. State Department said that Hikvision and other tech companies are related to the development of a “Uyghur alarm” based on a face-scanning camera system.

The report said the Chinese government is conducting significant human rights abuses against Uyghurs, including “mass detention of more than one million Uyghurs and other members of predominantly Muslim minority groups in extrajudicial internment camps and an additional two million subjected to daytime-only ‘re-education’ training.”

China, which contends that Uyghurs hold extremist and separatist ideas, denies the allegations, saying that Xinjiang’s camps are “re-education” facilities aimed at combating terrorism.

Source: Voice of America