Long Island furniture store numbers drop as more buy online

Family-owned Bay Shore Furniture & Mattress has survived a lot over the store's more than four decades in operation.

Business was difficult during the recession of 2008, but the experience prepared the owners to withstand this year’s big slowdown in sales, said Luigi Robayo, who manages the 10,000-square-foot store his father, Luis, co-founded in 1983.

Sales are down about 30% over the last year at the Bay Shore store, whose customers primarily are moderate-income consumers who have been hit hard by inflation, Robayo said.

"So, I think they’re spending more money on food and everything that is more expensive and they’re not getting an increase in income. OK, so they have slowed down in buying a couch," he said.

Nationwide and on Long Island, the number of furniture stores, particularly mom-and-pop shops, has been declining for decades due in part to the growing popularity of furniture sold on e-commerce sites, such as Wayfair and Amazon, and at discount stores, such as Marshalls, Target and Walmart.

In recent years, overall furniture sales have declined as inflation-weary consumers pull back on buying nonnecessities, such as home furnishings, and higher interest rates curb sales of homes and, thus, the purchases of furniture, retail experts said.

Furniture sales boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020; many consumers quarantined at home spruced up households with new furnishings and don’t need to replace them yet — regardless of the type of stores selling the goods.

"Business was so good [in 2020 and 2021], we couldn’t meet the demand. ... And then at the end of 2021, it was just like the wheels came off," said Jerry Epperson, co-founder of Mann, Armistead & Epperson Ltd., a Richmond, Virginia-based investment banking firm that specializes in home furnishings.

Furniture retailers that didn’t put that windfall away for a rainy day might be feeling the pinch now, he said.

Locally owned stores that have closed in the past several years include Casco Kids Furniture in Centereach, Leonardo Furniture in Westbury and Overstock Furniture in Copiague.

Jennifer Furniture closed its store in Coram in 2022 and one in Newburgh, Orange County, in 2021 because they were underperforming, leaving the chain with four stores, said John Garg, CEO of Jennifer Opco LLC, the Great Neck-based holding company that owns the Jennifer brand.

Long Island chain Harrow’s, an outdoor furniture retailer that had six locations as of 2020, closed its Melville store in September and will close its last store, in Carle Place, in a few weeks due to online competition and exorbitant rents, an employee said recently.

Los Angeles-based furniture and home décor retailer Z Gallerie filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023 for the third time, and then closed all 21 of its stores, including one at the Roosevelt Field mall in Uniondale.

In discount retailer Big Lots' filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sept. 9, it cited among the reasons the decline in home goods sales. The Columbus, Ohio-based retailer, whose furniture sales accounted for 25% of net sales last year, said it would close  more than 350 stores, including two on Long Island — in Centereach and Carle Place.

Between 2001 and 2023, the number of furniture stores nationwide declined 14% to 23,161 and the number on Long Island declined 28% to 205, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Some of the declines were related to the recession from 2007 to 2009.

Sales nationwide at furniture and home furnishings stores fell 5.1% to $87.6 billion between January and August compared with the same eight-month period last year, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. It was the biggest decline among all retail categories, including the sporting goods, hobby, musical instrument and book stores segment, as well as the building material and garden equipment and supplies dealers segment.

Shift in habits

Less demand for new furniture has contributed to prices falling between 3% and 5% for the last year, making it the worst period of extended price declines since the financial crisis of 2008, said Scott Hoyt, senior director of consumer economics at Moody’s Analytics, headquartered in Manhattan.

But the price declines haven’t been enough to ease the worries of consumers most affected by inflation in the past few years — those in lower-income households, retail experts said.

At Bay Shore Furniture & Mattress, Robayo is seeing more customers declined for in-store financing, possibly because they are overextended financially, he said.

Furniture stores selling merchandise at low to mid-tier prices are being hit the hardest by the declines because their customers are more likely to shop from online competitors than high-end shoppers would be, retail experts said.

That shift in consumer habits hasn’t spurred Artie Eisenberg to offer online sales at the six Farmingdale furniture stores he co-owns, two of which are high-end, he said.

"When people are spending ... good money, they want to see what they’re getting. They want to sit on it. They want to feel it," said Eisenberg, who has been in the furniture business for 40 years.

All six of the stores he co-owns are in "Furniture Row," a stretch of Route 110 and some off streets that are heavily dotted with home furnishings stores.

His two high-end stores are Seigerman's Furniture & Interior Design Center and Natuzzi Editions, while the other four in the mid-tier category include One Ten Home Furnishings and The Show Place Furniture Galleries.

Sales are down 15% at his mid-tier stores compared with the same period last year, but the declines are not enough to be worrisome, he said.

"We run a tight ship. We’re fortunate enough to have good landlords. When things get tough, they work with us," said Eisenberg, who believes consumers’ uncertainty over the Nov. 5 presidential election is a factor in the sales declines.

Consumers’ desire for convenience is helping to drive online sales, said Cristina Fernández, managing director and senior research analyst at the Telsey Advisory Group, a brokerage firm in Manhattan.

"In the last 30 years, it’s not that you have a stay-at-home parent that can go look for this stuff during the day, right? Everybody is a little more pressed for time, and if that means they can do some of the research online, then you know that’s going to fit better into the busy operating schedule that everyone has right now," she said.

In 2023, the second-biggest retailer of furniture in the United States was home goods company Wayfair, which primarily sells goods online and had $5.7 billion in sales, a 2.6% decline from 2022, according to Home News Now, a trade publication based in High Point, North Carolina. Amazon ranked third, with $5.3 billion in sales, a 1.9% increase from 2022.

The top spot went to Ashley Furniture, a manufacturer and retailer that had $5.8 billion in sales at its 830 company-owned stores and online, down 2.5% from the previous year, according to Home News Now.

Not everyone is onboard with shopping online.

"We don’t deal with online. We want to walk around" to see and touch the furniture in a store, said Hicksville resident Danny Kumar, who was with his wife, Shelly, looking for new bedroom furniture in The Show Place Furniture Galleries on a recent afternoon.

Buying in furniture stores reduces the chances of having to return the merchandise because it is defective or doesn’t match what was advertised on a website, Danny Kumar, 36, said.

Looking for dining room and accent chairs, Dix Hills couple Giscard and Nita Bourgeois also were in The Show Place Furniture Galleries recently. 

"When you have things that are in magazines and websites, they are shot with professional lighting" and props, said Nita Bourgeois, 47, who said the couple was disappointed after visiting a Manhattan furniture store to find that the merchandise didn’t match the apparent quality of what appeared online.

Young consumers account for the biggest share of online furniture sales.

Not only are they more willing than their parents and grandparents to buy furniture online, they also are buying cheaper items that won’t last decades, said Bill McLoughlin, editor-in-chief of Furniture Today, a trade publication based in High Point, North Carolina.

The shift means the availability of more-durable heirloom furniture that can be passed down to new generations is going to take a hit in about 20 years, he said.

"My generation bought furniture with the idea of passing it down to your children. ... There is more of a temporary mindset among younger consumers than there was for their parents and grandparents," said McLoughlin, who added that young consumers have been delayed in setting up their first households because of high student loan debt and a shortage of affordable housing.

Because millennials and Gen Z consumers have more mobility than previous generations did as they start out in the careers, they don’t want to spend a lot of money on furniture that might go through several relocations, said Tom Russell, editor-in-chief of Home News Now.

Some sellers of heirloom furniture are encountering challenges.

Farmingdale antique and vintage store Back in Time is not having difficulty acquiring furniture via purchases from estate sales and individuals, and donations, but the store's sales were down 10% to 12% in the first two quarters of the year, said Laura Napolitano, who co-owns the 5-year-old business with her husband.

"The floor traffic is here. It's just that people are not opening their wallets as easily because, I think, there's a lot of uncertainty, maybe in an election year. I'm not really sure," said Napolitano, who expects business to pick up in the last quarter of 2024 because the holiday season is the shop's busiest time of the year.

At Rosie’s Vintage in Huntington, sales aren’t suffering because the inventory is diversified at the store, which sells furniture, jewelry, toys, vinyl records, clothes, bar items and other goods, said Thea Morales, who founded the business in 2016.

"One thing about Long Island is, unfortunately, the real estate taxes are high for commercial, like rental space. So, if you have a building that is solely for furniture, they need to really keep the flow going in order to make the space work," she said.

Getting to the source

About 20 years ago, Jennifer Convertibles, known for its sofa beds, had 206 stores nationally, including 46 in the metropolitan area.

The chain, which was founded in Woodbury in 1975, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2010.

Jennifer Opco LLC bought the assets and trademark of Jennifer Convertibles in 2020 from Morris Holdings Ltd., a Chinese furniture manufacturer, and changed the name to Jennifer Furniture. At that point, there were six stores.

Now, left with three stores on Long Island and one in New Jersey, and an e-commerce site, Jennifer’s business has been challenging this year — sales are flat, Garg said. Most of that is due to online competition from retailers that sell products more cheaply because they have lower expenses for utilities, rent, payroll and other operations, he said.

Jennifer’s sales have been sustained by manufacturing the product that the brand is most known for, he said.

"So, I make my own sofa beds [mostly in Thailand] and I distribute all over the U.S. So, that’s the only reason I’m surviving, because of the specialty line," he said.

Most furniture sold in the United States is produced overseas, McLoughlin said.

Last year, the United States imported more than $42 billion in furniture and fixtures, and the top market from which these goods were imported was China, which accounted for 30%, according to U.S. Department of Commerce data. The next four top markets for U.S. imports were Vietnam, Mexico, Canada and Italy.

Sluggish home sales

Nationwide, home sales have been sluggish and prices remain high, due in part to elevated interest rates, a result of the Federal Reserve hiking the rates 11 times between March 2022 and July 2023 to help curb inflation.

On Sept. 18, the Fed cut the rate by 0.5%, or 50 basis points, to a range of 4.75% to 5%, the first reduction since 2020.

Nationwide, the median price of existing homes was $416,700 in August, a 3.1% increase from the price in the same month last year, according to the National Association of Realtors. August was the 14th consecutive month of year-over-year price increases, according to the Chicago-based trade group.

The number of existing homes sold declined 4.2% to 3.86 million between August 2023 and August 2024, the association said.

Further relief on mortgage rates bodes well for the home furnishings industry, Fernández said.

"But certainly, as we look to the spring, if there are further cuts coming this year, and we get back to that like 5 to 5½% range on interest rates, you know, the affordability equation starts to look different for a lot of people. And you know that could drive more traction in existing-home sales," leading to more sales of home furnishings, she said.

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.