Furniture and Home Furnishings Retailers (U.S.) — NAICS 2022: 4491

A Histometrics rollup primer for a general investing audience — relevant to both public-market and private investors. This page synthesizes the two child-industry primers plus our ground-truth federal statistics for this level. Core size and concentration figures are cited to federal data; company and market figures come from the child primers (filings and named research). Forward-looking statements are flagged as judgments.

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1. Overview

This is the store-based business of furnishing a home — both the big pieces of furniture you sit and sleep on and the soft, decorative layer that goes on top of and around them (flooring underfoot, blinds on the windows, and the housewares and décor that fill the rooms). Together these specialty retailers ring up about $191.7 billion a year across roughly 35,250 firms.[1]

The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS — the U.S. government's standard for classifying business establishments) groups them under code 4491, "Furniture and Home Furnishings Retailers," an industry group (the 4-digit layer) that sits one rung below the retail sector. It holds exactly two child industries: 44911 Furniture Retailers and 44912 Home Furnishings Retailers.[4] The unifying thread is that everything here is a discretionary, big-ticket, housing-linked purchase sold through specialty stores — so the whole group rises and falls with home sales, home prices, remodeling budgets, and interest rates, and the whole group is being squeezed by the same off-code giants (home centers like Home Depot and Lowe's, mass merchants like Walmart and Target, and online marketplaces like Amazon and Wayfair) that sell the same products but are counted under other NAICS codes.[4]

Why it matters to an investor. This is a leveraged play on the housing cycle without owning houses: when homes change hands and borrowing costs fall, people furnish and re-decorate, and demand surges; when moves freeze, it slumps. Store costs are largely fixed, so profits swing hard with sales volume — high on the way up, painful on the way down — which makes timing and balance-sheet strength decisive. But the two children are not the same business, and the real value of viewing them together is the contrast in size, direction, ownership, concentration, and how an outsider can actually buy in. Section 2 lays out that comparison; the rest treats the group as a whole. Tickers, margins, and multiples are reserved for Sections 4 and 10.

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2. What's inside — the two child industries and how they differ

Both children are specialty home-goods retail, but they are two different businesses with different economics, owners, and entry points. Figures are 2022 Economic Census receipts, firm counts, and concentration unless noted.[1][2][3]

Sources: level and child receipts/firms/concentration from the 2022 Economic Census;[1][2][3] company and ownership detail from the child primers.[8][9]

Reading the contrast. Three points stand out:

1. The two children are close in revenue but far apart in structure. Home furnishings is slightly larger (~52% of receipts) and holds far more firms (~60%), because it includes a long tail of tiny window-treatment and décor shops. Furniture is slightly smaller by revenue but its firms are bigger on average (~$6.4M vs. ~$4.7M in sales) — showroom-based sellers of a bulky, high-ticket product.
2. Home furnishings is more concentrated at the top; furniture is more fragmented. Home furnishings' CR4 of 33.3% sits well above furniture's 18.9%, because home furnishings contains the big national chains (a HomeGoods, a Williams-Sonoma) in its all-other sub-industry, whereas furniture's own leaders — even the giant private ones — split a more evenly divided pie.
3. The public on-ramps cluster in home furnishings; furniture's scale is mostly private. The cleanest listed pure-plays in the whole group live on the home-furnishings side. Furniture's largest operators (Ashley, IKEA, Rooms To Go) are private or foundation-owned, so public furniture exposure is a scattered menu of niche business models rather than one dominant stock.

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3. How big it is

Federal ground-truth figures for the whole group (NAICS 4491). Receipts, firm counts, and concentration are from the 2022 Economic Census — these are the figures in our ingested level file:[1]

How the parent relates to its two children. Receipts sum almost exactly: $91.5B (furniture) + $100.2B (home furnishings) ≈ $191.7B.[1][2][3] Firm counts nearly reconcile too — 14,197 + 21,107 = 35,304 against the level's 35,253 — the small ~51-firm gap reflects companies that operate in both children and are counted once at the group level.[1]

A subtle but important concentration signal: the group looks more fragmented than either child. The level's CR4 (18.2%) and HHI (129) are below both children's figures (furniture 18.9% / 133.9; home furnishings 33.3% / 357.1). That is not a data error — it is what happens when you pool two industries whose largest firms are mostly different companies. Home furnishings' concentrated chains and furniture's leaders don't overlap, so combining the two dilutes each leader's share of the bigger base. On any reading — CR4 of 18.2%, HHI of 129 (a standard gauge where anything below 1,500 is "unconcentrated" and 10,000 is a pure monopoly) — this is a highly fragmented industry: a long tail of local independents with no dominant national player.[1]

Establishment, employment, and payroll are not in our level ground-truth file; the children's primers report them from County Business Patterns (CBP) 2023, a slightly later vintage. Summing the two children gives roughly ~44,900 employer establishments and ~410,000 paid employees across the group.[8][9] Total payroll cannot be cleanly summed here (the furniture side is not carried up in our files), so no group payroll figure is stated. Our level file also does not report national margins, average ticket, inventory turns, or e-commerce share, so none is estimated.

Two undercount caveats apply to the whole group, and the first is large.

1. Channel undercount (large). The ~$191.7 billion figure is only the specialty-store channel. The biggest sellers of nearly every product here are counted elsewhere: home centers (Home Depot, Lowe's — NAICS 444110) move enormous volumes of flooring, blinds, and furniture; general-merchandise giants (Walmart, Target, Costco) and online marketplaces (Amazon, Wayfair — nonstore/electronic-shopping codes) sell most of the housewares, décor, and a large slice of ready-to-assemble furniture.[4] Third-party researchers who add up all channels put U.S. home-décor spending alone at roughly $190–215 billion and total furniture and floor-covering spending well above the specialty figures — none of which can be read off these two codes.[7] Treat ~$191.7 billion as the size of the specialty channel, not of total consumer spending on furniture and home goods.
2. Nonemployer undercount. These are employer-business statistics; they exclude the self-employed and businesses with no paid employees (the Census Bureau tracks those "nonemployer" firms separately). Where small or individual ownership dominates — and both children carry a long tail of one-person shops, shop-at-home dealers, and independent gift/frame stores — the true count of operators exceeds the 35,253 employer firms.[5]

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4. The investable universe — where value concentrates across the children

This is a fragmented industry and the largest sellers of its products are off-code, so pure-play public options are scarce and cluster in specific children. There is no single public company, and no dedicated exchange-traded fund (ETF), that captures NAICS 4491 as a whole. Where an outsider can actually put money differs sharply between the two children.

On the home-furnishings side, the public value concentrates in three names: Williams-Sonoma (premium, self-branded — Pottery Barn, West Elm) and TJX / HomeGoods (off-price "treasure hunt") are the two clean, quality ways to own the theme, joined by Floor & Decor as the flooring category-killer. Window treatments have no U.S. public pure-play at all — listed exposure runs through the home centers or foreign makers.[9]

On the furniture side, public exposure is a scattered menu of business models rather than one stock: online (Wayfair), luxury (RH, Arhaus), full-service (Havertys, Ethan Allen), specialty seating (Lovesac), manufacturer-retailers (La-Z-Boy, Bassett), value (Bob's Discount, public since February 2026), and mattresses (Somnigroup, Sleep Number, Purple). Note Williams-Sonoma straddles both children (furniture and home furnishings), one reason the codes don't cleanly separate at the company level.[8]

Most of the group's mass is private or foundation-owned, reachable only off the public market:

• Furniture's biggest operators are private: Ashley (the #1 North American furniture retailer), IKEA (Ingka/INGKA Foundation), Rooms To Go, Raymour & Flanigan, American Signature/Value City, Crate & Barrel, and Room & Board — reachable via private equity, family ownership, or franchising.[8] Berkshire Hathaway offers indirect public exposure to private-style furniture retail (Nebraska Furniture Mart, R.C. Willey, Jordan's), though the segment is immaterial to the stock.[8]
• Home furnishings' base is held together by co-ops, franchises, and PE platforms: CCA Global Partners (Carpet One, Flooring America — 1,000+ member flooring stores) and Budget Blinds (~1,500 window-treatment territories) pool purchasing so independents survive the big boxes; Hunter Douglas (3G Capital) and Springs Window Fashions (Clearlake) are PE-owned makers pushing into retail; The Container Store and At Home emerged from 2025 bankruptcies owned by their former lenders.[9]

The upshot: buy the group's quality through home furnishings (Williams-Sonoma, TJX, Floor & Decor); express a furniture view through niche models or through private/family channels; and accept that the single largest sellers of these goods — the home centers and online generalists — are only reachable off-code.

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5. How the money works

At heart every operator here earns the spread between what it pays for merchandise and what it sells it for, minus the cost of the store — a discretionary retail model where net margins run in the low-to-mid single digits in a good year, so both operating leverage (rent) and financial leverage (debt) cut hard on the way down.[8][9] The group-wide levers:

• Comparable-store ("same-store" or "comp") sales are the health signal everywhere, split into transactions × average ticket. Because these are big-ticket, low-frequency purchases, store costs are largely fixed and profit rises and falls with comps — strong operating leverage that makes the whole group cyclical. Downturns show up first as falling traffic.
• Written vs. delivered sales. Much furniture and custom flooring/window product is made-to-order and delivered or installed weeks later, so signed orders lead recognized revenue — a useful forward indicator — and custom orders often collect a deposit upfront.
• Working capital cuts both ways. Custom-order operators (window treatment, made-to-order furniture) can run on negative working capital — a deposit lands before the factory is paid, an attractive cash trait. Inventory-heavy operators (warehouse flooring, all-other home furnishings, stocked furniture) tie up cash in bulky, style-sensitive goods, where buying the wrong item means markdowns that fall straight to the bottom line.
• Margins diverge widely by model. A premium, vertically integrated brand that designs its own product earns the most (Williams-Sonoma's ~17–18% operating margin); an off-price operator runs a low-30s gross margin but turns inventory fast; a warehouse volume player competes on price. Gross margins across the group range from the low-30s to 60%+ depending on model.[8][9]
• Two of these businesses sell labor as well as product. Floor covering and window treatment are markup-plus-installation models — the retailer captures the product spread and the install labor, so installation reliability matters as much as sourcing. Furniture and all-other home furnishings are closer to pure merchandise markup plus last-mile delivery of bulky goods, where scale is a real advantage.
• Promotional financing (0%-interest, deferred-payment) sells the ticket, tying demand to consumer credit and interest rates.
• Imports drive the cost side. A large share of furniture, flooring, blinds, and housewares is imported, so margins swing with tariffs, ocean freight, and currencies — a recurring pressure point.
• Scale is bought through groups. Independents that can't match big-box purchasing pool it through co-ops and franchises (CCA Global, Budget Blinds, Ashley dealerships), earning volume pricing and vendor rebates that are often the difference between surviving and not.[8][9]

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6. What drives demand

Demand across the whole group is largely a derivative of housing activity, tracked through the same handful of indicators:

• Existing-home turnover — the single biggest driver. A home purchase unlocks a burst of furniture, flooring, and décor spending; when elevated mortgage rates freeze existing-home sales, every part of the group softens at once.
• Mortgage rates and the "lock-in effect." High rates keep owners in place and suppress moves; this is partly offset by repair-and-remodel (R&R) spending as households upgrade in place. Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity (LIRA) is the standard R&R gauge and points to only low-single-digit growth into 2026–2027 — a slow, steady backdrop rather than a boom.[9]
• New-home construction and household formation add first-time furnishing demand.
• Home prices, home equity, consumer confidence, income, and credit all swing a deferrable, frequently financed purchase (the wealth effect).
• Business-to-business demand (hospitality, office, multifamily) adds a non-household leg, especially in furniture.
• Input costs and tariffs (lumber, foam, steel, imported finished goods, freight) feed through to prices and volumes.

Each child also carries its own kicker: mattresses run a replacement cycle inside furniture; window treatment carries a structural child-safety-driven cordless/motorization replacement tailwind; floor covering benefits from waterproof luxury-vinyl innovation; and all-other home furnishings adds gifting, registry, holiday seasonality, and social-media trend cycles.[8][9]

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7. Regulation

This is a lightly regulated retail activity — no rate base, no license-to-operate, no government-payer reimbursement. The binding rules govern the products sold and, increasingly, the cost of importing them, and they cluster around a few agencies common to both children:

• Product safety — CPSC. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) enforces the STURDY Act dresser tip-over standard and mattress/upholstery flammability rules on the furniture side, and a mandatory cord-safety rule for custom window coverings (effective May 30, 2023) plus carpet/textile flammability rules on the home-furnishings side. From July 8, 2026, importers of most regulated consumer products must electronically file conformity-certificate data with U.S. Customs and Border Protection — a new burden that falls hardest on direct-import and private-label sellers.[8][9]
• Chemical and sourcing rules. Composite-wood furniture and flooring must meet formaldehyde-emission limits under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Title VI; imported wood carries U.S. Department of Agriculture Lacey Act declarations. Lumber Liquidators' 2015 Chinese-laminate formaldehyde scandal shows these are not theoretical.[9]
• Advertising, labeling, and financing — FTC and others. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) polices deceptive "Made in USA" and "green" claims, requires textile fiber/origin/care labeling, and governs the buying co-ops and franchises via the Franchise Rule. Truth-in-Lending / Regulation Z governs consumer financing; the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) governs store access.[8][9]
• Trade and tariffs — the dominant variable. Because so much product is imported, trade policy is arguably the single most important "regulatory" input to this group's economics. Section 232 furniture tariffs (effective October 1, 2025) remain in effect even after the Supreme Court struck down separate "reciprocal" tariffs on February 20, 2026, alongside long-standing antidumping/countervailing duties (AD/CVD) on Chinese wooden bedroom furniture, imported mattresses, flooring, and housewares. The 2025 tariff escalation was a proximate cause cited in at least one major bankruptcy in the group.[8][9]
• State/local. Sales tax (collected on online sales too, post-South Dakota v. Wayfair), building codes, California's Proposition 65 warnings, and — for the install side of flooring and window treatment — contractor licensing and workmanship-liability exposure.

Full citations and specifics are in the child primers, Section 7.[8][9]

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8. Consolidation

The competitive story across the whole group is a slow-motion channel shift plus a shakeout — fragmented at the base, consolidating at the top, and shaking out in the middle. The federal data confirm the low starting point: a group CR4 of 18.2% and HHI of 129.[1]

• A fragmented base under pressure. A long tail of local independents competes on service, selection, and installation quality while home centers, mass merchants, and online generalists steadily pull volume out of the specialty channel.[1][4]
• Category killers and off-price take share. Floor & Decor's warehouse format in flooring and HomeGoods' off-price model in all-other home furnishings are the group's clearest share-gainers.[9]
• Co-ops and franchises consolidate the survivors. Buying groups (CCA Global in flooring, Budget Blinds in window treatments, Ashley's dealership network in furniture) roll thousands of independents under one brand and supply contract — the closest thing to national scale at the retail level.[8][9]
• Vertical integration and PE roll-ups. The landmark furniture deal was Tempur Sealy's ~$5.1 billion acquisition of Mattress Firm (completed February 5, 2025), forming Somnigroup; on the home-furnishings side, private equity has taken leading manufacturers private and pushed them into retail (Hunter Douglas/3G, Springs/Clearlake), and Lowe's paid $1.325 billion for Artisan Design Group to own builder flooring directly.[8][9]
• A distress wave and a new lender-owner class. The high-rate slump culled the leveraged middle across both children: in furniture, Big Lots, Conn's HomePlus, Z Gallerie, and American Freight vacated an estimated 1,500-plus stores; in home furnishings, Bed Bath & Beyond, LL Flooring, Tuesday Morning, The Container Store, and At Home passed through bankruptcy in 2023–2026 — several now owned by the lenders who converted debt to equity. Bob's Discount Furniture moved the other way, from private equity to a public listing (IPO February 2026).[8][9]

The consistent pattern: scale (purchasing, freight, technology, private label, compliance) accrues to the largest players, leaving the leveraged mid-price operator in the weakest position — a structural squeeze on the middle across both children.

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9. Risks

• Housing cyclicality and rate sensitivity. Every part of the group is a deferrable, big-ticket, housing-linked purchase; high mortgage rates freeze existing-home turnover and raise financing costs, hitting comps quickly (as in 2025). The lock-in effect can suppress demand for years.[8][9]
• Operating and financial leverage cut both ways. Fixed store costs (rent) turn modest sales declines into outsized profit drops, and acquisition/PE debt compounds it — the direct cause of most recent casualties.[9]
• Import, tariff, and supply-chain exposure. A heavily imported, thin-margin cost base means Section 232 duties, AD/CVD, freight, and currency swings can compress margins with little notice — the defining risk of 2025.[8][9]
• Inventory and markdown risk. Bulky, style-sensitive, seasonal goods that don't sell must be marked down, and discounts fall straight to the bottom line.
• Competitive squeeze and channel disintermediation. Home centers, mass merchants, and online marketplaces continually pull volume out of the specialty channel and raise price transparency and customer-acquisition costs.
• Execution and installation risk. For flooring and window treatment, a single bad measurement or install can erase an order's profit; installer shortages cap growth and create warranty/liability exposure.
• Product-liability and regulatory risk. Tip-over, flammability, cord-safety, formaldehyde, illegal-wood, or false-advertising failures can trigger recalls, penalties, and litigation — and can be company-ending (see Lumber Liquidators).[9]
• Small-operator fragility and private-company opacity. Most firms fall under the Small Business Administration (SBA) small-business line and face owner-dependence, weak controls, and succession risk; the long nonemployer tail is thinner still, and the largest private names disclose little.[5][8][9]

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10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public-market routes — start with exposure purity, because the clean plays sit in specific children:

• The quality large-caps are in home furnishings: Williams-Sonoma (WSM) for the premium, self-branded, digitally led model, and TJX (TJX) for off-price with HomeGoods as a genuine growth engine (note you also buy TJX's apparel business). The flooring category-killer is Floor & Decor (FND); Tile Shop (TTSH) is a small, niche adjacent play.[9]
• Furniture is a menu of niche models, not one stock — compare by business model, not a single valuation yardstick: online (Wayfair), luxury (RH, Arhaus), full-service (Havertys, Ethan Allen), specialty seating (Lovesac), manufacturer-retail (La-Z-Boy, Bassett), value (Bob's Discount), and mattresses (Somnigroup, Sleep Number, Purple).[8]
• Diversified housing exposure across the whole theme comes through the home centers Home Depot (HD) and Lowe's (LOW) (home goods as a slice of a bigger business); supply-side exposure through flooring maker Mohawk (MHK). Berkshire Hathaway gives indirect exposure to private-style furniture retail. There is no dedicated furniture/home-furnishings ETF — investors typically pair broad consumer-discretionary or retail funds with housing-linked funds as leading indicators.
• What to analyze: comp sales (transactions × ticket), gross margin and its source, inventory aging and turns, new-store/new-territory returns, installation performance, leverage, and cash conversion — valued against normalized, mid-cycle earnings (price-to-earnings, enterprise-value-to-EBITDA — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — and free-cash-flow yield), not peak-housing conditions.

Private-market routes — where most of the group's mass actually sits, and you underwrite the operator, not the code:

• Own or franchise a local operator — an Ashley dealership or independent furniture store, a flooring dealer under a co-op (CCA Global's Carpet One), a Budget Blinds window territory, or an independent housewares/gift shop. These are classic SBA-scale small businesses.[8][9]
• Back the platforms — PE-owned manufacturers and shop-at-home nationals (Hunter Douglas, Springs, Empire Today), installer and dealer roll-ups, and distressed-debt/restructuring plays (the lender-owned Container Store and At Home). Adjacent plays include manufacturing, last-mile delivery/logistics, warehouse real estate, and the commercial real estate under the stores.[8][9]
• Diligence questions: Are sales repeatable or tied to one owner/lead source? Are margins stated after installation rework, returns, and markdowns? How much cash is trapped in inventory? Can the platform add locations without degrading service? Is debt service covered under a housing downturn?

Outlook (forward-looking judgment, not reported fact). Demand entered 2026 soft and cost-pressured: existing-home turnover remains muted while mortgage rates stay elevated, remodeling growth is in the low single digits, and Section 232 tariffs are pushing prices up — a headwind for import-heavy sellers and a relative tailwind for domestic manufacturer-retailers.[8][9] Medium-term the case is more constructive and shared across both children: an aging housing stock, large accumulated home equity, and eventual rate normalization should release pent-up turnover, furnishing, and remodeling demand. The most important swing factor for the whole group is housing — a meaningful drop in mortgage rates that thaws existing-home sales would release pent-up demand quickly. Expect continued shakeout, further e-commerce and off-price share gains, relative resilience at the premium and off-price ends versus a squeezed middle, and ongoing consolidation of a fragmented base. The macro switches that govern everything here are mortgage rates and existing-home sales (the demand switch), tariff and trade policy (the margin switch), and new-store/new-territory productivity (the growth switch). These are judgments about the future, not certainties.

For the complete company-by-company universe, regulatory citations, and demand and consolidation data, read the two child primers: 44911 Furniture Retailers and 44912 Home Furnishings Retailers.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau. "2022 Economic Census — Concentration of Largest Firms, NAICS 4491 Furniture and Home Furnishings Retailers" (receipts ~$191,730,447 thousand; 35,253 firms; CR4 18.2%, CR8 27.0%, CR20 40.1%, CR50 51.4%; HHI 129). 2022. (Histometrics ingested federal statistics — our ground-truth file for this level.) https://data.census.gov/table/ECNSIZE2022.EC2200SIZECONCEN

2. U.S. Census Bureau. "2022 Economic Census — Concentration of Largest Firms, NAICS 44911 / 449110 Furniture Retailers" (receipts ~$91.5B; 14,197 employer firms; CR4 18.9%; HHI 133.9). 2022. https://data.census.gov/table/ECNSIZE2022.EC2200SIZECONCEN

3. U.S. Census Bureau. "2022 Economic Census — Concentration of Largest Firms, NAICS 44912 Home Furnishings Retailers and children 449121/449122/449129" (receipts ~$100.2B; 21,107 firms; CR4 33.3%; HHI 357.1). 2022. https://data.census.gov/table/ECNSIZE2022.EC2200SIZECONCEN

4. U.S. Census Bureau. "2022 NAICS Definitions — 4491 Furniture and Home Furnishings Retailers, children 44911 and 44912, and adjacent codes 444110 Home Centers, 455110 Department Stores, 4541 Electronic Shopping." 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/?input=4491&year=2022

5. U.S. Census Bureau. "County Business Patterns Methodology" and "Nonemployer Statistics" (employer-only coverage; nonemployer undercount). 2023–2026. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/technical-documentation/methodology.html

6. U.S. Small Business Administration. "Table of Small Business Size Standards" (furniture and home-furnishings retail size thresholds). 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards

7. Mordor Intelligence and Grand View Research. "United States Home Decor Market (~$190–215B, 2025); U.S. Furniture and Floor-Covering Markets across all channels." 2024–2026. https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/us-home-decor-market

8. Histometrics child primer — NAICS 44911 Furniture Retailers (and national industry 449110): full investable universe (public equities and private/foundation owners), operating economics, regulation, the 2023–2025 furniture shakeout, the Tempur Sealy/Mattress Firm → Somnigroup deal, and the Bob's Discount IPO, with the complete numbered Sources list (SEC filings, CPSC/EPA/FTC citations, tariff and housing data). primer-44911-DRAFT.md

9. Histometrics child primer — NAICS 44912 Home Furnishings Retailers (floor covering 449121, window treatment 449122, all-other 449129): full company universe (Floor & Decor, Tile Shop, Williams-Sonoma, TJX/HomeGoods; CCA Global, Budget Blinds, Hunter Douglas, Springs, Empire Today, At Home, The Container Store), County Business Patterns 2023 establishment/employment/payroll, LIRA remodeling data, CPSC cord-safety and Section 301/tariff citations, and the 2023–2026 distress wave, with its complete numbered Sources list. primer-44912-DRAFT.md