Furniture, Home Furnishings, Electronics, and Appliance Retailers (U.S.) — NAICS 2022: 449

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 outfitting a home with its big-ticket, durable contents — the furniture you sit and sleep on, the flooring and window treatments and décor that finish the rooms, and the electronics and appliances that power daily life. Together these specialty retailers ring up about $367.0 billion a year across roughly 52,600 firms.[1]

The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS — the U.S. government's standard for classifying business establishments) groups them under code 449, "Furniture, Home Furnishings, Electronics, and Appliance Retailers," a subsector (the 3-digit layer) that sits two rungs below the retail sector. It holds exactly two child industry groups: 4491 Furniture and Home Furnishings Retailers and 4492 Electronics and Appliance Retailers.[4]

The thread that unites them is a shared customer occasion: everything here is a discretionary, big-ticket, durable good bought for the home and sold through specialty stores — so the whole subsector rises and falls with home sales, home prices, remodeling budgets, and interest rates, and every part of it is being squeezed by the same off-code giants (home centers like Home Depot and Lowe's, mass merchants like Walmart, Target, and Costco, and online marketplaces like Amazon) 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 and replacement cycle without owning houses: when homes change hands and borrowing costs fall, people furnish, re-decorate, and re-equip, 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. 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 — one child is a fragmented, mostly private long tail; the other is a top-heavy, publicly-anchored channel in structural decline. Section 2 lays out that comparison; the rest treats the subsector 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 store-based specialty retail of durable home goods, but they sit at opposite ends of almost every structural axis: one is fragmented and mostly private, the other is concentrated and publicly anchored. 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, ownership, and economics detail from the child primers.[8][9]

Reading the contrast. Four points stand out:

1. Nearly equal in revenue, structurally opposite. The two children split the subsector almost evenly by dollars (~$192B vs. ~$175B), yet furniture/home furnishings has twice the firm count and a fragmented base of independents, while electronics/appliances has half the firms and each is roughly twice as large on average (~$10.1M vs. ~$5.4M in sales per firm).
2. Concentration is the sharpest divide. Furniture/home furnishings is a textbook fragmented industry (CR4 18.2%, HHI 129 — a long tail with no dominant national player). Electronics/appliances is the opposite: its top four firms take 59.1% of receipts, driven overwhelmingly by Best Buy.[2][3] The subsector's blended CR4 of 30.6% sits between the two — the arithmetic of pooling a fragmented industry with a top-heavy one.[1]
3. Public access is lopsided. Electronics/appliances gives investors one clean, large listed specialist (Best Buy) and little else on-code. Furniture/home furnishings has more public on-ramps but they cluster in the home-furnishings half (Williams-Sonoma, TJX/HomeGoods, Floor & Decor); furniture's largest operators (Ashley, IKEA, Rooms To Go) are private or foundation-owned.[8][9]
4. One is cyclical, the other is structurally declining. Furniture/home furnishings is depressed by the housing cycle but keeps genuine growth engines (off-price, warehouse flooring, premium brands). Electronics/appliances is not just cyclical — its store channel has been losing share for two decades to online and to the home centers, and it consolidates by attrition rather than growth.[8][9]

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3. How big it is

Federal ground-truth figures for the whole subsector (NAICS 449). 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: $191.7B (furniture/home furnishings) + $175.3B (electronics/appliances) ≈ $367.0B.[1][2][3] Firm counts nearly reconcile too — 35,253 + 17,421 = 52,674 against the level's 52,632 — the small ~42-firm gap reflects companies that operate in both children and are counted once at the subsector level.[1]

A concentration signal that only shows up at the rollup. The subsector's CR4 (30.6%) sits above its fragmented child (furniture/home furnishings, 18.2%) but well below its concentrated child (electronics/appliances, 59.1%).[1][2][3] That is not a data error — it is what pooling does: blending a long-tailed industry with a Best-Buy-anchored one produces a middling top-four share. Federal statisticians suppressed the subsector's HHI, so we cannot report a single concentration score for the level, and no suppressed value is estimated here. On the visible measures, the subsector as a whole is moderately fragmented: a broad base of local independents (concentrated in the furniture/home-furnishings child) sitting alongside one dominant national anchor in electronics/appliances.[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 ~63,900 employer establishments and ~606,600 paid employees across the subsector (about 44,900 establishments / 410,000 employees in furniture/home furnishings, plus ~19,000 / ~196,600 in electronics/appliances).[8][9] Total payroll cannot be cleanly summed here (the furniture/home-furnishings side is not carried up in our files); the electronics/appliances child alone reports roughly $8.5 billion in annual payroll, so no subsector-wide payroll figure is stated.[9] 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 subsector, and the first is very large.

1. Channel undercount (large, and it runs the same direction for both children). The ~$367.0 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) are the #1 and #2 sellers of major appliances and move enormous volumes of flooring and blinds; general-merchandise and club giants (Walmart, Target, Costco — NAICS 455) and online marketplaces (Amazon — nonstore/electronic-shopping codes, holding an estimated 30%+ of the U.S. electronics market) sell most of the housewares, décor, and a large slice of both electronics and ready-to-assemble furniture; even GameStop (459120) sits off-code.[4][7] Third-party researchers who add up all channels put total U.S. spending on these products far above the specialty figures.[7] Treat ~$367.0 billion as the size of the specialty channel, not of total consumer spending on furniture, home goods, electronics, and appliances.
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 the furniture/home-furnishings child in particular carries a long tail of one-person shops, shop-at-home dealers, and independent gift/frame stores, alongside casual electronics-repair sellers — the true count of operators exceeds the 52,632 employer firms.[5]

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

This is a fragmented subsector on paper, but the largest sellers of its products are off-code, so pure-play public options are scarce and cluster in very specific places. There is no single public company, and no dedicated exchange-traded fund (ETF), that captures NAICS 449 as a whole. Where an outsider can actually put money differs sharply between the two children.

Electronics and appliances is a one-stock story. The public value is highly concentrated in a single large pure-play — Best Buy (NYSE: BBY), the only large listed specialist in the code, with a lease-to-own adjacency in Upbound Group (NASDAQ: UPBD, Rent-A-Center). The private/family regionals (P.C. Richard & Son, Abt Electronics, Micro Center, BrandsMart USA) are rarely for sale, and every other national rival of the last generation has gone bankrupt. A direct on-code bet on this child is largely a bet on one company.[9]

Furniture and home furnishings offers more public on-ramps, but they cluster. The cleanest listed quality plays live on the home-furnishings side: Williams-Sonoma (premium, self-branded — Pottery Barn, West Elm), TJX / HomeGoods (off-price "treasure hunt"), and Floor & Decor as the flooring category-killer.[9] The furniture side is a scattered menu of niche business models — online (Wayfair), luxury (RH, Arhaus), full-service (Havertys, Ethan Allen), manufacturer-retailers (La-Z-Boy), value (Bob's Discount), and mattresses (Somnigroup, Sleep Number) — rather than one dominant stock, because furniture's biggest operators (Ashley, the #1 North American furniture retailer; IKEA; Rooms To Go) are private or foundation-owned.[8]

Most of the subsector's mass sits off the public market or off-code entirely. Furniture's scale is reachable mainly through private equity, family ownership, or franchising; home furnishings' independent base is held together by buying co-ops (CCA Global in flooring) and franchises (Budget Blinds); electronics/appliances' independents survive in service-heavy niches. And the single largest sellers of all these products — the home centers (Home Depot, Lowe's), the clubs and supercenters (Costco, Walmart, Target), and Amazon — are only reachable off-code, as a slice of a much bigger business.[8][9]

The upshot: own electronics/appliances almost entirely through Best Buy; own furniture/home-furnishings quality through the home-furnishings names; express a furniture view through niche models or private channels; and reach the biggest sellers only 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 single digits, so both operating leverage (rent) and financial leverage (debt) cut hard on the way down.[8][9] Within that shared frame the two children diverge on how thin the spread is and where the profit actually sits.

• Comparable-store ("same-store" or "comp") sales are the universal health signal, 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 subsector cyclical. Downturns show up first as falling traffic.
• Margins are much thinner in electronics/appliances. Consumer-electronics gross margins run in the low-20s (Best Buy's U.S. gross margin ~23.5%) and appliances thinner still, leaving operating margins in the low single digits (~4%). The profit sits in the attached revenue — delivery and installation, repair and tech support, protection plans, paid memberships, supplier-funded advertising, and financing — not in the box itself.[9]
• Furniture/home furnishings spans a wider margin range, from low-30s gross for an off-price operator to 60%+ for a vertically integrated premium brand (Williams-Sonoma's ~17–18% operating margin), with value and warehouse players competing on price. Some of these businesses also sell labor (flooring and window-treatment install is a markup-plus-installation model) and some can run on negative working capital because custom orders collect a deposit before the factory is paid.[8]
• Promotional financing (0%-interest, deferred-payment) and lease-to-own (weekly/monthly rental to eventual ownership, at a cost well above cash price) sell the ticket across both children, tying demand to consumer credit and interest rates.[8][9]
• Imports drive the cost side everywhere. A large share of furniture, flooring, blinds, housewares, electronics, and appliances is imported, so margins swing with tariffs, ocean freight, and currencies — a recurring, and in 2025–2026 a dominant, pressure point.
• Scale is decisive, and independents buy it through groups. Operators that can't match big-box purchasing pool it through co-ops, franchises, and buying groups (CCA Global, Budget Blinds, Ashley dealerships in furniture/home furnishings; NATM-style groups in electronics/appliances), 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 subsector is largely a derivative of housing activity and replacement need, tracked through the same handful of indicators:

• Existing-home turnover — the single biggest shared driver. A home purchase unlocks a burst of furniture, flooring, décor, and an appliance package; when elevated mortgage rates freeze existing-home sales (they fell roughly a third from 2020 to 2025, with a tentative late-2025 uptick), every part of the subsector softens at once.[8][9]
• 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) 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 and first-appliance demand.
• Home prices, home equity, income, consumer confidence, and credit all swing a deferrable, frequently financed purchase (the wealth effect).
• Input costs and tariffs (lumber, foam, steel, imported finished goods, freight) feed through to prices and volumes — including a 50% tariff on steel/aluminum-content major appliances that raised landed costs in 2025.[9]

Each child also carries its own kicker. Furniture/home furnishings runs on mattress replacement cycles, a child-safety-driven cordless/motorized window-treatment tailwind, waterproof luxury-vinyl flooring innovation, and gifting/registry/holiday seasonality.[8] Electronics/appliances runs on appliance replacement cycles (8–15 years, a floor under demand) and technology upgrade waves (larger/OLED TVs, AI-capable PCs, game-console cycles) that pull spending forward.[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, clustered 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, mattress/upholstery flammability rules, and a mandatory cord-safety rule for custom window coverings on the furniture/home-furnishings side, and product-safety recalls on electronics and appliances.[8][9] 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]
• Advertising, warranty, labeling, and financing — FTC and others. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) polices deceptive "Made in USA" and "green" claims, enforces warranty law (the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act), and governs buying co-ops and franchises via the Franchise Rule; Truth-in-Lending / Regulation Z governs consumer financing and lease-to-own; the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) governs store access.[8][9]
• Energy, chemicals, and radio — DOE, EPA, FCC. Appliances face Department of Energy (DOE) energy-efficiency standards and the ENERGY STAR label — both in live policy flux in 2025–2026; composite-wood furniture and flooring must meet the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) formaldehyde-emission limits under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Title VI; electronics need Federal Communications Commission (FCC) radio-frequency authorization.[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 the subsector's economics. Section 232 furniture tariffs (effective October 1, 2025), a 50% major-appliance steel/aluminum tariff, and long-standing antidumping/countervailing duties (AD/CVD) on Chinese furniture, mattresses, and flooring all bite here; the 2025 tariff escalation was a proximate cause cited in at least one major bankruptcy.[8][9]
• State/local. Sales tax (collected on online sales too, post-South Dakota v. Wayfair), state right-to-repair and rent-to-own rules, California's Proposition 65 warnings, building codes, and — for the install side of flooring and window treatment — contractor licensing and workmanship liability.[8][9]

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

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8. Consolidation

The competitive story diverges sharply between the two children, but both are shaped by the same force — off-code rivals pulling volume out of the specialty channel — and both confirm a fragmented-at-the-base, top-heavy-at-the-top structure (subsector CR4 30.6%).[1]

• Furniture/home furnishings consolidates by roll-up and shakeout. A fragmented base of independents banks together in co-ops and franchises (CCA Global, Budget Blinds, Ashley's dealerships); category killers and off-price take share (Floor & Decor, HomeGoods); private equity rolls up manufacturers and pushes them into retail; and the landmark deal was Tempur Sealy's ~$5.1 billion acquisition of Mattress Firm (completed February 2025, forming Somnigroup). A high-rate distress wave culled the leveraged middle (Big Lots, Bed Bath & Beyond, The Container Store, At Home), several now owned by former lenders.[8][9]
• Electronics/appliances consolidates by attrition. This is one of retail's harshest arenas, gutted by showrooming and price transparency for 20 years: Circuit City (2009), RadioShack, hhgregg (2017), Fry's Electronics (2021), and Conn's HomePlus (2024) all vanished. Best Buy is the survivor, re-engineered around price-matching, membership, and services; major appliances have shifted decisively to the home centers; and regional independents hold on in service-heavy niches by banding into buying groups.[9]

The consistent pattern across both children: scale (purchasing, freight, technology, private label, services, compliance) accrues to the largest players, leaving the leveraged mid-price operator in the weakest position — a structural squeeze on the middle, whether the field is fragmented (furniture) or already concentrated (electronics).

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9. Risks

• Housing cyclicality and rate sensitivity. Every part of the subsector is a deferrable, big-ticket, housing-linked purchase; high mortgage rates freeze existing-home turnover and raise financing costs, hitting comps quickly. 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 mechanism behind nearly every recent bankruptcy across both children.[8][9]
• Structural channel loss. Off-code rivals — home centers, mass merchants, clubs, and online marketplaces — continually pull volume out of the specialty channel, raise price transparency, and lift customer-acquisition costs. This risk is acute in electronics/appliances, where the store channel is shrinking structurally.[9]
• Import, tariff, and supply-chain exposure. A heavily imported, thin-margin cost base means Section 232 duties, appliance tariffs, AD/CVD, freight, and currency swings can compress margins with little notice — the defining risk of 2025–2026.[8][9]
• Inventory and obsolescence risk. Bulky, style-sensitive, seasonal goods (furniture/home furnishings) and fast-obsolescing technology (electronics) that don't sell must be marked down, and discounts fall straight to the bottom line.[8][9]
• Execution, installation, and credit risk. A single bad measurement or install can erase an order's profit (flooring, window treatment); promotional financing and lease-to-own carry consumer-credit risk.[8][9]
• Product-liability and regulatory risk. Tip-over, flammability, cord-safety, formaldehyde, recall, or false-advertising failures can trigger penalties and litigation — occasionally company-ending.[8][9]
• Concentration risk for the public investor. In electronics/appliances especially, a direct listed bet on the code is largely a bet on one company (Best Buy); the largest private furniture names disclose little, and the long nonemployer tail is fragile and owner-dependent.[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:

• Electronics/appliances is one stock: Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) — a value/turnaround-and-income name (long dividend-growth streak, yield near 5%), not a growth story; Upbound Group (UPBD) is a thinner lease-to-own adjacency.[9]
• Furniture/home-furnishings quality lives in home furnishings: Williams-Sonoma (WSM) for the premium, self-branded, digitally-led model, TJX (TJX) for off-price with HomeGoods as a genuine growth engine (note you also buy TJX's apparel business), and Floor & Decor (FND) as the flooring category-killer. Furniture is a menu of niche models, not one stock — online (Wayfair), luxury (RH, Arhaus), full-service (Havertys, Ethan Allen), manufacturer-retail (La-Z-Boy), value (Bob's Discount), mattresses (Somnigroup, Sleep Number).[8]
• Diversified / off-code exposure to the whole theme comes through the home centers Home Depot (HD) and Lowe's (LOW), the clubs and supercenters, and Amazon (home goods, electronics, and appliances as a slice of a bigger business). There is no dedicated ETF for this subsector; 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, attached-services mix (critical in electronics/appliances), inventory aging and turns, new-store returns, 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- or trough-housing conditions.

Private-market routes — where most of the subsector'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, a regional electronics/appliance chain, or a lease-to-own storefront. These are classic Small Business Administration (SBA)-scale small businesses.[8][9]
• Back the platforms — PE-owned manufacturers and shop-at-home nationals, installer and dealer roll-ups, distressed-debt/restructuring plays (the lender-owned Container Store and At Home), and the financing, delivery, installation, repair, and refurbishment businesses around 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 or in a shrinking store channel? Can the platform add locations without degrading service? Is debt service covered under a housing downturn?

Outlook (forward-looking judgment, not reported fact). The subsector 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 2025 tariffs are pushing prices up — a headwind for import-heavy sellers.[8][9] The two children face different medium-term paths. Furniture/home furnishings is cyclically depressed but structurally intact, with an aging housing stock, large accumulated home equity, and eventual rate normalization poised to release pent-up furnishing and remodeling demand, and real growth pockets (off-price, warehouse flooring, premium brands). Electronics/appliances shares the housing upside on the appliance side but keeps fighting a structurally shrinking store channel, so its survivors compete on service, installation, credit, and cost rather than unit growth. The macro switches that govern the whole subsector are mortgage rates and existing-home sales (the demand switch), tariff and trade policy (the margin switch), and new-store/services 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: 4491 Furniture and Home Furnishings Retailers and 4492 Electronics and Appliance Retailers.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau. "2022 Economic Census — Concentration of Largest Firms, NAICS 449 Furniture, Home Furnishings, Electronics, and Appliance Retailers" (receipts ~$367,007,509 thousand; 52,632 firms; CR4 30.6%, CR8 38.0%, CR20 48.3%, CR50 57.4%; HHI suppressed). 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 4491 Furniture and Home Furnishings Retailers" (receipts ~$191.7B; 35,253 firms; CR4 18.2%; HHI 129). 2022. https://data.census.gov/table/ECNSIZE2022.EC2200SIZECONCEN

3. U.S. Census Bureau. "2022 Economic Census — Concentration of Largest Firms, NAICS 4492/44921/449210 Electronics and Appliance Retailers" (receipts ~$175.3B; 17,421 firms; CR4 59.1%, CR8 64.4%, CR20 70.1%, CR50 74.4%; HHI suppressed). 2022. https://data.census.gov/table/ECNSIZE2022.EC2200SIZECONCEN

4. U.S. Census Bureau. "2022 NAICS Definitions — 449 Furniture, Home Furnishings, Electronics, and Appliance Retailers; children 4491 and 4492; and adjacent codes 444110 Home Centers, 455 General Merchandise, 454110/459 Electronic Shopping, 459120." 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/?input=449&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, home-furnishings, electronics, and appliance retail thresholds). 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards

7. Third-party market research across all channels — Mordor Intelligence / Grand View Research (U.S. home décor and furniture) and PYMNTS / Statista / OpenBrand (Amazon 30%+ of U.S. electronics; Lowe's and Home Depot #1/#2 in major appliances). 2024–2026. https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/us-home-decor-market

8. Histometrics child primer — NAICS 4491 Furniture and Home Furnishings Retailers (children 44911 Furniture and 44912 Home Furnishings): full investable universe (public equities and private/foundation owners), operating economics, regulation, the 2023–2026 shakeout, the Tempur Sealy/Mattress Firm → Somnigroup deal, and CBP 2023 establishment/employment data, with its complete numbered Sources list. primer-4491-DRAFT.md

9. Histometrics child primer — NAICS 4492 Electronics and Appliance Retailers (single-child chain 44921/449210): full company universe (Best Buy, Upbound/Rent-A-Center, private regionals), unit economics and attached-services model, CBP 2023 establishment/employment/payroll, appliance-tariff and existing-home-sales data, the 20-year attrition of specialist chains, and DOE/CPSC/FTC/FCC regulation, with its complete numbered Sources list. primer-4492-DRAFT.md