During the pandemic, toy companies haven’t been able to capitalize as much on sales of new toys and merchandise related to big movie releases, as many movies were significantly delayed.
We’re finding out more this week about how toy companies are faring overall. Hasbro reported its quarterly results on Monday, beating forecasts for revenue and profit. Mattel is set to report Tuesday.
Big new movie releases often mean new, licensed toys. President and CEO of the Toy Association Steve Pasierb said, in recent years, that’s made up a good chunk of sales for the toy industry.
“This year it was either flat to slightly declining because of the lack of large theatrical releases,” Pasierb said.
There were, however, some licensed toys connected to legacy franchises, like “Star Wars, “that sold well in 2020, he said.
“Like ‘The Mandalorian,’ in streaming, that did extremely well and generated ‘the Child,’ which was a hot selling toy,” Pasierb said.
Overall, 2020 was a strong year for the toy industry. Sales were up 16%, according to NPD Group, and that’s “despite the lack of entertainment calendar that we’ve usually had,” said Jaime Katz, an analyst at Morningstar.
Katz said that’s because people bought plenty of other kinds of toys.
“Fashion dolls have done really well this year,” she said. “The sports toys category has done fairly well.”
With so much less money going toward travel and eating out, Katz said, many parents had a lot more to spend on toys.
What happens if some relief funds are not spent?
Depending on how you count it, the federal government has put up about $4 trillion of pandemic-related relief so far, from loans to tax cuts to new spending. But, said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “there’s a lot of money still in the pipeline.” Leftover PPP money is sitting in an account. But other expenses, like unemployment, are more like Congress saying, “We’ll spend it if we need to.” But whether this or that program spends everything it was expected to is a very different argument than how much total need is out there in the economy.
How should companies compensate their employees’ work-from-home costs?
A new survey from the compensation software and data company PayScale found that less than 25% of organizations provided any kind of stipend to employees working from home last year. As companies make some level of working from home permanent, they need to think carefully about their compensation policies because figuring out stipends can get tricky, said Shelly Holt, chief people officer at PayScale. Also, a study from the University of Washington found that about 75% of Americans can’t work exclusively from home. Folks working in health care and at grocery stores among so many others.
What is budget reconciliation, and how might Democrats use it to pass COVID relief?
Both President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress have said they will pass the bill without Republican support using a process called budget reconciliation. In the Senate, “the final vote on any piece of legislation does pass with a simple majority,” said Kelly Whitener, associate professor at Georgetown University. But under Senate rules, you can’t get to that vote unless at least 60 senators agree to end debate. Budget reconciliation is a way around this, but only in very specific cases. It’s a process created in a 1974 budget law that allows senators to bring a bill to a vote with a regular old majority.
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