Keith Klein (Photo: moving.com)
Furniture and home improvement items were big sellers this holiday season, giving retail sales a 3% boost during this year’s expanded holiday shopping season, according to a report by MasterCard SpendingPulse.
Online shopping sales grew a whopping 49% between October 11 and December 24, emphasizing how the Covid-19 pandemic reshaped shopping habits.
The holiday sales surge brought on an influx in shipments. Yet in many cases, that limited parcel services’ abilities to deliver them on time.
Online shopping sales made up 19.7% of total retail sales. And Black Friday, a cornerstone unofficial holiday marked with unprecedented deals, landed as the top spending day of the season.
“American consumers turned the holiday season on its head, redefining ‘home for the holidays’ in a uniquely 2020 way.
They shopped from home for the home, leading to record e-commerce growth.”
The Federal Prison in Terre Haute has started vaccinating staff members and some inmates at the complex where the Justice Department carries out federal executions, as officials work to contain a coronavirus outbreak at the facility. A spokesperson said doses of the coronavirus vaccine had been delivered to 19 prisons, including the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Wednesday, including some prisons hit hardest during the pandemic. Nearly 7,100 federal inmates and more than 1,600 Bureau of Prisons staff members across the country had active, positive test results for COVID-19 on Wednesday, including 406 inmates at the Terre Haute penitentiary.
Don’t forget, highway 37 through Martinsville is closing Saturday morning to upgrade to interstate standards from Martinsville to Indianapolis, thus completing I-69 through Indiana.
Only weather could delay the closure. The five-mile stretch of Highway 37 will be closed for most of 2021.
The action allows work to be completed in one construction season, as opposed to taking two.
The detour uses Ind. 39, Ind. 67, and Ind. 144.
The five-mile stretch of Highway 37 will be closed for most of 2021.
[ Updates on the closure can regularly be found online at i69finishline.com/closure, or on the project’s social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at @I69FinishLine. ]
