Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Mark Rupe - Longbow Research.
Mark Rupe - Longbow Research
On the benefit that you’ve had in the residential furnishing segment, with the innerspring dumping, you’re sort of doing very well, the verticalization of a customer, all of those have obviously benefited this year offsetting some other end market weakness. Do you have any idea when some of that might lap going into next year and I’m curious to learn if how much of an impact on the positive side they are offsetting this year or in the current environment I would say.
David Haffner
The answer the first question is they would lap to a significant degree in the first quarter of ’09, but then we would have trade link benefit into the second and third quarter as the COG to those imported down the innersprings start to levitate, so it will roll actually through the third quarter of next year.
As it relates to trends, it’s a challenge. We’ve seen a significant reduction in demand, in the last few weeks of September, first couple of weeks of October and the way that we look at it is in the second quarter of this year, our innerspring sales were up approximately 13%. We believe at that time the market was off about 10%; the best intelligence we have.
Third quarter we believe the market was off 10% to 12% and our innerspring sales were up 15%. Now, admittedly our September sales were only up 2%. Our October sales through the first two weeks were off about 6%. We believe the industry is probably off north of 20% in units. We don’t know, this is so fluid and the falloff has been so dramatic, it’s tough for us to get a handle on. We certainly are outperforming the industry significantly, probably by a 20 point delta.
Operator
Your next question comes from Chad Bolen - Raymond James.
Chad Bolen - Raymond James
Karl, you gave us a couple of statistics there; would you walk through for us, I guess in residential furniture, bedding and office furniture, what was the year-over-year change in sales and units where you can give it to us?
Karl Glassman
Chad, as I’ve broken this out in the past, I’ll do it again. The buckets of residential in third quarter, U.S. spring in dollar sales was up about 18%. Remember there was significant steel inflation, so innerspring units up in that 15% range; box springs were negatives moving with the market trend. So, it’s tough to sort out the dollars versus the units.
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