Paul Fireman Half Quotations

The retail slowdown has continued in the first half of 1998 and has resulted in higher retail cancellations and returns, ... We believe that in the current environment many retailers are being more conservative in their future purchases, leaving more open-to-buy dollars available for at-once business. This situation, in combination with the unusually low at-once business in last year's second half, creates the potential for our performance to be better than our backlog trend indicates.