Used merchandise stores employed more than 131,000 people with $2.1 billion in annual payroll and nearly $9.3 billion in sales in 2007, according to new economic census data released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

     As part of the 2007 Economic Census Industry Series, these new figures for the retail trade sector provide data on the number of establishments, sales, payroll, number of employees, value of product line sales and other data items at the national level by industry.

     Other findings include:

• Women’s, juniors’ and misses’ clothing product line sales accounted for more than 15 percent ($1.4 billion) of total used merchandise store sales. Sales of antiques made up almost 13 percent ($1.2 billion) of the total sales of the 17,779 used merchandise stores in the United States.
• Total sales from used merchandise stores increased $1.5 billion (nearly 20 percent) since 2002, while the number of used merchandise stores decreased by 353 (nearly 2 percent) over the same period.
• Annual payroll per employee for used merchandise stores increased from $14,898 in 2002 to $16,382 in 2007, a 10 percent increase.

     Industry Series data are available only on the Census Bureau’s American FactFinder. This online tool allows users to access, filter, manipulate and extract data. Additional retail trade industries will be released through October 2009.

     The 2007 Economic Census only includes businesses with paid employees. Information on businesses without paid employees is released as part of the nonemployer statistics data files.

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The 2007 data in these files are preliminary and will be superseded by data released in the Geographic Area Series, Subject Series and Core Business Statistics Series data files. Data are published on the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) basis. These estimates are subject to sampling errors. For information on confidentiality protection, sampling error, nonsampling error and definitions, see the following methodology statement <http://www.census.gov/econ/census07/www/methodology/>. For more information about the 2007 Economic Census (including the new NotifyMe system that informs users when the data they are interested in are available), see the 2007 Economic Census page.