In a previous post (November 13, 2009 “Existing vs. New Home Sales — What’s the Difference?”) I explained that new home sales have broad and far-reaching effects on the market place, including everybody from the manufacturers of nails and drywall to the man who operates the track hoe laying sewer pipe.  Existing home sales, on the other hand, don’t create the same or nearly as many economic ripples.

This morning I learned of a new victim of the near-dead new housing market: pickup trucks.  While it makes sense, Ford and GMC are not manufacturers I would have thought to list among new housing’s economic beneficiaries.

In a recently posted AP story, a Las Vegas-based construction company owner decided that he would not replace his three aging Dodge Ram trucks.  This owner, of course, was randomly discovered and made into one journalist’s example of both an obvious fact and a national trend:  construction workers are a large component of the pickup truck market, and subsequent to some crunch point in 2008 a huge chunk of this demographic decided that their old trucks held just as many tool boxes and 2 x 4s as a new model and would do just fine for another year.

I’m sure the list of new housing’s beneficiaries would run into the thousands.  But when the beneficiary list becomes an after-the-battle posting of the dead and wounded, I can only read so far.

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