WELCOME BACK: After an absence of 10 years, I received a Famous Fritz Postcard informing me that my old friend is returning to the helm at Host/Racine Industries. He is the eldest of the three Rench brothers running the company and is back in the fold after resigning a decade ago for health reasons. I missed him and the postcards from remote places in the world, exotic and intriguing destinations where he always managed to find a floor covering store and report its status to me. He was my foreign correspondent and could cram the Magna Carta on the 3 x 5 missive. Well, he’s healthy and back to work and I’m richer for it. Friendship rekindled. That’s as good as it gets.

SOLD!: The economy may be faltering but there’s still money around. A silk Persian rug dating from the 16th century has sold for a record $4.45 million at auction. To put it in perspective, that’s about $729.87 per square inch. The rug was sold by Christie’s auction house on behalf of the Newport Restoration Foundation and expected to bring $1.2 million. The rug is 7 feet, 7 inches by 5 feet, 7 inches and had been purchased by the late tobacco heiress Doris Duke in 1990. She left it to the foundation when she died. Elisabeth Parker, head of Christie’s rugs and carpets department, says there are only two other known rugs like it and calls it “an amazing work of art” and says it has an intricate floral design and an unusually large number of colors, at 17. The buyer prefers to remain anonymous.

GOING UP: These days everything is going up: the price of food, energy, clothing and services of all kinds. Floor coverings, of course, are no different. Manufacturers are being assailed by raw material suppliers and must raise the price of their products to offset the mounting costs. Armstrong will initiate a 3% to 5% increase in the U.S. on select vinyl composition tile, commercial sheet vinyl, commercial wall-base, residential sheet and tile, and laminate products, effective with shipments on July 7. Prices for luxury vinyl tile will increase 5% to 10%. Mannington announced increases “to be passed on to the consumer” on select commercial and residential vinyl products, as well as laminates, effective July 7. Tarkett Commercial will issue a 5% increase on all VCT commercial resilient flooring placed after July 1. Congoleum announced that effective with shipments beginning July 14 all products will increase 3% to 6%.

STUNNING: Here is the ultimate story on price increases in the floor covering industry. On June 3, BASF announced a $.05 increase per dry pound on all Styrofan carboxcylated styrene-butadiene polymers sold to the carpet industry in the U.S. and Canada. This was in addition to the $.04 increase per dry pound less than a month earlier. Then, on June 10, BASF effected an additional 20% increase on Styrofan latex for the carpet industry. That’s three increases in less than a month. Either the product was woefully underpriced or whatever it’s made of is the rarest substance on earth. Even with a petro-chemical base, it couldn’t rise so wildly and unpredictably.

NOW I GET IT: Omnova Solutions last week announced a price increase of $.20 a dry pound on styrene butadiene latex for carpet, effective June 9. No pecking away. One huge shot, no lingering pain. The company says “this increase is in addition to those previously announced and is necessitated by the unprecedented inflation in energy and raw material costs, driven by the high price of oil and shortages of key raw material feedstocks.” That explains it. It’s the economy, stupid.