Attendance at HP fall furniture market down…2 pct.

In the middle of all the controversy surrounding the still-unresolved North Carolina governor’s race comes this short AP story passed along by the News & Observer: attendance at High Point’s fall furniture market was down 2 percent, probably—emphasis on probably (at least as far as the AP is concerned) due to HB2.

Still-Market Authority CEO Tom Conley cited the registered attendance of just over 77,000 as still strong, adding that it’s 1 percent higher than attendance in October 2014.

Remember as the market was getting under way, Conley told the Winston-Salem Journal he had not heard much discussion about HB 2 from exhibitors and buyers in terms of attending or staying away. Such lack of talk about HB2–according to the Journal— was “intriguing given that the authority was one of the first North Carolina business groups to sound the alarm about HB 2.”