The American RV industry has seen a reversal in the prevailing winds, stiff and abrupt enough to snap your head around.
Skyrocketing gasoline prices, rising rates for financing, a pullback in consumer spending and rumblings of recession have swiftly created a new landscape for RV makers after more than a decade of smooth sailing, which then included moderate gasoline prices, an increasingly robust U.S. economy and the generational opportunity provided by the pandemic to expose more Americans to a safe and insulated mode of transportation into the great outdoors.
But in the face of all of this, THOR Industries, a giant of the RV manufacturing industry, and CEO Bob Wheeler are maintaining calm and a rational sort of optimism. There’s no business that has seen more wild ups and downs than theirs, and yet THOR has boasted a net profit for every fiscal year since its founding more than four decades ago.
There’s little way to overstate the devastation experienced about 15 years ago by the RV industry, which is centered in Indiana and the upper Midwest, and its employees, because of the Great Recession and $4 gasoline. But RV sales and makers achieved a remarkable snapback since then, as tens of thousands of retirees and others invested tens of thousands of dollars into the RV experience.
Read the full story by Dale Buss in Forbes here.
