Marketing Channels 8th Edition by Bert Rosenbloom

Exercise 2

The Census of Wholesale Trade and the Census of Retail Trade are published every five years by the Department of Commerce. The most recent census was taken in 2002 and the one before that was in 1997. However, the actual findings from the census are not made available until two and one-half to three years later. Thus, the findings from the 1997 census did not appear until 2000, and the 2002 census did not appear until the year 2005
How serious a problem do you think this is in terms of the timelines of information provided by the census?