SUPPLIES IN SYDNEY

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 187, 9 August 1941, Page 8

SUPPLIES IN SYDNEY

SOME ARE BEING EXPORTED TECHNICAL LABOUR SHORTAGE While managers of small stocking shops in Sydney complain that the supplies they are able to obtain are so meagre that many shops are preparing to close, merchandise managers and hosiery department heads of large city stores deny that a shortage exists. "Sydney women are falling over each other to buy stockings, but stockings are practically unprocurable," the manager of a city hosiery salon said on Thursday. The merchandise manager of a large city store said that there was a shortage of pure silk hose, but not of hose generally. Although demand was greater than normal, it could not be described as a rush.

A shortage was inevitable eventually, as Australian manufacturers, who produce 100 per cent of our silk hose and 90 per cent of our lisle hose, were short of technical labour, now employed on war work. "Not one hosiery mill in Australia has the same output as before the war," he added.

At present, however, manufacturers were even exporting to Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and South Africa. If small hosiery salons were feeling a shortage, it must be because they had not placed orders with warehouses sufficiently far ahead.