IN THE SHOPS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 83, 9 April 1942, Page 8

IN THE SHOPS

SIGNS OF HOARDING

COUPONS WELCOMED

Distinct evidences of the hoarding of tea and .sugar had been observed in local grocery shops over the past three or four months, stated an officer connected with a large chain of shops in Auckland, when discussing the subject this morning. Grocers themselves had had to ration supplies to customers, he said, to conserve their stocks, and had been restricting sales to as little as 21b of sugar and lib of tea at a time to any one person. There was nothing, however, to prevent that one person taking this ration from several shops. "And I happen to know for certain that this has been happening." he added. "For instance, we had a complaint from a woman in the country, who sent back three packets of tea which had deteriorated and blamed us, when the fact was that she had been hoarding tea and had made the mistake of storing it in a damp place." At one stage, earlier in the war period, there had been some unusually heavy buying by housewives, who soon found, however, that holding this commodity was unprofitable because of its tendency to mildew in spite of all precautions. CiiiitioiiH Storking Up Apart from hoarrling, or panic buying, said this executive, there had been noticeable in the shops a quite reasonable tendency on* the part of families to conduct a cautious policy of stocking up in tea and sugar to a moderate extent. This resulted from public intimations that there would be possible shortages in these articles. Actually, the supplies in both articles to the trade had been a deal below the normal, requiring grocers to take the precautions mentioned, of rationing customers, to ensure that all regular customers might be kept supplied. This was understandable with respect to tea, but the distributors felt that the supply of sugar had been unduly restricted. In one shop recently the position arose of the whole stock being down to three bags and a consequent rationing of lib per customer, which resulted in a distinct hardship when a regular customer with six children in her family could not get more than that amount for the week. Scheme Welcomed The manager of another firm controlling a number of stores expressed the opinion that there had not been much in the way of hoarding, and his experience had been that people had been buying much the same as usual. His firm had been put on a very keen ration of sugar since Christmas, and in turn retail customers had to be rationed in the stores. "Personally, I feel pleased to hear that the Government is going to do what it has been trying to force us to do tot the past three months," he said. Both these business men expressed some concern about the amount of extra clerical work that might be thrown on the retail and wholesale grocery stores by the coupon system. They stated that at the moment they were carrying on with skeleton staffs, and a considerable proportion of inexperienced hands, but agreed that as this sort of thing had been done in other countries the difficulties here will be surmounted.