SALE OF ORANGES

Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22877, 25 November 1939, Page 14

SALE OF ORANGES

FRUITERER OBJECTS TO , REGULATIONS [THE PRESS Special Service.] WELLINGTON, November 24. “I must now call on you to comply with the regulations forthwith, failing which all wholesalers will be instructed to discontinue your supplies.” * Mr A. Bennett, Wellington fruit retailer and former secretary of the Wellington Fruiterers’ Association, in a statement said that he had received this communication from the Internal Marketing Division that morning. “The public might well ask,” said Mr Bennett, “what crime I have committed to justify the threat that without trial I may have my livelihood taken away from me. I am guilty of defending what 1 think is the best way of earning my livelihood, but the Internal Marketing Division is determined that by dictatorial methods I am to be threatened into doing what it says.

“I am the same Bennett who chose to question both the need for this type of enforced control and also what I consider to .be the falling away in service to the public since the Internal Marketing Division took monopoly control of the goods I handle. .

"The regulations I object’to are merely those by which I am compelled to adopt a system of ticketing oranges, under which the public is compelled to buy them at so much a dozen. This is an Internal Marketing Division manoeuvre without any advantageous result either to the housewife or to the retailer. The whole thing is a petty absurdity. “I have been used to selling oranges at so many a shilling. Now the regulations, from which I have no appeal, are introduced to compel shopkeepers to change to the design of 2s 7d a dozen or some such figure. This also applies to lemons. Whatever the outcome I feel it my duty to make public these extraordinary facts. It is unbelievable that this could happen in New. Zealand.

“I am sure I will receive the support of .every fair-minded person in my appeal for fair play, and I am sure also that this type of pettyfogging interference by officialdom, much of it entirely without experience of the things being handled for the public, should cease.”