“SUPERMARKETS WILL NOT OUST BUTCHERS’’

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29776, 20 March 1962, Page 7

“SUPERMARKETS WILL NOT OUST BUTCHERS’’

The Secretary of Industries and Commerce (Dr. W. B. Sutch) yesterday looked into the future of the suburban butcher and other small retailers and forecast that their numbers would increase and their importance would survive changes in retailing. He was speaking to the annual conference in Christchurch of the Meat Retailers' Federation,

With New Zealand’s population increasing to 2.900.000 by 1970 and 3.600.000 by 1980. Dr. Sutch said the suburban butcheries would not be supplanted by large supermarkets.

He doubted, he said, that New Zealanders would become rich enough or silly enough to own sufficient cars to carry all housewives to large shops in town centres. He foresaw that, as more housewives went out to work there would be less local patronage for butchers. He expected that as New Zealand became an exporter of precut and packaged meat there might be a tendency for the organisations behind this to use some of their skills and resources to supply the home retail trade. Dr. Sutch predicted there would be more individually owned and operated butchers’ shops, “suburban butchers with humanity” to whom customers would specify their exact requirements. “Social Occasion” He advocated, as an economist, the concentration of "highly prized and highly paid” skills of the butcher’s craft on cutting, rather than on the counter. Then he added: “But we miss one thing. The butcher is a friendly man. Women folk rely on the butcher as a friend. Visiting the butcher is a social occasion for women. They are lonely in their houses.” ’ He had bought packaged meat in the United States 30 years ago, said Dr. Sutch. “It was not the way I was brought up to buy meat. I was shocked. It was all done in Chicago. “In a Honolulu supermarket meat can be bought prepackaged. with the price on it, with the weight on it, inspeotable. You drive you car in and they will load it on ... all in the supermarket. Is that going to happen here?” In a large Melbourne supermarket he had been told that 300,000 people, living close by, were needed to justify its huge building. “We will not go the way of Melbourne or Honolulu while we spread our houses over the countries and over the paddocks," said Dr. Sutch, "The average number of employees in a New Zealand butcher's shop is 2.6, and the labour force is 3.6—that one man is usually the owner” he said. “I do not think that will change very much if we go on building individual houses.” Form Of Ownership Dr. Sutch said that of the 28,000 retail establishments in New Zealand 80 per cent, were individually owned or were private, registered com-panies—“one-man bands, or one-family bands” Sixteen per cent* were partnerships and only 4 per cent, were public, registered companies, though that 4 per cent, had a higher proportion of busines than the average. "Eighty per cent of butchers’ shops are privately owned or private, registered

companies. Only 4J per cent, are owned by public registered companies. This is interesting when you have the big freezing works who do not seem to have entered strongly into the retail side as you might have expected." The key factor in this was the importance of the butcher as an individual person, he said.