BIG COMPANIES

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 230, 24 June 1943, Page 3

BIG COMPANIES

Value To Public Stressed

i tty Telegraph.—Press Association.) AUCKLAND, June 23.

'The value of big companies to the community is not always recognized, said Mr. A. D. Bell, chairman of the Farmers’ Trading Company, at the annual meeting today. Last year the company purchased from suppliers within and outside the Dominion considerably more than £2,000,000 worth of goods, and in so doing provided a most useful service to tho people in which the wage earner was the principal beneficiary. The company might well be taken as an example, for while the profit motive was its reward for enterprise the company recognized its wider obligations, including .the selling of goods so that the public received value for their money and employees worked under the best condition.s Mr.. Bell specially repudiated the idea that bis company, and'companies with similar motives, were concerned with profits regardless of all else. The company’s boot factory had made sufficient military bools to equip the personnel of nearly four divisions with’a pair for each man, ho said, enough greatcoats had been made in tho factory to equip fully a whole division, ami thousands of soldiers’ uniforms had been manufactured. The furniture aud tent factories were concentrating on-Govern-ment requirements. Over 200,000 parcels had been packed for shipment to soldiers aud others overseas.