"NOT FOR SALE"

Evening Post, Volume XCIII, Issue 48, 24 February 1917, Page 11

"NOT FOR SALE"

TRICKS OF BERLIN TRADERS,

In speaking of Berlin shops a Frankfurter Zeitung correspondent remarks on the "surprising" opulence of the shop windows of drapery establishments—silks fit for queens, delicate veilings, astrakhan fur jackets, and fur dress trimmings in lavish abundance, but he notices that these are all articles which have cither not been placed under an embargo 'because of their practical uselessness, or articles of use on which the embargo rests.

The correspondent says you must look at these piled-up shop, windows with scepticism. They don't, bear examination. From a distance they represent abundance, narrowly observed they are a fraud. Goods are there of no use to anyone, and you are told on a card that you may buy them "without special permission." You look in the window of a great "delikatessen" shop, with its enticing array of appetising things. They must be fearfully dear—towers of chocolate boxes, symmetrical buildings of preserves in tins, aE sorts of geometrically arranged designs o£ glass jars and pots with labels that make your eyes bright and jour mouth water. It is incredible, but we have the Frankfurter man's word for it, that all these mighty edificss of boxes, pots, cans, bottles, and jars are either empty or commandeered, and therefore not for sale.

For a long time the public could not accustom itself to these mock displays, and resented the lavishness, but the "better-class" shops now display cards in the window on which they ask the public to believe that the jars and boxes and things are empty, and other cards which tell what articles have been commandeered, and what are still for sale. Batocki's regime, we are told, has only partially put an end to the street "polonaises" of waiting women. As soon as any particular article becomes unusually scarce the queues of women form up as it wera automatically.