STATE MARKETING

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 66, 15 September 1943, Page 4

STATE MARKETING

Sir, —I read with some amazement your correspondent Florence Williams's letter in praise of the Internal Marketing Department. It immediately calls to mind a certain "muck-rake" broadcast. Florence Williams implies that butter, apples, pears, eggs, honey, oranges, and lemons have not risen in price, not become scarce, or fallen in quality! What nonsense! Even butter lately has fallen in quality and is much more yellow in colour. Also surely Is 6d per lb is a high enough price for butter. All the other articles mentioned have definitely not been improved in any way by the machinations of the I.M.D. If your correspondent really.thinks they haye why does she not quote some reliable price figures to show they have either remained constant or improved in quantity or quality? Florence Williams tries to cloud the issue (in the approved bureaucratic style) by talking about the military canteens —unfortunately the average housewife cannot buy her groceries, etc., from military canteens. t Florence Williams then states that "the I.M.D.'s function, indeed, is just rationing"! If so (which I doubt —the Rationing Office is separate from the 1.M.D.) I submit that the Department has been incapable and inefficient in this direction as well. .In October, 1942, eggs were plentiful in the South Island and omelets,or two eggs could be ordered for breakfast without fear of the waitress passing out in a dead faint, whilst in Wellington one could sometimes get one egg in hotels and many homes were practically without them. The same position existed with potatoes, which Florence Williams conveniently omitted to mention—plenty in the south but a famine in the North Island. This also applied to honey. As far as fruit distribution is concerned 1 think the less said the better. But perhaps Florence Williams would like to mention the price paid per case for apples in Nelson last season and the price at which the same apples were sold to shopkeepers in Nelson, often on the same day. My information places the profit to the I.M.D. at around 100 per cent, gross on cost.— I am, etc.,

ANTT-I.M.D,