CONSUMERS’ INTERESTS.

Evening Star, Issue 23423, 14 November 1939, Page 2

CONSUMERS’ INTERESTS.

TO THE EDITOR. 1 Sir, —A good many letters pro and con for consumers and distributors have been lately seen in the Press columns. People are beginning to feel that the rising prices, much of which is profiteering, are a cancerous growth in their incomes, and especially those unfortunates with small fixed incomes. There is little doubt that prices have risen quite out of proportion to the rises in wages, and that no happy mean has been struck. How a man with £5 a week can keep a wife and three children after paying rent, insurances, Social Security tax, poll tax, fares to and fro, with a few social amenities or amusements is difficult to calculate. Every merger and every association or combination for the fixation of prices is just another step in the increasing • of the cost of living; anyhow, it never seems to lower prices. Consider the prices of a few of thjp almost absolute necessities of a housed hold; meat, fish, bread, sugar, and fruit, let alone tea, cheese, and vegetables and we find there is good cawse for the formation of a housewives’ protection society or union. Take for instance, meat, fish, bread, sugar, and tea for price criticism. Meat—three decent crops, lid or Is. when wether mutton is selling at Smithfield, at 4Jd, more or less very slightly, after freezing, carriage of 12,000 miles, handling at destination, cool storage, insurance, commission, and retailing; a shilling a pound can be understood in London but not here, the place of production. Fish, of which the oceans are the costless producers, is sold at very nice prices l for someone, and certainly not the fisherman. For blue cod for export to Australia Bluff fishermen not long ago were getting ljd to 2d per lb, while consumers hero are paying Is per lb. The selling price of groper is still less excusable. Again, why should sugar be increased a penny per lb, which is £9 6s 8d a ton, when the manufacturing price is raised even £2 a ton, which is a shade over 2-7 of a penny per lb? The war, so far as New Zealand, is concerned, should not affect the price either of sugar or tea. Sugar is manufactured in Auckland, Fiji, and Queensland. and wc in the South-west Pacific are not in the regions of war risks. Even between India, Ceylon, Burma, and New Zealand there is very little risk. Under the different conditions that exist between shipping to England and New Zealand sugar and tea should be cheaper owing to the restrictions of export to the Northern Hemisphere. As for the quality of meat, with very few exceptions, old steel knives with a razor edge are very necessary for cutting old cow beef and old ram and ewe mutton to save damning one’s immortal soul by bad language at one’s dining table. 1 am, etc., Victim. November 13. TO THE EDITOR. Sir,—ln reply to “ 4/1530 ” and “ Master Butcher,” - 1 had no intention of writing just to relievo my feelings. I put a plain statement before your readers that potatoes which were sold on September 1 at 2d per lb were now 4d, a clear breach of the law, as no extra charges had to be met on this product. It is not a correspondence on the merits or dements of diffeienl classes of trading., I le.t d ">'» ' hard for people with a family to lime

to pay the extra price without the sanction of the Government, and that. my letter would perhaps stop other articles going up in price. In .reply to “ Master Butcher,” as I see it the best of them cannot always get what they require at Burnside; they have to taks what is offering, and I still think the public can be relied on to pick good meat. I must query the statement that 90 per cent, cannot tell wether mutton, from old ewes. Put it on the table, and anyone who cannot tell the diner* ence is really not normal.—l am, etc., November 14. Spud Murphy,