A LONDON OCTOPUS.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 59, 16 April 1914, Page 5

A LONDON OCTOPUS.

What shall we do with this man Selfridge? Do: you know that five years ago he cam| to London with hardly a couple of Rolls-Royces to call his own, and now he is going about buying whole blocks of this old town of ours (comments Ivan lleald in the "London Express"). He sits up at night with a map of London before him, planting little American flags as he captures an opposing Manchester goods department here or a basement bargain there. "Yes, my dear," you imagine him saying to his wife, "to-morrow I shall throw out a quarter-mile length of counters on our east front, and so cut off the shoppers who would otherwise escape down Bond Street. Put.on your hat, and we'll go out and buy a few shops before closing-time." Really, the man must be curbed before he turns the Tower into an antique curio emporium, and opens out a leather goods branch in the House of Commons. We ought to lure him on to playing golf, solving chess problems, collecting postage stamps, or some such hobby, which would keep his mind and time pleasantly occupied and divert his energies from this perilous mania of making us into a nation of shop assistants. If I were one of Mr Self ridge's business rivals I would devise all sorts of methods of wasting his time. I would send him .jigsaw puzzles and exciting detective stories, and all the new parlour games. I would button-hole him at lunch-time to tell him the full story of how I holed out in two on the Mitcham links last July. He would have such a busy time with all these things every day that before he knew it would be 6 o'clock, and too late to go out and buy the row of shops he had been thinking about. In case he wanted to work at night, I would send him free tickets for the best picture theatres. It must be a bitter blow for Lloyd George—a man taking up all these buildings which the Government needed as offices for new insurance officials.