A Shopkeepers' Grievance.

Observer, Volume XI, Issue 753, 3 June 1893, Page 3

A Shopkeepers' Grievance.

Proprietors of retail businesses in Auckland are complaining very bitterly of the unfair competition of a seotion of the wholesale warehouses, and so far as I have been able to gather, the complaint is by no meanß without foundation. Not content with supplying the retailers with stocks, the wholesalers in question it seems have long made a practice of ' obliging ' retail private customers. In fact the practice has become so common and widespread in this city as to very seriously handicap the shopkeepers who, what with heavy rentals and no less heavy salary-lists, have quite enough to do, in the majority of oases, to hold their own without having the wholesalers poaching on their preserves.

How is the poaching done— what shape does it take ? Well it takes more shapes than one. To buy in the cheapest market is an article of faith with very many people, and the people who are the most anxious to get the best possible value for the least possible outlay are, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the people with the most money. Poor people, middleclass people, are for the most part ready and willing enough to pay a fair and reasonable price for the necessaries of life

aDd suoh of its luxuries as they are able to get hold of. Well-to-do people, upper - crust people, people with banking accounts and luxuriously famished houses are as a class — of course there are many honourable exceptions— the meanest, the. most grasping. These are the people who sneak into the warehouses and hug themselves with delight when they ace supplied 'at wholesale price '— and the unfortunate shopkeeper suffers.

So common has this sort of thing become in Auckland, I understand, that many people when they want a new waterproof or a suit of clothes, a silver watch or a meerschaum pipe, make a practice of ignoring the retail shops altogether. They will wink knowingly when showing of! the new purchase to their friends as they explain : ' Yes, I got that at 's warehouse. Saved the retailer's profit on it. Oh yes, I get all my things that way.' And the friends naturally go and do likewise, and the poor shopkeeper is left out in the cold. A few cases of this kind would make but little difference, of course. But such cases I learn, as the result of enquiries in more than one quarter, are by no means few.

And I grieve to say the ladies are not one whit behind their husbands, brothers, lovers, and other male relations in this matter. But then ladies are born bar-gain-hunters. And many Auckland ladies, it seems, buy all their personal requirements ' wholesale,' although they may have to take hosiery by the dozen pairs and perfumes by the box. The English wholesale houses, as it is hardly necessary to remark, utterly disoountenanoe this very improper and unfair interference with the shopkeepers. If they consent to "supply private customers with goods at all, the private customers have to pay ' through the nose ' for the accommodation. And serve them right !

Bat there is another way in which Auckland warehousemen enter into unfair competition with retail tradesmen, and this way is to be more strongly oondemned than that with which I have already dealt. Will it be believed by the uninitiated that some shops in Auckland and its suburbs are merely retail branch establishments of great wholesale firms, and that the so-called ' proprietors ' of these shops are only proprietors in name ? In reality they are simply managers in receipt of salaries and commissions on sales. Apart from the obvious injustice to the shopkeepers entailed by this system of doing business, it is astonishing that the wholesale firms in question should be so blind to their own true interests as to run against their own clients. Such a policy is not only unfair. It is suicidal, and unless the firms who are pursuing it ' turn from the error of their ways ' they have only one thing to expect : that they will be boycotted, and that the trade which now reaches them will be diverted to other firms possessing some sense of what is right and fitting to their clients.