NO MORE BARGAINING

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 2, 4 January 1939, Page 10

NO MORE BARGAINING

A FRESH LAW IN TURKEY Turks, who are no doubt cursing the modern craze for change and improvement, have now little time left in which to enjoy the Eastern luxury of bargaining with shopkeepers for their daily purchases, says the Manchester Guardian. For a new law is coming into force making bargaining illegal and fixed prices compulsory. Even the English, who are accustomed to fixed prices and are generally fond of beating salesmen down, might regard the application of such a law in this country as a strange piece of interference; but for Turks, to whom bargaining is as the breath of their nostrils, the regulation is bound to seem something catastrophic—a sort of commercial Last Trump. The instincts of a nation, implanted by generations of tradition, have usually been regarded as ineradicable except by very slow degrees and after tremendous effort. The notion of suppressing this one, therefore, by a decree and at one blow seems highly Utopian. If there is any basis in the belief that human nature cannot change—at any rate rapidly—it needs little acumen to prophesy widespread violation of the new edict, in spite ot the threatened penalties—fines and temporary closing down of shops, as well as the publishing of the delinquents' names in the public Press. Indeed, this last threat may have an opposite effect from that intended: the names so published may be well regarded as those ot popular heroes, safeguarding the inalienable rights of the people to get a thing for one-and-four For which our friend paid twopence more, which (as the poet rightly concludes) “is balm unto the soul.”