Current Situation

The business situation this Fall has not lived up to the expectations entertained for it earlier in the year. Wholesale demand, except for building materials, has slackened significantly, and merchants are finding again that the consumer vigorously resists retail prices continuously jacked up.

From one standpoint, the whole situation is in the main simply a phase of the regular business cycle; from another, it serves to illustrate the shortsightedness of the mercantile community. The year 1920 should have thoroughly taught the lesson that higher prices mean curtailed consumption. Today the very merchants who sought to stabilize prices in the depression of 1921 are seeking to elevate them to unjustifiable heights. It is true that our merchants have not this Fall laid in the heavy stocks which rested on their shelves when the 1920 boom collapsed, but from the consumer's standpoint this only means that he is charged high prices for little diversified stocks.

Probably merchants who are following this policy--and while they are in a minority, still there are many of them--will reap extensive profits this Autumn. But next Spring they may be called upon to pay the bill for it themselves.