Prices Without Badges

Facts about price ceilings and how they are working were coming clearer last week. Examples:

P: The main job of making ceilings work has been done, not by the Government, but by the Government's ancient whipping boys--the big chain stores.

P: Ceilings have not put any little stores out of business that would not have gone out of business anyway.

P: The smaller the store, the less likely it is to have heard of OPA or its ceilings.

Big buying & selling groups have the biggest stake in price sanity. Aware of this, and of their own conspicuous position in the public and political eye, the chains and the big stores grumbled at the harsh inequities of General Maximum Price Regulations, but then rolled up their sleeves to make the law work.

Best example of how the chains set compliance standards is in food retailing, where the U.S. has some 600,000 outlets, ranging from carload-lot supermarkets to one-man neighborhood shops. Only 40,000 (7%) of these outlets are owned by chains (A. & P., Safeway, Kroger, etc.), but they do a potent 33% of the business. The five largest chains alone, with about half the chain outlets, handle two-thirds of the chain volume. This, says the Department of Justice, means that "the food chains are in a position to dominate the food industry." If that is so, it is fortunate for OPA: without the conspicuous compliance of the chains, there would not have been any enforcement.

For the little shopkeepers with the wet-pencil bookkeeping know even less about price control than about their own business. Most of them have as hard a time figuring ceilings as they do making money. But all of them can read the big, black prices pasted on the chain-store windows, know they can't sell much over these practical if unofficial levels.

Although cramped under ceilings, retailers have fairly well adjusted themselves to doing business the OPA way. The food trade has been squeezed hard by rising costs at the farm end, so has shifted sales emphasis to fresh fruits, vegetables, poultry, and the rest of the 40% of food-store volume not under price ceilings. Some "ceilings shortages" have developed where present replacement cost is higher than March selling price, and retailers drop the item.

Drugstores, already working under fair-trade prices high enough for profit, have suffered least from ceiling pressure--one big chain (United-Whelan) is even planning a "ceiling-prices-smashed!" sale. Department and drygoods stores have enough leeway in fashion merchandise and "soft" goods to let them maintain the traditional competitive-price selling which keeps the words "sale" and "reduced" in the ads. In most retailing, however, the bargain counter is blacked-out for the duration; the ceiling price has become the selling price.

Chief complaint of U.S. retailers is the sprawling complexity of Government orders and regulations. OPA lawyer language makes decisions difficult, clogs the steady flow of goods in a business which depends on turnover. Trade associations have done much to clarify and expedite the intentions of these orders, and Washington promises a "Retailer's Digest" which will put them into storekeeper's English so that men with crops to catch and seasonal buying to plan will know which way to jump.

U.S. shoppers, by & large, take price control for granted. Few flat-heeled snoopers have appeared to plague retailers as expected. In food stores housewives do scan the posted ceilings. But few people look over the elaborate listings in drug and department stores. Such quiet acceptance by the public is the best indication that ceilings are working.

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