The High Cost of Ceilings

What has happened to all the cheap textiles--the 98-c- dresses, dollar work clothes, 39-c- aprons, 25-c- socks? The dearth of these bargain-basement specials has graveled many a low-income shopper, and given many a housewife to wonder whether OPA is really succeeding in holding the line. This same question last week bothered Economic Stabilizer Fred Vinson. He issued orders to WPBoss Don Nelson and OPA Boss Chester Bowles to increase supplies of these inexpensive soft goods.

The paradox is that these low-priced textiles do not exist mainly because OPA has succeeded in keeping prices down. But OPA's victory has also been the consumers' loss, because manufacturers of "low-end" goods, between soaring labor and raw materials costs on one side and inflexible ceilings on their prices on the other, found themselves squeezed out of profits. Result: they largely quit civilian production--and "upgraded" the rest. Half of production went into military orders. The other half became "higher-quality" merchandise--sometimes a matter of adding as little as an extra color to a fabric--where the spread between costs and selling prices nets a profit.

With the doors and windows locked against it, inflation has thus been tunneling under the house, in a new manner. Low-income consumers do not benefit from a tight ceiling on a commodity that does not exist. But every union dues-payer knows that the lack of merchandise in the low-price brackets is a main factor in the cost of living.

Nelson's problem is to force the industry back to production of cheap goods, even if this means sales at cost, as suggested by Stabilizer Vinson. Bowles's assignment is to search for ways to raise producers' ceilings--without lifting the lid too much on retail prices.

But with no top to raw cotton prices, and with textile labor agitating for higher wages in 1944, the textile industry is skeptical.

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