Shirt Off Your Back

One harried retailer summed up: "My clerks feel like keepers at the zoo with no food for the animals at feeding time." AH over the U.S., underwear, men's suits and shirts and women's stockings were scarcer than ever before. Stores brave enough to advertise a small shipment of any of the precious items warned customers that they shopped at their own risk (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), occasionally had to call police to quell riots.

Last week, the fraying consumer found out where some of the clothing was:

P: More than 3,000,000 men's shirts were piled up in manufacturers' warehouses, were not moving into retailers' hands. One national maker alone had 750,000 shirts on his shelves.

P: Between 400,000 and 750,000 men's suits were being held off the market by manufacturers in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York alone, according to a survey by the conservative Baltimore Sun.

The trouble was price--specifically, OPA's Maximum Average Price plan. Under it, high-priced goods cannot be sold unless balanced by enough low-priced goods to bring the manufacturer's average sale price to his 1943 level. Some shirt and suit makers had made high-priced items, because the profit was greater on them. Now, they said, they could not buy fabrics to make low-priced items, thus could not sell their goods to retailers. Their solution: abolish MAP.

OPA refused. It snapped that few manufacturers were being squeezed by MAP. Those who were stuck, hinted OPA, had gambled on the regulation being lifted--and had lost.

MAP was only part of the trouble. The primary cause was production. Cotton fabric manufacture was running some three billion yards behind 1942 levels, will this year be about five billion short of demand. Result: shirt production is about 35 to 40% below 1941 levels, demand about 200% (32,100,000 dozen shirts) above. Similarly, demand for men's suits this year is put at 40,000,000. Estimated 1946 production: 30,000,000 at most.

The only brightening spot in textiles was in hosiery. Production of nylons had been slow getting started (mostly because of the shortage of nylon thread). But production is now hitting 30,000,000 pairs a month. They should soon begin to appear on the market in greater quantity.

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