Going Down

Without quite daring to believe it, the U.S. watched prices go slowly, surely down.

The nickel cigar was back in Manhattan and the $1.99 shirt in Kansas City. A basket of groceries which cost a Des Moines housewife $4.19 a year ago could be bought last week for $3.29. The papers advertised sales in everything from bed sheets to mink coats.

The news was good; yet few consumers seemed to be setting off rockets. Maybe it was just a perverse American custom to worry when prices went up, and worry also when they went down. There was certainly some caution in the air. Florida had never had so many tourists, but along Miami Beach, where workmen had labored overtime under nightlong floodlights to build 19 new hotels for the booming luxury trade, that trade was no longer booming. In Seattle a waitress complained: "Things are starting to tighten up all right; you get twice as many 10-c- tips as you did six months ago. No more two bits and four bits."

Union members who had tied their wage increases to the cost of living, had seen their wages soar up--and would now see them dip a bit. In St. Louis, 25,000 employees of the International Shoe Co. faced such a wage cut. So did 380,000 at General Motors. Old A.F.L. Chieftain William Green hinted, in as unincriminating a way as he could, that maybe there wouldn't be so many workers asking for fourth-round increases.

There were layoffs here & there, but most people still had their jobs, and good wages. Whatever the unpredictable future brought, right now their potatoes were cheaper, their eggs were cheaper, and so were their pork chops.

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