Jabber Jitters

Up before 600 lunching Los Angeles bigwigs one day last week rose Lever Bros. Co.'s plain-talking President Charles Luckman. He had something to say about the psychology of fear: the American people, he thought, were talking themselves into a depression.

All over the U.S., "from boardrooms to barrooms" Luckman had encountered it. The talkers were not measuring the U.S. economy, but "their own fever chart"--using a special kind of emotional arithmetic, adding two and two to get zero. Luckman preferred to add U.S. employment of 59 million (still close to its alltime high), savings of $200 billion and a purchasing power 53% higher than prewar. "Too many . . . have accepted the jabber-jitter estimates of what is wrong with America, instead of finding out . . . what is right . . ."

Luckman agreed that everything was not rosy. The buyers' market was back, and "a lot of companies and individuals who rode the gravy trains of easy prosperity will be reduced to walking the rails again." But there are plenty of opportunities; 27 million Americans still have no kitchen sinks, 18 million have no washing machines, 25 million lack vacuum cleaners, 40 million have neither bathtub nor shower. The job of supplying such needs could keep business hopping for generations.

The real job, said Luckman, "is not to sell the enterprise system, but to put some enterprise into the selling system . . . [Businessmen] must relearn the science of fighting for orders ... At the very least, we should inflict as much wear & tear on the soles of our shoes as we do on the seats of our pants." To help sales, Luckman thought that business should cut prices where possible, take inventory losses where necessary. Costs would have to be shaved, of course, and the way to do that, he said, was to boost output. There must be "a willingness to expand."

After lunch Charles Luckman gave a personal demonstration of his thesis. Eight miles east of downtown Los Angeles, armed with a silver-plated shovel, he broke ground for a new $25 million soap and food products plant. Lever Bros., he said, would spend another $30 million on expansion and modernization elsewhere. That would make a total bet of $55 million that the jabber-jitterers were talking jabberwocky.

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