Auckland Covent Garden

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1013, 2 July 1930, Page 8

Auckland Covent Garden

RETAIL MARTS FOR EVERYONE (Written )or THE SUN) TUCKED ill odd corners of the City, little retail shops invite Auckland housewives to buy produce of the farm direct from the producer. Apples there are and eggs, now and then poultry, sometimes a flitch. Unorganised as ,h'. are, these stalls bill themselves as the - tunitv to eliminate the wholesaler s margin. Though at present offering little opposition to the mtributor in the big way, the isolated farm-to-the-people shop-' may be the beginning of a retail mart for Auckland is known in many important cities abroad.

Mr. C. F. Bennett, a former councillor, outlined an objective of this kind to the City Council in a recent report on the value of the existing market-place leases. Apparently because mention of a retail market, a people’s produce exchange, was not precisely on the order of reference the council merely gazed interestedly upon Mr. Bennett’s scheme, received it and forgot. But a number of citizens have remembered. These include the members of a Labour union, which last week urged upon the council the dedesirability of looking closely into Mr. Bennett’s proposal and of acting upon it. This, in fine, was that the present bulk market area which Mr. Bennett predicts will become congested before long, should yield place *o a popular mart where producers and consumers could trade direct. in suggesting that the council should erect a new wholesale markets building and convert the present block into a series of stalls, Mr. Bennett pointout that a greatly increased rental could be expected from such a conversion. Whereas at the moment the council is getting a rental of £536 for two floors taken together, establish meat of the stalls each at a rental of 10s (which Mr. Bennett regards an attractive figure 1 would return £650 to £7BO a year for one floor alone. After .remarking that general market appointments throughout New Zealand are not as up-to-date today as facilities found in‘other parts of the world, Mr. Bennett suggests that Auckland should take the lead and go ahead with the retail markets and make them an attractive rendezvous for patrons.

Tea rooms, sports and rest rooms, music and so forth could be arranged on the lines of the practice abroad. A Covent Garden for Auckland embodies even more important possibilities than simply cheaper vegetables and produce for the housewife; jt presents this great opportunity for the smallholder, namely that he coulu market second grade commodities which at present are virtually unsaleable. To find purchasers through the ordinary auction market operating on the wholesale scale produce must be super-fine or it will not pay the costs of cartage to the centre of distribution. Enormous quantities of vegetables, fruits and the like never find thenway behind the retailers’ windows solely because the goods do not present an attractive appearance. But if co-operating groups of small land holders were afforded facilities to sell second-grade stuff they would find buyers in plenty among the wifteearners and the poor. It therefore goes without saying that benefit would accrue both to producer and to consumer —to the former from the- ability to dispose of produce which at present is only a drug on his property; to the purchaser from the chance to obtain really cheap greens*. Mr. Bennett’s scheme has aroused no little interest, no less in tbe city than in the rural areas fringing the town. Numbers of persons holding more garden ground than their domestic needs require commonly reap a har vest which could be converted into cash, but have no incentive to sell the surplus. Here, then, is the oppor tunity to augment the family income I£ the City Council should feel dis inclined to undertake Mr. Bennett’s plan the way is possibly open to private enterprise. This, of course, is opposed to the principles of the mass of wage-earners. If Auckland is to have a municipally-controlled retail market, the time is ripe for a member of the council to give notice of motion that the corporation proceed with the conversion of the existing markets when the current leases expire in 1939. —W.