CRAZE FOR BARGAINS.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 444, 8 February 1890, Page 3

CRAZE FOR BARGAINS.

Mrs Lynn Lynton writes : To women, who are the housekeepers and marketers of the nation, is primarily owing this rage for cheapness, which is to be had only by sweating and grinding the faces of the unfortunate workers and producers. It is the women who beat down prices. The richest will do it without a blush. Women to whom £IOO more or loss in the year’s expenditure means an inappreciable nothing will haggle with a laundress over a penny. They will beat down a flower woman and make her take tenpence for a shilling, and their conscience will not prick them, and their self-respect will not suffer. They hold themselves justified in taking away their custom from the • local tradespeople, if thereby they can effect a saving which cripples the townsfolk and does not benefit themselves. They grudge all percentages which enable the poor to live and save. They think wages are extravagantly high for the under-servants, though pride and that scarcity which commands the market make them pay liberally for pampered upper-class domes tics. . At clearance sales they buy ‘ bargains they do not want, when they are perfectly well able to pay the full price for things they really want. More than this, they—these ladies of birth, education and means —come down into the labour market, and by their capital and connections thrust aside the small workers, who have neither. In the exhibition of ladies’ ware, now so fashionable, how much is done by women really needing money, and how much by those who simply desire to have more than they need? All of us know women of ample fortune who do not disdain to make money by means which take away so much bread from the hungry. This, by the way, goes deeper and lower than the class so called of ladies. In the well-to-do middle classes where the girls of a family have no pressing need to do anything at all, they add to the general income by keeping themselves. they have only themselves to keep, and this not of absolute necessity, they pull wages still lower down than need be by working for small pay. These well-to-do-workers damage the labour market for women more than might appear at first sight.