THE COST OF LIVING.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 309, 26 June 1912, Page 4

THE COST OF LIVING.

The increase in the cost of living lias been the. subject of enquiry by a commission in New York, and it is interesting to notice that the remedy proposed is an extended system of municipal markets. The chairman of the Commission goes so far as to propose that the city should employ suitable men to serve as agents between the producers and the consumers, thus eliminating the middlemen altogether. These public servants would work in connection with a "municipal department of markets.." and probably would establish a chain of district depots which would make the retail provision shop unprofitable. The scheme is frankly socialistic, of course, and it presents practical difficulties of a serious kind. In Now York, as in our own centres, the housewives generally show a lazy disinclination to undertake their own buying in the old-fashioned way. They like the butcher, the baker and the grocer, even the fishmonger and the vegetable dealer, to call for orders or receive them across the telephone. They want to be allowed credit, and they give no attention at all to the processes of distribution. The result is that the price finally charged them, possibly for an inferior article, is made high enough to provide several profits, and also to cover the cost of unnecessary handling, overlapping organisation and various "frills." Some of the New York commissioners have not hesitated to say that the housewife who had to choose between going round the corner to a cheap market with her purse in her hand and a basket on her arm, and handing a "Wat" to a polite retailer at the back door, would elect, in nine cases out of ten, to pay toll to the middleman. The suggestion is not complimentary to the women of New York, and Mr. Gaynor, the Mayor of the big American city, has proposed that the housewives should be asked to state by means of a referendum whether or not they would like to see municipal markets established. He feels sure, he says, that they are better business people than their husbands think. Quite possibly they are, and quite possibly the women of New Zealand are their worthv sisters.