SHOPPING IN GOOD TIME.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 December 1938, Page 4

SHOPPING IN GOOD TIME.

' X T this season of the year, when most people have an unusual amount of shopping to do, the best advice that can be offered, is that purchases should be made at the earliest convenient opportunity. Whether from the point of view of business people and their assistants or that of those who are intent on buying presents or other goods, the policy of action at the earliest possible moment has manifest advantages. To all concerned a means is thus offered of doing what may be done to minimise the confusion and rush that are apt to develop in the last hours of Christmas shopping.

As is demonstrated in our advertising columns and in the shops themselves, with their attractive displays, ample preparations have been made by the shopkeepers to satisfy the exceptional and varied demands that arise at this time of the year. The goods are there and nothing whatever is to be gained by putting off to the last possible moment the satisfaction of seasonal needs. On the contrary, members of the buying public have everything to gain from making their purchases at leisure and in good time.

In this way, too, kindly thought may best be shown for those for whom presents are intended, and also for the busy people serving in the shops who will have at best a somewhat harried and distracting thne until the Christmas rush is over and done with.

The consideration that is due to shopkeepers and shop assistants in this matter is due also to people engaged in transport and other services which are taxed abnormally at the height of the Christmas season. Not least is consideration due to "'the Post Office, which has to deal at this finite of the year with phenomenal mails. At best there will always be a last-minute rush of Post Office business of one kind and another at Christmas time, but something may be done to spread the demands made on counter-clerks, telegraphists and others engaged in the Post Office, and the resultant benefits will extend to the members of the community which the Post Office exists to serve.

One very important point that has been justly emphasised of late is the claims that New Zealand goods have upon the attention of the buying public. It cannot be pointed out too often that in buying goods produced or fabricated in their own country, New Zealanders are helping to build up and strengthen their own fortunes —to broaden the field of profitable employment open to themselves, their immediate kith and kin and their fellow-citizens. Imported goods of many kinds have their necessary and accepted place in our national economy, but every New Zealander will do the right thing from a standpoint of individual and community welfare in making a point of ascertaining, at the Christmas season or at any other time, whether goods of New Zealand origin are available to satisfy his or her requirements.