The Price of Vegetables
The attack on the arrangements for marketing fruit and vegetables was bound to begin somewhere, and it is natural that it should have begun with an exasperated improvisation. The experiment of the group of market gardeners who are selling vegetables direct to the housewives of Croydon is entirely deserving of the forbearance of the Ministry of Food to what is technically an offence, but it remains an experiment. The problem is complex, and it is there- fore unlikely to be finally broken by a measure which is not so much a positive arrangement for marketing vegetables as a desperate device for cutting losses. There is first of all the difficulty that the costs of wholesale and retail marketing of vegetables in labour and transport are higher -now than they were before the war. Since the war the dishonest element has clearly expanded, and the cost of dishonesty, represented in part by the large fines cheerfully paid by " barrow boys " and others, is borne by the public in the form of higher prices. Again, some honest traders have been led to forget the old logic of small profits and quick returns simply because they cannot find enough assistants to shovel the goods out to the public. Finally there is the incorrigible willingness of the public to pay the prices asked. There is no piecemeal cure for all this. When the official controls are removed on September ist there may be a change for the better. If controls are removed, if unnecessary costs are cut out, if the trade is purged of its dishonest elements, if growers in general show the courage of the Croydon experimenters, and if housewives always shop in the cheapest market, the problem will be on the way to solution. But it will not be solved until all goods, and not vegetables alone, are plentiful, and the days of suppressed inflation are over.
Previous page
