Consuming Interest
Egg-Bound Control
By LESLIE ADRIAN
One way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it; so let us hope that the decision against Harrison Gibson's shops last week will turn out to have been a nail in the coffin of the ridiculous Shops Act. This shop in Ilford (and five others in dif- ferent districts) started an evening viewing scheme by which customers could come into the shop till nine o'cloCk every Tuesday, and look at furniture. They weren't allowed to buy anything, and sales- men were forbidden to pester them or take down their addresses; but it was a way for young couples who were furnishing their homes to take their time choosing their furniture, rather than having to rush in and out in their lunch-hour or on Saturday mornings.
The scheme proved a huge success : hundreds of people flooded the store, made an evening of it and were served free coffee. The sales staff, initially dubious, decided they liked the idea, the overtime and the increased sales later on. In last week's hearing it was quite clear that nobody actually thought the scheme a bad one, but the Shops Acts were against it, and a motor firm that had allowed people to catch sight of saleable cars on a Sunday had provided a precedent for prosecution. So the shop was fined a matter of £6 or so, and will presumably have to give up the scheme—unless they can find some legal loop- hole, such as the sale of perishables.
The implications are obvious. Customers want and ought to have shops which are not invariably closed when they are not at work; and sooner or later the law will have to give way.
And now I see that that idiot's delight, the Egg Marketing Board, is at it again, defending itself at a conference at—of all places—the Royal Society of Arts. One MP (a newly-elected one, Mr. J. Mackie : he is learning parliamentary ways fast) said that the demand for date-stamping of eggs was an impossible demand and would be meaningless; and an anonymous civil servant said it would be useless unless you could fit a date- stamping device to the backside of the hen. Oh, very funny! But can't these people see that the jocose arguments which they are using against date-stamping apply equally to the lion stamp, which they are presumably anxious to defend?
If date-stamping is a fraud, so is thelion, and for the same reason : that the Board has no control over eggs during the period of time which they take to get from the backside of the hen on to the packing-station lorry; and no control of them after they have left the packing station —they may be stored in unsuitable conditions for days or weeks by retailers. The implication of the Board's advertising that the lion gives the housewives some sort of a guarantee of fresh- ness is consequently spurious; and the Board ought not to be allowed to foster the delusion on television or in the press any longer.
A producer argued at the meeting that date- stamping would be suicidal, because the house- wife would refuse ten-day-old eggs. Why not try and see? All that would be required would be a price differential for eggs under a certain age. Older eggs could then be sold at reduced prices; and I am sure housewives would welcome them for the casual 'add an egg' cookery that the Board has been so anxious to stimulate. WhY not a pilot experiment, then, in some part of the country, analogous to Mr. Marples's pink zone experiment for London traffic?
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