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Show les, plants, transportation lines, warehouses, and whole sale and retail establishments. bundle of 'built-in maid services' ser-vices' wrapped around it. It's important to realize that the cost of that bundle goes into an increasing marketing spread. In 1973 the farmer recieved 46 cents out of the food consumer's dollar while the marketing share was 54 cents. The price spread is sometimes some-times blamed upon 'middleman's 'middle-man's profits. ' It's true that profits are part of the spread, but they are a small part. More important is the fact that consumers are willing to pay for more elaborate processing of their food. All of these services require re-quire labor, amounting to over $40 billion , of the cost for marketing services. These labor costs in the price spread represent stable sta-ble employment and good wages for millions of Amer-can Amer-can workers in laborator- CONSUMERS PAY FOR MAID SERVICES AND MARKETING SPREAD 'Built- in maid services' and a sizeable marketing spread both contribute to the food cost package. This has been increasing as the consumer con-sumer has been paying less and less attention to the basic food commodity itself and more and more attention to the bundle of services that is wrapped around that food. That bundle of services is where the most money is made by the food industry not in selling a straight agricultural commodity, such as raw potatoes in a bag which have very few services attached to them. . For example, the same potatoes po-tatoes cut into french fries, frozen and put In the cabinet cabin-et is the same agricultural commodity but with a much bigger bundle of services wrapped around it. Put the same potatoes in a TV din -ner, and you have an even bigger bundle of services attache to the same raw agricultural ag-ricultural commodity. Those are part of the marketing mark-eting services for which American's spent $83 billion last year. In providing such services our food industry has packaged pack-aged a dazzling array of more than 8,000 different food products to display in the super -markets. No other food industry in the world has done such a mammoth job of providing consumers with food that has an increasing |
