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Show Business Changes Loom ;fs For Small Town Merchant ! Nation's Buying Habits Face Further -vOy Changes as Consumers Curtail f ''f' Unnecessary Travel. V jr " ' yy WaaBSSatasss saaaasatai By BAUKIIAGE Wu , t onf Cumnirntator. WNT Service, 1343 II Street. N-W. Washington, I). C. When I came back to the building where I have a little office which overlooks the tip of the Washington monument I found both buttons on the elevator signal missing. The buy told me they had been broken off. He also told me that he couldn't Ket any more. Those buttons were cither plastic or hard rubber. That's war. Probably Prob-ably somebody will have to whittle two new buttons out of wood. I wonder if someone can be found who is handy enough with a Jack-knife Jack-knife today. If he can't I'm kind of sorry for America. Well, a little later I sat in the office of a man in the department of commerce. We talked about the corner store and what was going to happen to it when the folks can't Jump into the car and drive off to the county seat to buy what they want. I mean that in a few months they won't be able to do that because be-cause they won't have the tires. This man whose name is Fletcher Rawls and who was brought up in a small town was pretty optimistic about the new world that the war is creating. He was worried about some things but he relished the idea that all of us are going to have to do a lot of things for ourselves. Like the man who is going to have to carve out the p ish buttons for my elevator. (If . .'t have to take time out arid do I r.yself ) He said: "Remember when we used to saw a barrel in two and make two tubs out of it? Cut an oval hole in both sides to make handles? "Those tubs got you pretty clean on Saturday nights. Just as good as a shiny porcelain tub. Well, we're going to have to get rid of a lot of chromium steel kitchens, and porcelain por-celain tubs. But we'll be just as clean and we'll show a lot more ingenuity." That was the text of a talk he read to me about how ingenious the small town merchant was going to have to be If he beat the idea of "bigness" that has all but run away with America. He wasn't quite as optimistic as Earl Sproul, vice president of the Western Newspaper Union, but he had a lot of sound ideas, too. Mr. Sproul says: "That small towns of the United States, always important factors (heart hear! I was born in one) in Die economic, social and political life of the nation, will now regain much of whatever trade that was lost in the years that saw almost every American family owning a car, is so evident that the new order demands the most serious attention." In other words people can't shop where they happen to be because they won't be there. They've got to shop near home. And the small town retailer is nearer to half the people than the big town merchant. Half the national population is officially offi-cially reported as rural; living in towns of 2,500 or less or on farms. All right. That puts it squarely up to the smoll town merchant, the cross roads store. A Tough Job Ahead And he has a tough job ahead of him. He has got to be able to get the stuff to sell. He has simply got to go out and fight to get the supplies. The storekeeper is going to be on a ration just like the people who get tires and he has got to prove that he is eligible for the greatly reduced output of non-war products that will exist. One thing the small town merchant mer-chant needn't try to put on his shaves is canned goods. The can and the canning cost 90 cents out of every dollar paid for canned goods. But when it comes to frozen ioods, the new quick freeze method. yu get 70 cents worth of eating out 0 every dollar you spend. Of course tliat doesn't take into consideration transportation. But right there is where the small town merchant may find a new out. The locker system is spreading. There is now a project for establishing estab-lishing more of these cold-storage lockers. Places where the armor can take his perishable products, fruit, meat or vegetables and for a small cost preserve them. There is a possibility that the small merchant mer-chant can beneilt by this method. He can retail the surplus that the farmer doesn't need for himself. A whole new business may grow out of that. The days of the fancy goods are over for a long while. The shiny steel iceboxes and sinks and counters. coun-ters. The canned goods. The frills. Those are the products of the big manufacturer, they are the things sold by the big merchant. We are not only going to be forced to deal with our neighborhood merchant mer-chant because we can't get out of the neighborhood but because we are going to have to return to the simpler things which the commu-1 nity itself can produce. The day has come when the man with energy and without capital, j with American ingenuity and with-1 out a father-in-law in the banking business, is going to have a chance to put his brains and his energy against even odds. We are going to get back to the time when a man wtyo can make a better mouse-trap will be rewarded reward-ed for it without having to have a corporation lawyer organize a company com-pany and sell stock. The only stock he will need is the kind he arrives with in this world. Americans- And Culture I once knew a man who worked on the next desk in the olfice of a great niiddlewestern newspaper. He ran a semi-humorous column. He printed in it a lot of miscellaneous contributed verse. One contributor contribu-tor who had a funny pseudonym (we'll, call it Jonathan X) wrote stuff (as we called it) which really amounted to poetry. The man who ran the column was a man of rare taste. His name was Kieth Preston. He is now dead. He was so struck by "Jonathan's" work, wanted to meet him. But the author refused to be met. Finally he wrote: "I'll tell you the truth. I am a physician. physi-cian. I have a very good practice. If my patients knew I wrote poetry they would be suspicious of me. I couldn't afford to reveal the fact." He was probably right. American people have a tendency to sneer at the gentler arts. But privately they are proud of their culture. I'll tell you a story about that. An acquaintance of mine published a very popular magazine. It specialized spe-cialized on sea stories. It was very popular with sailors. The publisher pub-lisher knew that his sales were tremendous tre-mendous among members of the Meet. He was soliciting an advertising account ac-count from a firm that sold chewing tobacco. Sailors buy (or bought at this timet a lot of chewing tobacco. tobac-co. The advertiser was hesitant. So the publisher said: "If I pay for sending a questionnaire question-naire to sailors on warships and if they admit my publication is the most popular with them, will you give me the advertising?" "Yes," said the advertiser. So the questionnaire was sent It asked the sailors to list in order which magazine they preferred. Well, the answers came in and Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Century, Cen-tury, and all the high-brow publications publi-cations led the list. The boys wanted want-ed to show their culture but they read my friend's pulp publication Just the same. This same principle is working out to rob the boys in the army und navy today of the books they really want. I get that first hand from the "Victory Book campaign," nn organization sponsored by the American Amer-ican Library association, the American Amer-ican Red Cross and similar organizations. organi-zations. They want donations of old books for men in the armed services. They tell me this: "The average donor comes in with works of high literary or technical merit (ond these we want, of course) but timidly half-hiding a book he relished no little, a "west-crner," "west-crner," or a "thriller." or perhaps a detective story. Finally he manages to ask If Just one of this sort might be acceptable. Please tell your listeners lis-teners 'yes.' " I pass that on to you as an ex-service ex-service man who relished any book he could get, who still loves detective detec-tive stories. And I also think it's a fine commentary on American's taste, actual und potential. If you have any, turn them in to a convenient Public Library or send them to Victory Book Campaign, 24 West 40th St.. New York City. |