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Show GROCERS AND NEWS PAP ERItS. The Salt Lake Tribune takes J. S. Carver of Ogden to task for statements that gentleman made before the Utah Retail Merchants' Association last Wednesday. The Tribune says: Mr. J. S. Carver, president of the Utah Retail Merchants' Association, As-sociation, is much discontented with the newspapers. He intimates that they, do net print thinfiro n& -th .ita.ilrs givo . them, which saying- is a gratuitous" piece of folly. The great difficulty ih' newspapers have to contend with is in getting news from the retail merchants to get the facts as they are. The newspapers print as fully as they can the prices as given by the retail merchants of this city, but no matter how much pains they take to get those prices, they find in many things a wide divergence between the fact and prices as given for publication by the retail merchanst3. The consumer naturally wishes to buy at the prices given out by the retail men. Very often he is not able to do it,-and that is one great cause of complaint. com-plaint. The retail merchants seem to take pleasure in misleading the public in their quotations for publication. Mr. Carver says that the newspapers print statements regarding the prices of high living "which are totally untrue." Well, if so, which is to blame, the newspapers which print the prices or the retail dealers who quote those prices to the( newspaper reporters? Mr. Carver intimates that the newspapers do not print the facts as the retail dealers give them. It is quite possibly that they do not always print "fact3" given by retail dealers, when they know those "facts" to be untrue. For instance, if the retail dealer says that the price of a certain article is 25 cents a bunch, a pound or a box, and the reporter knows by diligent inquiry as a customer, that, as a matter of fact, the price is 30c to 35c, and nobody can buy it from the retailers for 25c, of course he does not quote the false price, but the true one. There is no doubt in the world but that the prices in this city, and presumably in Ogden also, are governed by combines, and those combines put the prices up to the highest figure which they think the trade will bear or the consumer will or can pay. It not infrequently infre-quently happens that farmers coming to this city with their loads, ask extortionate prices before the departure of the morning trains. After the departure of these trains, after the commission men aro no longer in the market for shipments, then the prices, fall as much as 50, 60 or even 75 per cent. Then the retail merchants come in and buy. But do they give their customers the benefit of the drop? By no means. They claim that they have paid the highest price asked in the early morning, when in fact they have done nothing of the kind, but they charge heroically, the combine among them holding all to the agreed-on. price. All tese things are perfectly well known to the trade here, and they are known to the general publicand the buyer. But the general gen-eral public and the buyer cannot help themaelvess; they cannot, as a ride, go to the farmers' wagons and get the benefit of the "after-train" "after-train" reductions, but have to pay the extortionate prices demanded by the retail dealers. Mr. Carver claims that the retail dealers are entitled to a living and he asks that they should be allowed' to make upwards of 20 per cent per day on their investment. If this means that they should make 20 per cent per day on their purchases, that would surely be a pretty stiff premium for their service in handling the goods But they make more than that, as a rule. They double their money aimost daily on the goods that they sell; but it is true that they often buy more than they can sell at the exorbitant prices they demand, and so their greed is responsible for the losses they sustain on that account; ac-count; if they were at liberty to sell at a fair profit, which their mpno-pohstic mpno-pohstic combination forbids them to do, they could sell much moro . and would have less stuff to spoil on their hands. ' The Tribune is absolutely right. The experience of that paper has been the experience of this paper. No paper intentionally misrepresents, mis-represents, unless the control of the paper be beyond the pale of honesty hon-esty and no paper attempts an exposure of wrong doing methods and abuse? in a public service until convinced that right is on its side The attempt at a combine and monopoly is in itself sufficient to bnng down upon the combination of men the distrust of the public and to justifly the newspaper in a campaign of publicity and con. demnation. If the members of the state association, of which Mr. Carver is president, are seeking a conflict with the press of Utah, it is just possible pos-sible that arrangements can be made to accommodate them. |