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Show Small Town Stores Transact Over Half Of Business in Iowa . DES MOINES, Iowa. If you want to hear the cash register ring in Iowa, go out to the small towns. So ays Bernard Nowack, chief statistician statis-tician for the Iowa Development Commission, recently as he looked over the figures on business activity In Iowa and the nation. Small town merchants ring up mora than half the business dollars la Iowa, Nowack announced. According Accord-ing to his figures, cash registers In Iowa towns and cities under 23,000 chattered to the tune of more than three billion dollars In 1948, the year of the last business census. That Is 52.8 per cent of the business done In the whole state, which totaled $3,040,621,000. What's more, money plunked down on the counters of Iowa towns of less than 10,000 amounted to 48 per cent of all the Iowa business that year (except for manuiactur-tng.) manuiactur-tng.) Iowa is the only state with so much business activity In its small-. small-. er towns, according to Nowack. In other states with a comparable or larger gross business, the volume transacted in places under 25,000 ranges from 9.1 per cent (New York) to SS per cent (Indiana, New Jersey and Texas). In the nation whole, cities and towns under 29,000 do 29.9 per cent of the business. busi-ness. There Is a two-fold explanation for Iowa's widely scattered business activity, ac-tivity, Nowack reported. First, Iowa's 2 billion a year" farm Income In-come Is more likely to be spent In trading centers close to the farm-era' farm-era' homes. Second, Iowa manufacturing manufac-turing is widely scattered among 600 different towns and cities, spreading out industrial payrolls. |