Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 February 1910 — CONSUMER. [ARTICLE]

CONSUMER.

One Get* Low Prices and the Other Faye High Prices. ' -- You, Mr. Greenhouse Grower, must realize that when lettuce sells at 25 cents a pound, cucumbers at 15 cents each and tomatoes at 5 cents each, there is. just about ane-third the .consumption there would be if the prices were one-half what they are, says the Market Growers' Journal. You may not be getting a fair profit for your Mme, labor and capital. If you are

nut, you must be Interested In then figures. It may be that you are getting all you can reasonably expect from your products, and that you have profited to some extent by these high Christmas prices. But you must realize that high prices decrease consumption and that extreme prices, either high or low, work no good to the produced. When you subtqgct your returns from what the consumer pays you can not but fail to realize that the machinery of marketing your produce is too complicated and too costly. Just consider a fanciful case. You, John Smith, ship a box of seven dozen cucumbers to Jones, Brown ft Co., commission merchants in Chicago. They sell the box to Taylor ft Co., commission merchants in Indianapolis, at $1 a dozen, or a total of $7 for the box, and send you a check for your returns, deducting express charges, cartage and commission. Taylor ft Co. pay the express charges from Chicago and sell the cucumbers in lots of one dozen to grocers at k price enough above their buying price to give them a fair profit. The consumer pays the grocer on an average 20 cents each for your cucumbers, so that what you sold for less than $1 a dozen costs consumers more than $2 a dozen. And remember that it must be a fairly well-to-do cossumer to pay 20“ cents Tor one cucumber. Here is a big problem for producers to consider—the marketing of their products so that they may get more of the consumer’s dollar and the consumer may get more for his dollar.