Stampede to Soap

Procter & Gamble announced last week that it had sold more Ivory soap, P. & G., Jap Rose, Camay, Chipso, Crisco and all other P. & G. products in the first three months of 1934 than in any other quarter in the 97 years of its history. In dollars its sales were only at the 1932 level but in tonnage the quarter set a record. Earnings were $4,031,000 against $2,451,000 in the same period of last year. To Chairman William Cooper Procter, who makes 40% of all U. S. soap, the future should have appeared fine and dirty.*

Yet such was not the case. The whole soap industry was in the midst of a boom but the boom was false and frothy. What touched it off was a 3-c--per-lb. tax on nearly all imported vegetable and fish oils in the pending revenue bill at Washington, a tax originally aimed by U. S. farmers at Philippine coconut oil. No matter how scented & savory, most soap is basically fat and caustic soda./- The trade paper Soap estimates that U. S. soap makers last year used 1,500,000,000 lb. of fats, of which two-thirds came from beyond the seas. At present prices the 3-c- tax amounts on the average to a 100% ad valorem levy. All soap makers use some imported fats, and they bluntly declare that the new impost will add 25% to the price of a cake of soap.

In a mad stampede to stock up before the tax becomes law, dealers have kept the soap works running night & day. Warehouses are crammed. Retailers have passed the word on to housewives and bathroom shelves are piled high. The trade is usually stocked for about a fortnight but the supply is now sufficient for three months. Whether or not the tax is passed, Col. William Cooper Procter and all the other U. S. soap makers must wait a long, long time before the last cake of tax-free soap goes down the trap in suds.

*Last week Col. Prector, 72, lay critically ill of pnemonia in a Cincinnati hospital. /-A by-product of soap is glycerine. During Depression, prices of glycerine dropped so low that soap makers let it run down the sewers. An unprecedented demand for anti-freeze mixtures during the winter, a pick-up in the use of industrial explosives and war talk has made the price of crude glycerine from a low of 4-c- per lb. in 1933 to about 8-c-.

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