O, Simplicity

From the Office of Price Administration came a hopeful communique: food price ceilings will be revamped and simplified so that ordinary people can understand them.

On the way out is the General Maximum Price Regulation, unhonored & unsung. It pegged prices to March or other specified levels, but in its seven months got hopelessly bogged down in new costs and schedules, a dozen individual price regulations and a mess of confusing explanations.

Now, due in January, is a scheme to let every housewife know in cents per pound or package, what she is to pay for every item. Ceilings will be set (and may be published in handy booklets), community by community, first for meat and soap in key cities, later for all groceries in all places, as fast as newly enlarged OPA regional offices can handle them. Some 400,000 retail food outlets will be affected.

Stores will be classed as independent, chain and supermarket. To end frozen-price inequalities in competing stores and ease the small businessman's position, each store class will be assigned definite markups above operating costs. The markups are to be based on studies (made by the Bureau of Labor Statistics) of margins of several thousand U.S. food stores. Independent grocers generally will be allowed wider margins than chains and big markets to allow for difference in business methods and operating costs. Similar controls will be extended to wholesalers.

The idea is to hold prices to current levels as far as possible, but there will be changes: some stores on high margins will be cut to lower ceilings; others with exceptionally low margins will be allowed to boost prices.

Explained Leon Henderson, with the enthusiasm of a man on the trail of a big idea: "The new program is designed to give the consumer effective protection from rising living costs and at the same time vastly simplify the regulations to which the food retailer is now subject." Echoed U.S. housewives and grocers: praise be.

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