"Advantages of Mass Buying"

Cotton Mather, great Puritan preacher and educator, hated witches and had 15 children. A Florida descendant of his, also named Cotton Mather, who hates taxes and has 15 chain stores, last week learned that taxes, unlike witches, cannot be burned at the stake.

In 22 States, independent retailers' cries of oppression by chain-store competition have been quieted by chain-store taxes.* Particularly stiff are Florida's; only Idaho has comparably severe rates. Florida's Cotton Mather, less fanatical but no less shrewd than his ancestor, worked out a system which he thought had the tax witch lashed to the stake: he organized his 15 stores under seven loosely knit corporations, no one of which held more than three stores. Under Florida's system of graduation, paying taxes on several small chains is small potatoes to paying on one large chain. The slipknot in his lashing was that he proudly advertised the "advantages of mass buying" for all 15 stores.

The State confronted him with this boast, last week warned that if he did not kick in $25,200 it would repeat last month's Whiddon confiscation--in which 20 Whiddon Cash Stores, owing $43,000 in back chain-store taxes, were seized by the State and sold at auction.

Said Cotton Mather II, as Cotton I never would have: "I know when I'm licked."

*Last week the Colorado Chain Stores Association began a campaign for repeal of a four-year-old chain-store tax. Colorado is the only State in which the tax was enacted by popular vote.

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