Pointless Story

Since tight food rationing began last spring, the small Dixie Market in little Ypsilanti, Mich. (1940 pop. 12,000), hard by the Willow Run bomber plant, has done a big city business. For 10 1/2| hours a day, seven clerks hustle to fill the grocery orders of the 4,000 customers who jam-pack the store every week. Yet the store has never collected a ration stamp from a customer. For the Dixie Market deals only in unrationed groceries.

The Dixie's boss is bespectacled, pipe-smoking Raymond Erastus Hart, 47. Smart Mr. Hart learned the grocery business while traveling about Michigan opening new stores for giant Kroger Grocery & Baking Co. He also learned that the way of the small town independent grocer is hard, and decided to stay out until he had a saving trick up his sleeve. Last February, he cannily foresaw the strict rationing ahead, and guessed that coupon-confused housewives would give a rib-cracking welcome to an old-fashioned grocery store, where there was no such vexing thing as "points."

Raymond Hart went to Ypsilanti and while studying the situation there (35 stores), he worked at Willow Run for two months. When rationing of canned goods and other foods turned many a small grocer into a coupon-counting insomniac, he launched his pointless store. He shrewdly stocked an 18-by-60-ft. store with hundreds of unrationed items, included "something almost as good" for all rationed foods. For butter and oleomargarine he had apple butter, honey and tomato preserves; for meat, chicken and turkey a la king (in glass jars), fish flakes, packaged spaghetti with cheese and tomato sauce; dehydrated and powdered soups for canned.

The first week, the market grossed $800, made a neat profit. Within a month coupon-weary housewives so jammed this pointless paradise that the gross zoomed to $1,500. Now the market does a $2,000 weekly gross, has brought Hart many offers to expand. Last week, he turned them all down. He feels that more stores would keep him too busy, give him little time to sit back, puff at his pipe and chortle at his fellow grocers, sore-eyed, weary-fingered, thumbing over hundreds of stamps through the nights.

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