Bargain Day

A rash of spotty price-cutting broke out in stores across the U.S. last week. Bargain hunters in New York City's 170,000 retail stores found some of their best buys since 1948. Gimbels department store blared attention to a one-day sale in its sports department--"$70,665 worth of sporting goods for $42,578"; Bloomingdale's advertised a Simmons innerspring mattress for $43.95, reduced from $67.95; Franklin Simon had white broadcloth shirts at $3.25 which had been $4.50; Stern's offered washable cotton rugs for $39.98, cut from $59.98.

Manhattan retailers, who keep their fingers on the pulse of U.S. trade, knew what they were doing. All over the U.S., a log jam of goods was piled up in warehouses, and prices had to be slashed by manufacturers, as well as retailers, to move them. Prime example: Admiral Corp. announced it would give a $90 table-model radio-phonograph free with every purchase of a floor model TV set costing more than $339. No Room. Nowhere was the pile-up bigger than in Chicago, headquarters for Associated Warehouses, Inc., sales organization for 75 U.S. warehouses. Executive Secretary Clyde Phelps picked up the phone one afternoon last week, got a call from a Louisville, Ky. soap manufacturer who wanted room for 200 carloads of soap. The phone rang again: it was a San Francisco cosmetics manufacturer who .wanted floor space to store his excess inventory in Chicago.

Phelps said there wasn't an inch of storage space left in the city. Goods are piled in sheds, under tarpaulins in open-air lots, in freight cars on sidings (with manufacturers footing the expensive demurrage bills). Merchants who have asked "immediate shipment" on goods, thinking this would mean a month or so, have been flabbergasted when they got the goods in a few days, with no place to store them. "In the 20 years that we've been in business," said Warehouseman Phelps, "we've never been flooded with more merchandise than we have in the past 60 days."

Back to Normal. Inventories are indeed bulging: a fat $64.6 billion worth, compared to $54.2 billion in June 1950. Most of the pile-up is on the shelves of retail stores, where sales are about back to normal after last winter's scare-buying spree.

At week's end, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the Consumers' Price Index had inched up to 184.5 on March 15, a bare .4% advance over February. But this figure does not reflect post-Easter sales and other price cuts which have taken place since then. Government price controllers hope that when figures are published for April they will show that the cost of living has stopped rising.

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