The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-05-10

From the New York Times.
 l 6NHE high cost of food, shoes and | various other things everybody
 Gs must buy has been leading topic l so long that one finds it hard to~Delieve there is any purchasable article which | is not soaring outrageously. Yet the storekeepers of New York say many prices l have risen so little that they furnish striking contrast to the familiar sky rocket quotations on daily necessities. | Women's clothing for example, has not 1 changed much in cost; in some cases, not at all.
 | Heads of six large New York depart ment stores, discussing the situation with | in the last week, insisted that their ! women customers were not paying 1 greatly increased price for clothes. If woman does comparative shopping, &C., cording to their estimates, she can dress as cheaply as she ever did. In nearly every store there is always something that l Is being sold cheaply, due to overstock- l ing on the part of the manufacturer who might have had too many copies of l a certain dress made up. He becomes un- certain of it's style and sells 1t for any price he can get. A woman's garment | has no intrinsic value. It is all matter
 of demand. A dress can be worth $50 one month, and the store will be glad to lget 5 for 1t the next month, if it has | gone out of style.
 Three years ago a woman could buy
 nice looking serge suit for s2s.5O. She can ' buy just as nice looking serge suit now l for s29.5O. Retailers have found that the public demands a $295O suit. But raw materials are scarcer, labor is more high Fly paid and harder to get. The manu- facturer pays more to have that suit
 made; the wholesaler pays more to get 1t l from the manufacturers; and, in turn, the retailer pays more to buy it for his cus- | toner.
 l Who pays the increased price? The re- taller realizes that he must sell the suit for s29.5O, so he does two things. He adopts the "quick turnover system smaller profits and quicker sales, losing nothing in the end The stores prefer to operate at small profit rather than at no profit at all. Then the quality of the $295O suit is not quite so good as it was three years ago. Inasmuch as the l quality of a garment nearly always out wears the style, it answers the purpose | quite as well.
 | It is not the low priced merchandise | or the high priced merchandise that is most affected now. woman can get almost as good value for S30 as before, l or for S125; however, the woman who I paid $6O for a dress three years ago will | find herself paying s5. That is because of the expense of importing French models and fine materials necessary for copying them. The s3O dress Is not al- ways copied from an imported model, and
 the merchant makes enough profit on the
 $125 gown to pemit cut of profit for | himself Some one has said that a dry goods
 man must have inspired the President
 when he said: Small profits and quick service" for that is the system with
 which the stores are meeting the present
 situation. It stands to reason that if you sell 20 articles with a five-dollar profit
 on each you make the same amount of
 money that you would have done had you sold 10 articles with profit of $10 on each.
 And you are serving more people! i Each store head was asked If anything
 was cheaper than it was three years ago,
 and all, except one, answered mo-" The millinery buyer happened to be in that
 office, and he said:
 Ostrich feathers are cheaper than they
 have ever been. American women have
 a mistaken idea that it is against the
 law to wear them, while, on the contrary,
 the Audubon society recommends theif
 which lowers the price unreasonably." 1 One of the managers of store on Fifth avenue had just returned from his six teenth trip to Europe since the war.
 Judging from the experience of the
 other war-ridden countries. we need fear no business depression on account of
 America's entrance into the war;" he said. "I was in Paris five weeks after war was declared. The Germans were
 so close to Paris that we could hear the boom of their guns. The manager of the
 Galerie Lafayette asked me if I didn't want his stock of handmade waists. T
 think we will have to close up,' he said.
 'T have just returned from Paris, and that same man told me they had had
 the biggest year in the history of the