Arizona republican., 1917-07-15
UNCLE SAM NOW BUYS SHOES BY
 MILLION AIRS

When the average person reads that it will take 1, 4,555, 900 pairs of shoes to equip Uncle Sam's first million fight ing men and keep them in shoes the first nine months of service, he prob ably counts the heads" about the breakfast table and says, inwardly They'll (meaning shoes) go up still higher"
 The shoe demand for the United States army this first year of war will be nearer million pairs than the figures quoted, because we are going to have many hundred thousand more shan a million men in the field before the end of the year.
 Nevertheless, shoes ought not to cost the civilian a cent more because of those millions of shoes the govern
 ment is purchasing. If natural laws
 operated without such influences as the tremendous purchases of our allies
 n the American shoe market, the ar
 my needs should have little or no eff sect on the consumer
 On the face of it. this may seem an
 unusual statement, but here is tn, way one of the highest officers in the T my. who personally supervises the spending of many of the millions of
 o'lars voted to equip the army, ex- plained it:
 ''The person reading of the stu endous scale on which the United States is entering the markets for every day necessities, doesn't stop, as ! rule to think that no more peopl, Ire to wear shoes than before we | went to war; that as far as our army $ concerned, there are no more mouths to feed than before the mil 1 non young men went into the army. It is just the substitution of the government for the individual as the i purchaser
 Some of the shoe manufacturers who first came to Washington after government contracts pointed to gov efnment needs as a reason for a good round price, even above the market. which then was high. But the govern ment pointed out that the men the government was buying shoes for were oelng taken from private life and no longer would have individual pur- | chases to make; that where they might buy three or four pairs a veal
 as private individuals, and possibly
 It higher prices than those the gov
 fnment purchased they wouldn't be customers at the local stores any onger. The contractors probably kneW thls, anyhow, but they no longer tried to boost the price up on the government. In fact there was a
 'Hramble from the biggest >to the rsmallest shoe factory in the country
 or the government contracts. and shoes were bought considerably under the prevailing market
 But the war situation works our stlll further against higher shoe prices war makes people conservative. The person back home wears his shoe. longer than he would nsfmallv. And thls factor, government shoe experts say, more than counterbalances any eStra wear on shoes that might come through hundreds of thousands of men gong into field work who were at
 ;iesks or at machine bench before. on food and the army food de rnands this is particularly more apph- able. Except for a few articles sI,ch condensed milk and certain canned goods, where it is impossible for the government to supply fresh articles an large scale, there is simply a
 substitution of the government for the adlvldual as purchaser The govern. ment buys more economically and elin
 mates Tn large measure the vast, -and the waste in foodstuffs on :, million men year is enormous. The | million men the government must buy
 cod for are million men that were 'uying from the corner grocery How ever, 1n this equation enters the food