The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1920-01-27
WORST YEAR EVER
 FOR SOAP TRADE
Big Production and Euro pean Scarcity Led to Gen eral Stocking Up Beyond Reason and Reaction Hit Manufacturers Hard.
By S. W. ECKMAN.

President, B. T. Rabbit, Inc, N. Y.
 In December there appeared in the Brooklyn Eagle" a letter from some estimab1e lady in that city suggesting that the local District Attorney in his effort to run down the profiteers and bring down the high cost of living, give his attention to soap manufac- turers. whom she evidently thought to be chief offenders along this line. If the District Attorney followed this good lady's advice he probably dropped his Investigation after his visit to the first soap manufacturer.
 The fact of the matter is that 1919 will go down as perhaps the worst year ever known in the laundry soap business. This is the view both from the point of view of gross volume of business and net profit. One con- cern, which closed it's year several weeks ago. showed profit of over s1,0o0,oo0 in 1918 and a loss of about half that amount in 1919.
 While the war was on, the soap manufa cturers could hardly fill their orders. During this time the by-prod- uct, glycerine, sold up 70 over COG per pound, as against the normal high price of 20c, and naturally every manufacturer strained to the utmost to get out the greatest possible vol une, not only on account of the profit involved, but because the Government was urging maximum production of glycerine for war purposes.
 Soap Was Much Talked About.
 Probably no article received any more free advertising during the war than common laundry soap. Letters from soldiers to their folks back h ri in the papers, showed that dough- boy could walk down the main street of any French village with cake of soap in his hand and could get prac- tically anything short of part of a deed to a mans home in exchange there for.
 Prices of all fats and oils were go- ing up continually and it was the general consensus of opinion that soap prices must skyrocket. The fact of the matter was that, although the cost for the manufacture of soap ap- proximately tripled during the war, the cost to the consumer never got above double the pre-war cost. and hardly reached that. The reason for this was that the soap maker set off against the price of his soap the value of the glycerine and in that way was able to keep the price of soap down $1 per box or more below the price which would have been required had glycerine been selling at its normal value.
 The result of the general situation was that during the last year of the war, Mrs. Consumer, instead of buy ing 25c or soc worth of soap, bought a box, or two or three boxes and put 1t away. MT. Retailer, instead of buying five or 10 boxes, bought fifty or 100 and filled his cellar. MT. Job Der instead of buying 100 boxes, 1000; so that at the time of the ar mistice there was very large supply of soap in the hands of distributors end consumers all over the country.
 Jobbers Had Soap Galore.
 One jobber has recently circularized the wholesale grocery trade, offering 14,000 cases of different brands of laundry soap, which he evidently has had on hand since before the end of the war. If he has this much surplus a year after the war is over, one can imagine how many thousands of cases he must have had when the armistice was declared
 The result of all th1s was that the soap manufacturers found sales drop ping off almost to the vanishing point during the early months of 1919. IT many instances factories were closed down entirely, and in every instance