The Waterbury Democrat., 1941-02-14

Of tricks about buying, and as a result, the entire Supply system for the services is being modernized so the government will buy on buy CTS market when prices are low, and the national economy will be stabilized by putting some seasonal industries to work in slack periods.
 Out of the original SIS billion appropriated for the defense eff fort, all has been allocated except matter of some $500 million mere chicken feed. That doesn't include the supply bills to keep the services going, but that's where the smart buying comes in. It explains also the need for the current SITS million appropriation bill which will enable the quartermaster corps to buy food and clothing.
 THREE MAIN FOOD
 BUYING OFFICES
 Take food. It will cost three quarters of a million dollars day just to feed an army of a million and a half men. Yes, day.
 To do that trick, the chain store boys have set up three principal purchasing offices to supervise the job for the whole country. New York will buy condiments and non- perishables. Chicago will buy meats, flour and cereals. San Francisco will buy fruits and vegetables. The lines aren't hard and fast, but those are the main divisions.
 Supplementing that, there will be 36 zone offices, one in each of the 12 main and 24 branch federal re- serve districts, which will buy stuff locally for the camps in its zone. All this buying will be done under the army quartermaster corps, with a civilian expert sitting in to ad- wise.
 Under the old setup, the Q. M from each camp would do his own buying. Sometimes, when there were three or four camps in the vicinity of one market town, the Q. Ms would drive up with their trucks early in the morning, go into competition with each. other for supplies, run up prices, and by noon have the market so cleaned out there wasn't anything left for the local housewives. The new idea is to eliminate all that. Furthermore, truck farming in the vicinity of each camp is to be encouraged, so that areas will be largely self-sup- porting.
 Take clothes = take overcoats. Right now is the slack season in the overcoat making industry. All coats for this winter have been made, and they haven't started on the coats for 1922. The army will need nearly a million overcoats for next winter. It owns the cloth, so it will soon let contracts to cut make and trim next winters gar- ments.
 Take shoes. A soldier wears out four pairs year. Carter Glass won- ders how Washington's men got through that winter at Valley Forge, when the revolutionarieS didn't have | any shoes at all, but since this won't be a barefoot army, shoe buy CTS have to figure how they can get | six million pairs year out of pres ent factory capacity. RUBBER, SOAP PLANTS TO MAKE POWDER BAGS
 This matter of finding plants to make the things the services want is a problem in itself. More than 10 years ago the army began it's big survey of industrial production facilities in the United States. Ten thousands plants were inspected, catalogued and classified. The Sur- vey took into account how each fac- tory could be converted to make war supplies. A corset factory, for in- stance, was found to be an ideal place to make gas masks.
 For some supplies, the number of experienced manufacturers is limit ed. There are only about four com- panieS that can manufacture explo- sives on a big scale-DuPont, Tro- jan, Hercules and Remington. The job of making 15 freight car loads of SmokelesS powder per day had to be turned over to them. That to load the powder bags for artillery had to be met. With few experi- :. enced firms to approach, the army looked around for companies with good records of plant management and asked them to tackle the job. Two of those who said ives" were Goodyear and Procter & Gamble, and as result, these rubber and soap companies are going into en- tirely new businesses, starting from scratch.
 There will be funnier ones than that announced soon.