FROM THE ARCHIVES:Small shopkeepers, distributors and their employees were feeling the cold winds of competition in 1930 from improved transport and larger organisations but The Irish Timesdid not have much sympathy for what it called "hucksters" who imposed high prices on the public at large. – JOE JOYCE
IN IRELAND, and particularly in the Free State, there are far too many distributors. An unduly high proportion of the goods that are produced in the twenty-six counties is exported, while the distributive trades are engaged mainly in the sale of imported articles. In England and, to a less extent, in Northern Ireland, the public is served, even in small towns, by wealthy combines, which, on the principle of huge turn-overs and small profits, are able to sell their goods at remarkably low prices.
In the Free State, on the other hand, the huckster is supreme. Not only in the country towns, but in Dublin and the other cities, there is a plethora of small shops. In a single Dublin street one can find as many as half-a-dozen little establishments selling identical goods. Every one of them must pay rent, rates and taxes. Every one of them has a wages bill to settle; and the result is that their prices must be maintained at an exorbitant level in order that they may be able to make ends meet. Naturally, the public is the victim. Throughout the Free State this condition of affairs exists in varying degrees. The country is honeycombed with middlemen; and the organisation of the distributive trades is so bad that the Free State is the dearest land in Europe. The workers are not to blame for the economic evil on which their livelihood depends, and it is only natural that they should try to prevent that inevitable change which alone can remedy the country’s lot.
Thus, some of them protest against “foreign” shops on the ground that the multiple firm is able to sell at reduced prices, because it concentrates in a single establishment the “overheads” that in Ireland are spread over a score of small concerns. The “foreign” firms succeed as a result of modern methods, while many native distributors seem to be content with the methods of one hundred years ago. Now that road transport is developing at such a rapid rate, the need for reform is urgent. The distributive workers regard the advent of the omnibus with anxiety, fearing that it will ruin the smaller towns; and, in a sense, they are right.
The country town, as it was ten years ago, is doomed. In the old days local shopkeepers could charge their own prices; now they must compete directly with city houses. In so far as the omnibus has created this situation, it has contributed towards the solution of one of Ireland’s sorest problems. The small towns must mend their ways. Farmers no longer will be content to pay fancy prices, and the gombeen man’s days are numbered. On the other hand, the omnibus brings custom to the small towns.
They can survive as useful links in the chain of national economy, but the old spirit of the huckster must disappear.
http://url.ie/apms