Teapot Tempest

Some 4,000 years ago, according to Japanese legend, the Buddhist priest Bodhidharma tried to stay awake for seven years. In the fifth year he got sleepy and cut off his eyelids. They took root. From the leaves of the bushes that grew, he made a brew that enabled him to finish his vigil. That's how tea began.

And that was probably the most wide-awake the tea business has ever been. The British, who have dominated it since tea became their national beverage in the 18th Century, have always conducted the business in a gentlemanly, conservative manner, as unchanging as the ritual of tea drinking.* But last week the Big Five that compete for the U.S. tea market--Lipton, A. & P., Standard Brands, Salada and Tetley--were shocked into Bodhidharmian wakefulness by the prospects of a world-wide tea shortage.

First Ripple. Standard Brands raised wholesale prices 12-c- a lb. Then Thomas J. Lipton, Inc., which sells about 25% of all U.S. tea, quickly followed suit. A. & P., which had upped its retail prices 5-c- a lb. last month, prepared further hikes.

This was the first ripple to disturb the smooth flow of the tea trade since 1942, when the Japanese overran 35% of the world's sources. Tea still came from India and Ceylon. Though supply was short, the Allies froze prices at the 1942 level (while coffee prices rose 68%, cocoa 40%).

But in the tea gardens of the Far East, the cost of producing tea increased more than 100%. The greatest jump was in labor, the biggest cost factor. (It takes a lot of picking and sorting to make a pound, since only the three end leaves on every branch--the Pekoe leaves--are picked.) On top of that, India slapped on an export tax of 7 3/4-c- a lb., Ceylon, 12-c-. When the free market was restored in tea last January, the world found that demand was 25% greater than supply.

The Wave. In a few months, under the heavy buying of the British and Irish, wholesale prices at public auctions in the Far East soared as much as 200%. U.S. companies held off, confident that their nine months' supply on hand would see them through the flurry. But prices stayed up and U.S. supplies shrank. U.S. companies had to start buying again.

Though tea will now cost 64-c- to $1.15 a lb. retail, the prices are a far cry from the $4 to $15 a lb. it brought in 1660, when it was first offered by London's Thomas Garway, a coffee-house proprietor. He plugged it as "good against crudities, strengthening the weakness of the Ventricle or Stomack, causing good Appetite and Digestion, and particularly for Men of a corpulent Body and such as are great eaters of Flesh."

* Despite the exchange of technical information during two 20th Century wars, it is still impossible for Americans to get a good cup of coffee in Britain and for Britons to get a good cup of tea in the U.S.

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