A Double Life

In Manhattan last week, R. H. Macy & Co. was hawking an odd item--dish towels made of old flour bags. And they were selling at a furious clip (30,000 in ten shopping days). Sears, Roebuck & Co. was also advertising them in its new spring catalogue (and sales were brisk). In groceries, housewives were buying flour in 25-lb. bags that had sewn-in drawstrings; the buyer had only to unstitch a seam and she had a gaily printed cotton apron. Across the U.S., thousands of women, following instructions in special pattern books, were turning similar dress-printed bags into clothes, curtains, tablecloths, napkins, quilts and slipcovers.

All this stir was the result of a wideawake promotion by the onetime sleepy cotton industry. In plugging these apparently unimportant items it had a highly important purpose. It hoped to win a nip & tuck race with papermakers for what has usually been one of the biggest markets for U.S. cotton textiles (bags absorbed about 8% of all cotton textile production before the war).

Paper War. Since war's end, the papermakers have been edging high-priced cotton out of the bag market. But when 20 states passed laws forbidding the re-use of any bags for food, cotton men finally got up off their bales. With cotton bags at 32-c- (per 100-lb. bag) v. 10-c- for paper bags, cotton-bag makers had been getting by only because bakers were able to use cotton bags three and four times over in handling flour.

Last spring members of the National Cotton Council and other cotton men raised $380,000 for a last-ditch fight. Feed and flour bags had been used for years by farmers' wives for aprons, dresses, etc., but the cotton men decided to go after city folks too. A tougher and much more important job was to sell cotton bags to wholesale bakers; they didn't give a hoot about prints.

In the Bag. So cotton men dropped in on secondhand bag dealers in key U.S. cities and convinced them that they could profitably boost their business by buying used bags from bakers, processing them into tea towels, and selling them through retailers. Bag dealers were soon buying bakers' used cotton bags for as much as 25-c- apiece, thus cutting the original cost to bakers to around 7-c---well under paper prices.

In Manhattan last week, the cotton men reported on the first seven months of the selling drive. It was far rosier than expected. Monthly sales for 37-inch sheeting, the most widely used bagging, had more than doubled--to 6,370,000 yards. Far from satisfied, the cotton men hoped to reach the 15,550,000-yard mark for 37-inch sheeting before long, and have their market in the bag.

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