Command the Tide

Spottily but ominously, prices had started upward.

Some of the rises could be blamed on scare buyers. Last week, hoarding housewives still roamed the nation's stores and markets, snatching up prizes. In Boston, sirloin steak went to $2 a pound. In Washington, a psychology-minded grocer put a sign out front: "Special: 5 Pounds Sugar, 98 cents"--just twice the price at the store across the street. By closing time, clamoring customers had bought 1,000 Ibs. In Allegan, Mich., a man asked to exchange a bag of badly caked sugar, confessed he had 250 pounds more just like it that he had hoarded from World War II.

This week the surge of hoarding seemed to be subsiding. The big buying was something else. People who had been waiting until prices dropped before buying a rug, a radio or a new dress, decided there was no use waiting. Others were like a man in a Denver store who said angrily: "I don't like to be in the hoarder class, but I'll be damned if I'll stand by and watch everyone else buy up scarce items at regular prices and then have to pay more for the same damn thing next week."

Denver's angry man was hard to dispute. Last week such staples as bread, milk and coffee inched upward. In three days, producers jacked up the prices of 44 popular items sold by Massachusetts grocers.

The R. J. Reynolds Co. raised the price of its cigarettes--Camels will cost an extra cent a pack--and other major tobacco companies followed. Some textile prices had risen as much as 22%.* Emerson and Du Mont announced higher prices for their television sets. Rubber climbed upward and tire manufacturers increased their prices 5% to 12 1/2%. Gasoline was up 2-c- a gallon.

Everybody had ready every kind of explanation for their price increases except the obvious one--the fear that price control would come and catch them with their prices down.

Last week, in his mid-year economic report, President Harry Truman warned that he would impose controls "if it should become necessary," scolded those who would raise prices. He pointed out that already the daily wholesale price index had risen 10% since Korea. But even as his message was read, prices outdated him: the index had risen another 3%.

Would scolding be enough to halt the rising tide of prices? Harry Truman hoped so, and it might. But it never had before.

* One notable exception: Phillips-Jones Corp., which guaranteed that the price of its Van Heusen shirts, pajamas and sport shirts would not be raised before Christmas at the earliest.

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