From Icebox to Deep Freeze

"When we issued the price freeze, we put prices in the icebox," said Price Stabilizer Michael Di Salle last week. "Today, we are taking them out of the icebox. They will lie on the table for a short while; there will probably be some sweating and thawing. And then we put them in the deep freeze--for a long time."

With that offhand explanation, Mike Di Salle last week issued Ceiling Price Regulation 7, a new step in the fight to stabilize sky-high prices. The order wiped out the general price freeze for about 200,000 retail items and substituted instead a system exhumed from the tomb of World War II's OPA. The new plan, "retail margin control," specifies that dollars & cents price margins may be no greater than those prevailing Feb. 24. The plan applies to clothing, shoes, furniture, rugs, bedding--in short, about 75% of the things department stores sell--and affects some 233,000 retailers who sell about $31 billion of consumer goods a year.

Few Cuts, No Lists. Di Salle hopes the order will bring about some price cuts. But the likelihood is that there will be more increases than cuts. Reason: many raw-material dealers and wholesalers jacked up prices before the general price freeze of Jan. 25, and the marked-up goods are already on retailers' shelves. Under the margin control plan, the increases will be passed on to the consumer. This is the "thawing" which Di Salle admitted would come during the transfer from the icebox to the deep freeze.

But OPS hopefully thinks that once the margin control plan really settles into operation, it will result in fairer, more workable control of prices than specific ceilings and pave the way for similar margin controls in other levels (e.g., wholesale) and other sectors of the economy. Later on, Di Salle also plans to review all margin controls, and order rollbacks where retailers have boosted their markups in anticipation of the order.

Fancy Cuts, No Buyers. But cheerful Mike Di Salle could offer little encouragement about the mounting cost of food. Meat had become a particularly burning problem. Packers looked back to isolated examples of high-priced sales, used them as an excuse for getting around the Jan. 25 price freeze. Meat packers complained that they were caught between high prices for livestock (which are not controlled) and the control ceilings under which they must sell processed meat. Di Salle promised to put his enforcement staff to work on the chiseling packers, and one OPS official hopefully guessed that "it won't be many days" until the freeze is extended to livestock on the hoof.

But the most effective controls on meat began to come last week from the housewives themselves. They were refusing to pay $1.30 a Ib. for loin of lamb, $1.10 and up for sirloin, as much as 70^ for hamburger. "The way people are buying," grumped Chicago Butcher Louis Blut, "I think they are living on air."

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