The Charlotte News

Saturday, July 25, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: ...And the Japanese on July 7 had claimed, by their abacus odometer, that precisely 111,111 Japanese soldiers had been killed in the five years of war in China. What are the statistical probabilities? Why 111 days after the Herblock? Why 2,390? Kuku Caoutchu.

The front page reports that the papa who chained up his children in the backyard was sentenced to three years for the cruelty. He was quoted as saying that he did not want them to steal from stores.

It seems as though he must have had alternative forms of prevention at his disposal. Heck, if that was a problem, just put a little tar and brown sugar on their fingers next time.

The page also contains an editorial following up on the one on Thursday's editorial page, "Penny Profiteers", anent the one-cent charge for paper cups in lieu of glasses, thought by both the consumers and the state health officer to be less than sanitary. The practice appeared especially prevalent around military installations in the state.

The front-page editorial this date provides the other side: that the pharmacists accused of avarice were in fact only responding to a rise in the cost of paper cups. For 2,500 cups, the price had gone up a whopping $3.25.

But hold. That means, at a penny a cup, the price should have gone up $25 per case of cups, not just $3.25. The pharmacists were in fact profiteering by a factor of seven. They should have been charging only a penny for every seven cups. Or, put another way, charge every seventh customer one cent extra.

But then the seventh customer would claim price discrimination and refuse to patronize the establishment again. That might necessitate a Federal lawsuit for price-gouging.

They could have come closer by ordering up farthings from British currency, distributing same to their customers as change, and then asking for an extra farthing for each paper cup, upon accumulating four hundred of which, cashing them in at their friendly international exchange bank, obtaining a crisp dollar bill in return. But that seems like a wee mite of trouble for a mere farthing a cup.

Better to spread the charge evenly or not at all. A penny it would be.

On the other hand, they could have simply lowered the price a penny on drinks served in glasses.

But what about the increased costs of other items?

For that's not the only price hike with which they had to contend, said the pharmacists. Coca-Cola syrup was more expensive because of sugar rationing; ice was up from $1 per 300 lb. block to $1.30, presumably the result of gas rationing. Assuming about four ounces of ice per cup, that alone is a whopping 30-cent rise in the course of a mere 1,200 servings. Figuring four servings per customer and 300 customers per day, you could wind up having a cost rise of $9 in a month, $108 in a year, $1,080 in a decade. Think of what that runs to in an average lifetime of three score and ten. Can you imagine? Where would it end? That alone might break them and put them and the chain stores of which they were a part on ice. Why, it would make the Coster/Musica pyramiding scheme of three and a half years earlier look like chump change. There would be rampant suicide. Wright Patman would have a field day.

So, you see it is a difficult proposition to run a soda fountain in a pharmacy.

And then there are the inevitable demands for increased wages by the soda jerks, to be able to afford the increased cost of ice and syrup and sugar and cups.

Why no, not profiteering, my good sir, but a penny for wisdom, a penny for frugality, a penny for tribute.

Meanwhile, with the Nazis apparently on the verge of taking Rostov, if they had not already done so, the war in Russia might well be lost, and with it the whole of the European war and Britain in the bargain.

But, as the editorial page tells it in "Eastern Peril", the citizens of the United States were taking a what-us-worry non-chalance toward all of that, even if in fact the loss of Rostov did mean the loss of the Caucasus, its oil and lumber, enabling, too, the taking of Iran and Iraq and the other Middle Eastern oil upon which the British relied for sustenance in that theater, the consequent taking of the Mediterranean by the Axis, the winning of the war in North Africa for the necessity of withdrawal by the British to shore up Mother England against invasion, and then invasion itself. (Not to mention also the capability thus afforded the Nazis to exploit the rich resources of uranium available in the Belgian Congo and the great infusion of supply that would provide for the project afoot to develop an atomic bomb in Germany, as Einstein had warned FDR on August 2, 1939 the German scientists were striving to do.)

Russia could go hang; with its vast territory, it would survive.

It was those penny-extra cups for a Coke which had everyone astir these days.

That and rubber. Paul Mallon reminds that FDR had been quoted in the press on February 28, 1941 that rubber was in plentiful supply, most coming from the secure N.E.I. reservoir, that there would be an abundance of synthetic variants of the stuff on hand for civilian and military needs in the event of the U.S. needing to enter the war.

Give us a paper cup without the penny, pal. No one wants TB from sipping it from a glass. Why, one might as well heave up an old fruit jar from the garbage can outside and slap his own on the counter. No sir. Millions for defense, not a penny for tribute! We've been misled enough, can't you see? Damn Roosevelt. Damn him.