of cartoon comment. But my reaction is-it is only a nickel and why sit down and write Mr. Pepsodent on whoever it is. I am busy.

I think most of the housewives would react that way. A weekend before last I went into a supermarket because we wanted to get some tomato juice. It was a quiet part of the day and the cans were there and in fairness, let me say the quantity, the volume was easily read on the label. I quit trying to figure out which was the best buy in terms of price.

Now, before somebody jumps up and says, "Yes, but quality is the factor," let me say, unless you figure out the price per ounce, you are in pretty tough shape trying to figure out what the quality superiority should bring.

My reaction to the absence of critical comment by mail stems largely from my own experience. Maybe I won't sit down and write but I don't prove by that I am not concerned.

Mrs. BRADY. Our experience makes me take a slightly different view. Now, if you will remember, I think the gentleman from General Mills said he received lots of letters.

Senator HART. Betty Crocker gets 30,000.

Mrs. BRADY. A fantastic number. Of course, she invites them. You do get letters when you invite them.

Senator HART. But she does not even exist, and that is a pretty good mail count.

Mrs. BRADY. Well, you know that you get a response usually from whatever percent you put out. You don't get a big response but you get some.

When we publish an article in Consumer Reports on auto safety, the number of letters we will get goes up on that subject, not only on that, but the whole problem, packaging problem was brought to our attention by the letters that came in unsolicited.

Now, getting on a single subject 50 letters in 1 week, to be sure there are 90 million families, but this is like a fever. Those 50 letters mean there is a high interest. Many of our letters say, "I am not a letterwriter, this is the first letter I have written, but I am so mad I have got to say something."

When you get this kind of reaction, it doesn't mean just that one consumer has a short temper. If you can get 10 such letters, it does not mean that. It is a fever thermometer. People won't sit down and write about everything. For that reason, it is just impossible for me to believe, since we received so many letters about these instant mashed potatoes-as I say I am not accusing General Mills of misrepresentation of it. I am just putting it in a strange phenomenon group.

Maybe they think there is no point in writing to the manufacturer. They will write to you but maybe they think the manufacturer is their

enemy.

Senator HART. Thank you very much. I think I have directed that the record shall contain the appendix that you offered. Additionally, the record will reproduce the front of the package of chocolate almond cookies.

Mrs. BRADY. May I have one of them? It just happened that we got two.

(The exhibit follows:)

Senator HART. We are playing that game again with the man who just arrived. He has the other one. I was tempted to ask if you thought the selection of the color design of the label is responsive to consumers' demands? [Laughter.]

Mrs. BRADY. In terms of the definition of consumer demand as it has been presented by the opponents of this legislation, the answer is "Yes."

Senator HART. Our concluding witness this morning is John Edelman, president of the National Council of Senior Citizens. Is he here?

(No response.)

Senator HART. The statement will be received and printed in the record, and the exhibits will be received at this point. (Appendixes A, B, C, and D follow :)

EXHIBIT A. PACKAGING AS A TECHNIQUE OF DECEIT

(A speech presented before the 43d National Conference on Weights and Meas ures, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1958, by Colston E. Warne, president, Consumers Union, Mount Vernon, N.Y.)

There is no area of buyer information that so drastically illustrates the advantages held by the business buyer over the ultimate consumer than the area in which you gentlemen operate. Take almost any issue of the magazine Purchasing, a trade journal for purchasing agents for business firms, and you will find accounts of a number of standards programs-programs to standardize the sizes and weights of the materials used in preparing the final product that we consumers buy. Of course, business buyers frequently go much further in many of their standardization and specifications programs. But let us stick to just this basic simple problem-standards of size and weight.

There is, as you here well know, no more fundamental requirement in trade than standards of weight and measure equally understandable to buyer and seller. These are even more important in trade than in monetary units. When money standards fail, barter is always possible; but even for intelligent barter, the standards you here are empowered to enforce in our communities are essential. This is why around the story of weights and measures there glows a patina of beneficient history as opposed to the catastrophic glare of military triumphs. Trade is peaceful and fair and understandable; trade transactions benefit all parties. These workaday standards are usually reported, and correctly so, as one of man's first attempts to introduce a rational basis for fair dealing in trade.

They appear to mark not only the beginnings of a more satisfactory commerce, but also the extension of ethics deeper into the affairs of everyday life. These standards are the buyer's first defense against fraud. Behind their establishment there is a long inch-by-inch journey over the years which is an important part of our many attempts to rise into a more controllable environment. Here we deal with an alphabet in social survival. These, your weights and measures, are the hand and finger contacts through which we try to build and preserve a cohesive society. If it seems to you that I am overromantic about so simple a thing as a standard weight, let me say that it seems to me that it is precisely these things we experience day by day in our least pretentious activities that are frequently those very happenings which, a thousand years from now, historians will view as more significant than the slogans and fears that now agitate us. It seems to me that, when I say that business buyers apply and use these measurements increasingly but deny their use to the ultimate buyer, one of the things I am saying is that the general public is being robbed of its heritage. I do not need to tell you how long a heritage it is. You here know about King Dungi's standards of weights and measures for Babylonia back in 2350 B.C.; but I am afraid that perhaps the public does not know. I am afraid that we have all been not too romantic but too prosaic in our approach to the problems today's market poses in this area.

Who, on going into a supermarket, ponders long over the fact that goods are now packaged to confuse and mislead ultimate buyers? This is a return to caveat emptor, to be sure, and we all admit it, but what does such a return mean? What does it mean to a society when the mechanisms whereby its sustenance is provided are fouled with sharp practices?

You here have worked long and hard to introduce basic fairness. You have chalked up some notable achievements. Scales are more reliable today. Knowledge of basic units of weight and measure are more widespread. In the case of some goods like bread, milk, and dairy products, sizes are fairly well standardized. These are indeed victories. But they are, and pardon my bluntness here, old victories. Except in those areas where standard sizes are required by law or prevalent because of trade practices, marketplace developments since World War II have robbed us, the consumers, of the fruits of your hard-won victories. Honest scales stand idle while supermarket pushcarts are filled with prepackaged goods and other goods that are double and triple packed in sizes and weights designed to conceal their comparative value. The brand explosion of these past 15 years has presented the 20th century consumer with a marketplace where rational trading transactions are less available than was true on the market where the medieval peasant traded.

Shortly before coming here I made a single trip to a supermarket where, without any preconceived plan to follow, I simply wandered with open eyes and a pad and pencil for less than an hour. Here are a few of the things I saw. I am not offering them to you as anything startling. Any one of you here could doubtless furnish me with data much more remarkable. I am offering these examples only to illustrate what a layman in your field can see with but a little guidance, a clarification of a point of view, a hint as to the broader meaning that may lie behind the chaos of packages in a supermarket today.

The first shelves I came upon contained cosmetics and drugs. These racks were probably placed for easy access because the profit margin in these items is so high, comparatively, with many food items. There I picked up a package of toothpaste-a toothpaste whose advertising appeal was designed by motivational researchers in advertising. Its sales have been phenomenal, according to trade reports, and all because its advertising relieves you and me of a feeling of guilt. Here in the supermarket I found this toothpaste in four sizes at four prices. The prices were: 83, 69, 53, and 31 cents. The 31-cent size was nearly all gone. It appeared that it was the biggest seller. But which of the sizes was truly cheapest? That, of course, depended on the ratio between cost and quantity-so I looked for the net weight, which as I know is required by law. I could not find it. I turned the gaudy cardboard carton over and over, looked at the squared ends. but no net weight was there. Glancing over my shoulder to see if a manager might be about, or any observer who might misunderstand my actions, I pulled open the top flap where now and then I have found the net weight. But no weight was there. Carefully I toook the tube, the big one (I had started with the 83-cent size), out of the box and there found, after turning it over several times, that it contained 64 ounces. One after another, I opened each of the other three sizes to learn that they contained, respectively, 5, 34, and 14, ounces. I had to resort to my pad and pencil, leaning against a closed counterend, to learn that the small size, the 31-cent size, cost 40 percent more per ounce of net weight than the big size. That is, it cost that if my hasty arithmetic was correct.

At the same shelves, however, was another product-a hair oil-where the larger size represented a savings of less than 1 percent. Here, too, I had to take the bottle, a thick glass deceptively shaped, out of a very generous cardboard box in order to find the net weight.

From there I wandered past instant coffees which caught my eye because there were so many brands and so many sizes. Most brands came, however, in 2- and 6-ounce sizes, with here and there a 4-ounce size. The 6-ounce size was proclaimed on its labels to be the giant economy size. Right among these 6-ounce economy giants, however, was a maverick. One national brand's largest size. which looked the same size as the rest, contained only 5 ounces. Its price seemed such a bargain $1.09 as opposed to the $1.29 price of its competitors. Again, it took a retreat to the counter top with pad and pencil to learn that actually this brand was more costly, its cost per ounce came to 21.8 cents as opposed to its competitors' per ounce price of 21.5 cents. Not a vast difference on an individual purchase, but multiplied by the billions of transactions on the marketplace, a sizable toll. Furthermore, if I were any of the competitors of that

particular brand, I would feel that the pricing and packaging of that instant coffee was as much unfair trade practice as any exaggerated advertising claim. As a matter of fact, this is what has happened to packaging in this day of self-service out of giant supermarkets. Packaging has left its mundane role as protective and convenient wrapping for merchandise to join the primrose path of promotion. Packaging is widely hailed as point-of-sale advertising. In addition to a package designer, packages are now the result of the pooled efforts of a number of disciplines: sales manager, psychiatrist, motivational researcher, color hypnotist, and what have you.

In this burst of the package out of the field of utility into the field of promotion all the trickeries we have so long associated with the promotor have come to roost on our product shelves.

I took a quick look at pimiento filled olives, for example. I could not stand to stay there long enough to make detailed calculations. By the time I had copied down only price and net weight I was too disheartened to do more. Here is what my notes read: a 2-ounce size priced at 15 cents; 3-ounce, 33 cents; 41⁄2ounce, 39 cents; 44-ounce, 33 cents; 6-ounce, 59 cents; 74-ounce, 59 cents; 10ounce, 59 cents; 134-ounce, 49 cents; 1 pound 6 ounces, $1.69. These were only the glass jars I looked at. There were cans galore there, too. It would have made more sense to have checked the whole green olives which come in both packages but I was fed up on olives by this time.

A friend of mine who works with one of the largest grocery chainstores in the country said to me recently: "You and your consumers. Look what is happening. The competition has come out with a 6-ounce package of baloney. Its real price per ounce or per slice is higher than that on our 8-ounce package. But the suckers go for it. So now we are probably going to have to join 'em since we can't lick 'em. It is going to cost us all more."

There is not much sense in my giving further examples of misleading packaging, which I saw in tea, powdered milk, liquid detergents, giant economy size all purpose detergents and so on. The story is the same. You know it better than I do. What I would like to suggest, however, is that perhaps the time is riper than we think for a change.

There has been a growing agitation in Congress over the marketing spread, the cost of getting food to the consumer after the farmer has been paid. That spread has increased enormously since the war, World War II. Food processors and retailers are, themselves, worried over their rising costs. They explain it all to the public as the result of taxes and labor costs and the added value they put into ready-to-cook foods, the so-called maid service. Actually the maid service is seldom an added cost. But the packaging madness is. It adds costs all down the line. The manufacturer who puts out his product in needlessly multiple sizes increases his labor and overhead costs as well as inventory costs of packing materials. The wholesaler and distributor costs are increased by heavier, slower moving inventories. And the retail grocers' costs are pyramided by this meaningless product differentiation. And finally, of course, we consumers are befuddled and robbed of our ability to buy the best possible living our incomes might afford.

This is a great loss to the economy as a whole-this loss of rational buying on the part of consumers. The farmers as well as the consumers lose directly, but so, in the long run, do the very perpetrators of these practices. When promotional competition takes over from price competition, when sellers deal in bad faith with buyers, a kind of commercial corruption spreads like a cancer. quality of goods declines. Honesty is penalized and chicanery rewarded.

The

But, as we have all said so often, we are all consumers. We all eat, wear, drive, and use these goods. The environment in which we buy has deep significance in our whole social outlook. That is why I wax romantic about the loss of our heritage in the uses of your weights and measures on today's market. I am very glad to be here today. I know you have heard and said to yourselves often that public understanding and public support are essential to the best success of your job. The promotion of public understanding of such problems, as the ones you tackle, is a matter of first order of importance to us at Consumers Union. You here know all too well how difficult it has seemed in the past to achieve public awareness. The remarkable growth of Consumers Union these past 15 years, however, should give you some encouragement. Here is a medium dedicated to the problems with which you are working from the point of view of the general public welfare.