Independent. 70: 72-3. January 12, 1911.
Objections to the Parcels Post. Allan W. Clark.
There are probably a hundred really national organizations of dealers, and several thousand state and local organizations—generally affiliated with some of these national bodies. These embrace practically every line of retail merchandising and the ramifications of various interests among them. The individual, due paying membership in some of these larger organizations, like the National Association of Retail Grocers, the National Retail Hardware Association and the National Association of Retail Druggists, is from 50,000 to more than 100,000 each. I have never heard of any association of retail dealers that is not on record against the extension of the domestic parcels post in any form, especially the R. F. D. “entering wedge,” except the organized department stores in one or two cities (such as “The Merchants’ Association of New York”), who want this practical government subsidy for the benefit of their mail order departments and for cheaper local and suburban delivery.
I have mentioned only retailers’ organizations, whose resolutions on this subject, during the convention season, crowd the pages of all the trade journals. Nevertheless, practically all the organizations of wholesalers and manufacturers, besides many local commercial and civic associations, are opposed to the parcels post, and like the retailers, have been fighting it for years. Conspicuous among these is the Chicago Chamber of Commerce, the leading members of which, thru the “American League of Associations,” are pushing a national campaign “to assist the retail merchant and to co-operate with other associations in the protection and development of home trade, and (the italic emphasis is theirs), specifically, this organization is now opposing the proposed parcels post legislation.”
These dealers, jobbers, manufacturers and others interested in the maintenance and the improvement of the local stores and the local community, and who oppose any extension of the domestic parcels post, vie with its advocates in denunciation of the extortionate charges of the express companies. But they go further—their associations are fighting in many states to secure state regulation of express rates and classification; and they are making practical progress, with every prospect that their appeals for national regulation will be recognized by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which has just won its fight to regulate sleeping car charges. The opponents of parcels post want lower and equitable rates for the transportation of small packages of merchandise, but they believe that these rates, like those on the transportation of larger packages, should be investigated and regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission, especially as various state railway boards have recently demonstrated the fact that the express companies are chiefly owned by the railroads and are merely vehicles to bring into the coffers of the railroads larger profits than can be secured thru government regulated freight rates.
That any one can find an example for the United States in the parcels post systems over government owned railways in European countries, the largest of which is smaller than Texas, is incomprehensible to the average business man who is not asking for a government subsidy to arbitrarily annihilate distance and the natural local advantages of thousands of local business communities in order to increase the present $200,000,000 mail order business; and this in a nation that maintains a high tariff wall that may or may not “protect” the American manufacturer, farmer and workman, but the chief effect of which, so far as the distributor, the dealer, is concerned is to place him between the upper and nether millstones—the butt of criticism, the subject of Congressional inquiry on the high cost of living!
The mail order houses want a general parcels post; the general business community is opposed to it. Suppose that both are actuated by selfish reasons, one to gain an arbitrary advantage and the other to prevent it—where do the people come in, those besides the mail order men and the million retailers and their families?