1% ka Letters \
The Stamps Issue H. Maude-Roxby, Harold Inghatn
Below the Bread Line S.M. The Robbins Debate W. R. van Straubenzee,
Old Man Granite S. Jacobson Sukarno's War Abdul Rollin; Karim Early Verdi Cedric Wallis The Novel Today T. 1. Jeffreys-Jones THE STAMPS ISSUE
SIR,—We in the Distributive Trades Alliance do not see trading stamps as a moral issue. It is entirely a question of whether it works—works, that is, as the trading stamp companies claim. We say it does not work. We have made it our mission to point out our views to the consumer and tell her why we hold them.
In trying to protect the consumer from irrationali- ties we do not see ourselves as a Mrs. Grundy or founding our opposition on esthetic or nostalgic considerations, or indeed on any that could warrant the description narrow, puritanical or meddling.
All we are trying to do is to point out to her that however much she may want free gifts, it is not free gifts she is getting in the stamp trading game, but tied gifts. In taking them she is underwriting an unproductive and costly so-called 'promotional device' that no more makes an inefficient trader efficient than free life insurance for a registered reader made a dull newspaper readable in the 1930s. She is subscribing to a scheme that mitigates against her long-term interests in adding unnecessarily to the costs of distribution—an addition that is likely to revert to her; that confuses her assessment of true values and widens the gap between prices and the costs of manufacture and distribution.
The stamp trading faction are at pains to represent their continued survival as due to the will of the consumer—'British housewives want them; we arc satisfying their wants, otherwise we would not survive.' Few people who have given the matter a moment's thought have ever been able to swallow this version of how the 'marketing mix' came to receive this unsavoury ingredient; even fewer, when thekr fears were confirmed by the Green Shield's representative who at the Horsham supermarket opening the other week let the side down by pub- licly announcing (as reported in the West Sussex County Times), 'Whether the housewife likes it or not, stamp trading has got to come.'
J. H. MAUDE-ROXBY
Director, Distributive Trades Alliance PO Box 271, Brettenham House. Lancaster Place. WC2
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