Clause 1. — (Avoidance of Conditions for Maintaining Resale Prices.)

Part of Orders of the Day — Resale Prices Bill – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 24 March 1964.

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Photo of Mr George Proudfoot Mr George Proudfoot , Cleveland 12:00, 24 March 1964

I hope that my right hon. Friend will resist all the Amendments. When I consider the Amendment of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Hove (Mr. Marlowe), think that he is guilty of at least what might be called economic gerrymandering, because he seems to try to draw a line around those commodities about which we have had most letters.

I want to speak from one point of view and to say that the very people whom hon. Members are trying to protect, the small shopkeepers, will in the end regard those hon. Members as their worst enemies if they try to throw a blanket of protection around them and the shopkeepers one day find that it is stripped away because of the advancing techniques of distribution. That would be the cruellest of all things to do.

I know the grocery trade which has been quoted many times as an example of a trade which has been exposed to competition. Seven years ago I had to stop reading the grocery Trade Press. It depressed me so much that I could not read it any longer. It should have been printed with black borders. Some three years later, I took a casual look at it and found how much it had changed. It was vigorous and bright and full of ideas. It even told retailers what profits they should make; it gave them targets to achieve and it tried to blow a breath of efficiency into the business. There are now 27,450 members of voluntary grocery chains and they are doing extremely good business and, I am sure, will continue to do so. At this point of time the supermarkets have been hurt for three reasons. One is that they cannot get enough managers. The second is that they have paid too expensively for sites and the third is that the voluntary chains are competing hard against them. I believe that this will happen in other trades.

I want first to take the example of the chemist. I speak as one who comes from a very long line of hypochrondiacs. I had a grandmother who used to throw her medicines away but whose son tried every pill on the market. The Amendment of my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Sir H. Linstead) is not the kind of criteria to write into the Bill. Certain commodities are prescribable and others are not. I do not know where that is laid down, but I accept it as good sense. Grocers have sold patent medicines for years. The first widely advertised patent medicine had the slogan, "Worth a guinea a box", and that slogan has now been written into the history of advertising in this country. As a boy I was dosed by my grocer father with Fenning's Fever-cure and California Syrup of Figs. Some of these lines have been sold by grocers for years and years.

Let me take an instance to show why I dislike resale price maintenance so intensely. I once bought what for me was an enormous quantity of tooth brushes. They had a nationally branded name. I had read in the Financial Times that the tooth brush market was saturated and that the manufacturers were trying to get people to buy more than one toothbrush each. Being situated in a holiday resort I bought 10 gross, expecting that everyone would come on holiday forgetting their toothbrush. I bought them at 6d. each. The selling price on the box was 1s. 8d.

I think that that is an immoral profit. It is far too high. However, believing that one should take what the market will bear, I tried to sell them at 1s. 8d. I failed. I advertised them locally at 10d. each and every chemist in my town wrote to the manufacturer, and within days his representative called and asked me to put the price back to Is. 8d. I am pleased to say that I refused to do so and that I showed him the door of the shop and told him to go.

I believe that chemists could have the same sort of success that grocers have had if they form voluntary chains. I take that view for many reasons. The logistics of retail chemists are much simpler than those of grocery in many respects. The commodities are not as big and transport costs within a voluntary group would be less and the size of warehouses could also be less. If they were organised—and if resale price maintenance goes, they will not take long to get organised—chemists would do better business.

I envisage chemists then organising their shops so that the chemist himself could do his professional job—some now do. He could take his dispensing counter to the back of the store and give information and dispense and take out his window back and the traditional type of display of little bottles which now fills his window, have an open store and put a check-out at the door and allow customers to browse for the things which can be bought without prescription—cosmetics and health and beauty aide, and so on. I admit that there might be packaging problems and that some packaging would have to change to deal with the possibility of pilfering.