Sales Can't Improve Until Cotton Prices Rise, Nov. 20, 1921

Why Business Is Not Better

Business is better than it was, of course, but why is it that business is not much better, just as good as everybody had hoped it might be by this time?

This is the season of the year when it generally touches top, from now on until Christmas. Ordinarily, we would expect a veritable boom to be on and nobody complaining, but for some reason or another, as marked as the advance has been, it has not come quite so decisively as was hoped for.

Perhaps one basic reason is that prices are not yet acceptable to the people. It has been demonstrated by repeated instances that if the tags on goods show a price that is popular, the people have found the money with which to move these commodities. There has never been an absence of money when the people saw an article they wanted and believed was worth the money asked for it, whatever such article may have been. They have demonstrated with equal obviousness, however, that if they think the prices are not right, they are not going to become purchasers.

This leads naturally to the conclusion that the sooner everybody marks down goods to the lowest possible level and trims profits just as closely as is consistent with livable business, the sooner will come the revival in trade that is so universally desired. And in this particular territory, what perhaps is more important, is that when the price of cotton gets right, we will find a flood of new money pouring through local channels of trade. That is one thing that continues to have a depressing influence—the farmers who have the raw material out of which we get our new wealth are unable to dispose of it at such a price as will give them a reasonable profit. They are holding in the hope that such a price is around the corner, and so long as they old back their cotton, they hold up everything else. Business can’t flow unobstructively when there is a congestion in the movement of this trade-making and business-getting staple in the South.

From the editorial page of The Charlotte News, Sunday, Nov. 20, 1921. W.C. Dowd, president and general manager; Julian S. Miller, editor; and W.M. Bell, advertising manager.