Word: middlemen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...platform: bring down food prices. From one end of the country to the other, consumers joined a boycott against meat, and both retailers and middlemen began to take a roasting. Some packing houses shut down, 20,000 meat-industry workers were laid off, and beef, pork and lamb sales dropped by as much as 50% in supermarkets...
Besieged by consumers, Congress was stirred to action. In a price-fixing frenzy, the House Banking Committee voted to roll back retail food prices to May 1, 1972, an economically senseless measure that would be vetoed by the President because it would bankrupt farmers and middlemen. At the urging of the House leadership, the committee reconsidered next day and settled for a rollback of prices, rents and interest rates to Jan. 10, the last day of Phase II. The measure may still be too extreme to win a majority in the House, but public pressures are rising on Congressmen...
...culprit, but that, in fact, is a bad rap. Supermarkets operate on profit margins as thin as wrapping paper; .9% on sales is the current average margin. The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. lost $55 million last year largely because of its "WHO" discounting drive. The so-called middlemen are also largely blameless, though President Nixon last year fingered them as the main perpetrators of the food price jump. The meat-packing companies commonly earn about 1% on sales, and both Swift and Armour reported lower profits in booming 1972 than in the previous year...
Normally, there would be ample opportunity for all the people involved in the long food-production and marketing process to reap a reasonable profit. In the normal chain of events for beef, for example, the farmer sells his calf to a feedlot operator, who is one of the middlemen. He in turn fattens the animal and often sells it to a meatpacker for a few cents less per pound than he bought it. The feedlot operator hopes to profit by adding considerable weight to the animal in a relatively short time, but his problem lately has been that feed costs...
...Agriculture Department experts report that it will be even higher this year. In 1972, the average cost of food per household rose $60, to $1,311. Of the increase, the farmer received $42, while the remaining $18 was divided up among retail grocers and butchers, wholesalers, packers and other middlemen. Farmers paid 7% more for the goods that they bought last year, but they also received a walloping 17% more for the products they sold. "There is no mystery whatsoever as to why retail food prices have risen in the past year," says Arthur Okun, another member of TIME...