Housewives in revolt: Shoddy Goods 053

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Seems like Dads are always grumbling about something - but when Mom’s had enough, you know it’s serious. Hi, I’m Jason Toon. In this Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture, I look at the moment when fed up moms, wives, and grandmas put inflation anger on the political map.

[note from Dave: I flubbed the Shoddy Goods chat link last week, so if you’d like to join with others in Woot memories, here’s the chat thread that’s still going strong.]

It was a jar of olives that broke the camel’s back. A 52-year-old grandmother named Rose West cornered a supermarket manager to ask him why the price of olives had gone up four times in a month. His response, she said later, was “stick to your cooking and let us decide prices.”

So in October, 1966, dozens, then hundreds, then some 100,000 women in Denver began boycotting the five major chains that controlled a total of 150 stores in the area. They were hardly '60s revolutionaries, let alone feminists. They called themselves housewives. Many of them went by their husband’s names: Rose was often called Mrs. Paul West in the media.

But they were no shrinking violets. For a few months, they made national news and rattled the supermarket chains from coast to coast, in an early stirring of the consumer movement that would explode over the next decade.


Come on down! Some Raleigh, NC housewives stage their own showcase showdown

“We don’t like to feel we’re being taken to the cleaners and we’re tired of hearing about some rich, invisible middleman who is causing prices to go up," said Mrs. Jay S. Threlkeld (husband’s name again) of Housewives for Lower Food Prices. "We’re going to shop at independent and neighborhood groceries until we convince the chains we mean business.”

“The gals are waking up”

Organizers took credit for a subsequent grocery price war in Denver, claiming some chains dropped prices by 20%. In the midst of the '60s upheaval, the press found the man-bites-dog aspect of the protests irresistible. Housewives protesting, ha ha! But patronizing coverage is still coverage. Inspired by West’s boycott, picket lines formed around supermarkets from coast to coast.

One particular target of their ire was the various trading-stamps and sweepstakes programs that were so ubiquitous at the time. Rather than spend money on promoting these gimmicks and awarding prizes, the protestors said, why not lower prices for everyone? (The industry later admitted that the costs of these loyalty programs added about 2% to retail prices.)

The protestors found a friend in high places. Esther Peterson had been appointed as a Special Assistant for Consumer Affairs by President Lyndon Johnson. A former union official and Assistant Secretary of Labor, Peterson’s sympathies were firmly on the side of the housewives. She was invited to meet with the Denver group - “Because we think we can trust you,” one leader said - and gave them hugs in front of the press.

“I just think it’s so beautiful that the gals are waking up,” Peterson said. “From now on, industry is going to have to reckon with the consumer’s voice, and I think that’s good.”


You go, gals, Esther’s got your back

The supermarket industry fumed that they were being scapegoated for factors out of their control. It’s true that grocery was, and is, an extremely low-margin business, highly sensitive to upstream cost increases. Supermarket profit margins usually cited in reports at the time range from 1% to 1.25%, or about a penny on every dollar of sales.

But the Federal Trade Commission did find that the steep increases in retail bread and milk prices were two to three times higher than the increases in raw ingredient prices. “Retailers not only passed on the increase but added to it by expanding their own margins, both absolutely and proportionately,” their report concluded.

Or, as Tulsa housewife Mrs. W.B. Gillespey of Citizens for Lower Prices put it, “Somebody between that milk cow and when we buy it is sure raking in the money - and it’s not the farmer.”

If the grand poobahs of grocery did have a case to make for the multifaceted complexity of inflation, they made it in the most condescending way possible.

Calm down, ladies

“The housewife is wrong,” Campbell Soup President W.B. Murphy told Time magazine. “The food store is a handy goat.”

“The housewives are emotional,” harrumphed an unnamed executive in the pages of Life. “The logic of our balance sheet does not interest them.”

The protestors “are not interested in the facts,” said Dan Bell of the Denver Better Business Bureau. “They just want the price of bacon reduced.”

“Maybe they need a recipe instead of a picket line,” another exec sneered.

Somehow this line of argument proved less than persuasive. A survey of protestors found that 76% blamed high prices on profiteering middlemen and 68% blamed supermarkets, while just 18% blamed high wages for industry workers and 5% blamed farmers. (The highest number, 88%, blamed supermarket advertising expenditures, consistent with the heavy anti-“stamps and games” message of the protests.)


“Guess I’ll have to go back to the barbershop quartet”

The Johnson administration started getting nervous, to Esther Peterson’s detriment. She would be sidelined and then eased out in early 1967. “President Johnson’s consumer initiative had been partly intended as a bid for the political sympathies of female, white, middle-class suburban consumers,” Lizabeth Cohen writes in her book A Consumers’ Republic. “But his administration was caught off guard when these women asserted themselves outside the voting booth.”

Assert themselves they did. Groups kept popping up from Buffalo to Baton Rouge, with names like entries in a cleverest acronym contest: YELP (You’re Enlisted to help Lower Prices), MILK (Mothers Interested in Lower Kosts), and several variations of HELP (like Housewives to Enact Lower Prices, Home Economists for Lower Prices, and Housewives Enraged - Lower Prices) .

Even dense, pompous executives started to realize something was happening. It was time to stop smirking at the housewives and do something. While it’s hard to track, anecdotal reports mention price wars breaking out wherever the housewives went on the march. Then, in November, Safeway announced they’d put an end to the highly contentious game promotions. “We don’t think they have raised prices,” said chairman Robert Magowan. “But if the housewife thinks that, we won’t fight her.”


Don’t make me come in there, little mister! These New York moms have had enough

The fighting kind

What brought the housewives’ revolt to an end? Inflation cooled off. After the 5.6% increase in the year leading up to October 1966, the CPI for food dropped 1.7% by April of 1967. By then, the picketing moms had disappeared to the point that an Associated Press story could ask, “Remember the housewives’ rebellion against supermarkets last fall?”

When asked at the time if the protests had anything to do with prices easing, Portland grocery manager Rollin Killoran conceded, “Could be… They brought attention to the competitive factor… They made us more aggressive pricewise.”

The protestors themselves were less sure. A New York Times piece pointed to the prices that had dropped - butter from 86.3 cents a pound to 84.9 cents, eggs from 62.6 cents a dozen to 60.3 cents - but also concluded that the movement had fizzled out into a dispirited cynicism. “As soon as we turn our backs, they’ll go back up,” said Rose West, while another protester said “We aren’t politicians, we’re housewives. Some housewives may be fighters, but it’s hard to get enough of the fighting kind to fight over the same thing at the same time.”

They’re being too hard on themselves. The housewives’ revolt of 1966 was brief and its direct impact limited. But it was an early education for millions of American women that there was power in their shared identity as consumers. (Almost half of protestors, one survey indicates, were between the ages of 26 and 35.)

This consciousness would flare up again in the 1973 meat boycott and keep bearing fruit in the countless gains of the consumer movement in the 1970s. And within a few short years, those smug grey establishment blowhards would learn that shrugging in the face of inflation is a great way to lose customers, credibility, and even the White House. Not bad for a bunch of housewives.

I love reading about unlikely protesters—it often sparks change, or at least forces a response. I read The Power Broker earlier this year and there’s a similar first-crack in Robert Moses’ wall of power when his parking lot plans push the moms at the park playground to block the bulldozers with baby strollers.

Got any memories of past unusual, or unusually successful fights against grocery stores or other companies? Join us in this week’s Shoddy Goods Chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

The prices never go up on these Shoddy Goods stories: