Word: ftc
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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More impressive still, says FTC, is the way businessmen themselves have stepped in to police retailers. Better Business Bureaus, ad agencies and manufacturers, who know that nothing destroys consumer confidence faster than a fake bargain, have distributed 500,000 copies of FTC's pricing guide-and printed thousands more at their own expense-to retailers along with strong letters urging them to comply...
...Federal Trade Commission last week issued a progress report on its all-out attack on phony price cutting. In the three months since FTC started the campaign with a warning to merchants to stop marking up goods in order to make fake price cuts seem to be bargains, 60 companies have learned their lesson the hard way. Box score: 33 complaints, 21 orders to cease and desist, and six consent agreements. Most of the actions (32) were against furriers, long among the most obvious of the price packers, but the campaign also extended to sellers of sewing machines, perfumes, women...
...established merchants resort to price trickery. The problem is so bad that the Federal Trade Commission last month came out with a nine-point "Guides Against Deceptive Pricing," aimed at getting merchants and manufacturers to cooperate to force more honesty back into price advertising. Unless something is done, FTC Chairman John Gwynne told Manhattan's Radio and Television Executives Society, retailers may wake up to find they have "destroyed the confidence of the buying public in all advertising...
While the evil of fake price-cutting has spread into virtually every merchandise field, the FTC and Better Business Bureaus say that the practice is the worst on sales of refrigerators, stoves, television sets, mattresses and other household goods. Chicago's Better Business Bureau recently checked 23 claims of bargains, found in all cases that the presale prices were fictitious. Most of the bargains sold for less or the same in other stores. A $289.95 advertised list TV set, for example, was "on sale" at $249.95 but could be bought elsewhere...
...this, nobody is aiming at the real bargain, such as the genuine month-end clearance, the special purchase, distress merchandise, the end-of-the-season markdown of broken lots. But what the FTC, the Better Business Bureaus and merchandising groups (such as the National Retail Merchants Association) want to end are the phony price-cuts. The merchants, many of whom have prodded the FTC to get tougher, feel that if they do not voluntarily police their industry, Congress will step in and do it for them-just as the Monroney law outlawed phony price-packing by auto dealers...