Word: productive
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Gross Product $287 mill. $1.2 bill...
Flops & Switches. Failures came often enough to keep the bootstrap-tuggers from getting smug. Tax exemption means nothing if profits are nothing, and 169 factories (of the 667 that started) have gone under for such reasons as obsoletion of market, lack of distributing facilities, attempting to make a product exclusively for the still relatively small Puerto Rican market. The government, too, had its failures. The Land Authority tried valiantly, even mechanized sugar loading by a system that blows the semirefined product from trucks or railroad cars., into ships, eliminating bags. But it could not meet its allotted task of increasing...
Lilies & Placenta. But the beauty industry is far more interested in finding new products than rescuing old ones, is moving more and more into research. Revlon has more than 70 chemists on its staff, and about half its current sales are from products introduced since 1950, e.g., high-gloss lipstick. Top Brass hair dressing for men and hair sprays. Charlie Revson, who proclaims that "research is a deep religion with me," likes to don a white coat and take a turn at the retorts. On the average, a product takes from a year and a half to two years from...
...those who bought royal jelly had a right to feel stung. Reported the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau newsletter: "There is little evidence to support any significant therapeutic, cosmetic or nutritional value in the product for humans." Says Maison G. DeNavarre, chief chemist of Michigan's Beauty Counselors, Inc.: "Royal Queen jelly is not even for the birds. It is for the bees. It is a fad and does nothing for the skin...
Most of the difference between the cost and the wholesale price goes into packaging and advertising-which often cost more than the product itself. For the top companies, profits are fat; Revlon made a 9.4% profit on its gross after taxes, more than leaders in many another industry. Said a Denver manufacturer, who admits to a 900% markup on certain products: "A cheap line wouldn't do well. Women wouldn't be caught dead telling their friends they bought cheap cosmetics...