The Daily Gate City

Huckstering.

Quite a war is being waged in Richmond between the market hucksters, by which the community at large are saving many pennies. The Times, of a late date, says yesterday morning the war raged so fiercely that when a huckster offered a bunch of fish for fifteen cents, another offered and actually sold him a bunch of fish and a head of cabbage for the same amount. The first huckster then, not to be outdone, made the purchasing party a free gift of a bunch of fish. The Times exclaims success to the opposition and fish for the multitude.

Such a contest in St. Louis just at this time would be a very wholesome thing. But here the hucksters cling together like the Fenian Brotherhood, and the consequence is the most exorbitant prices are asked and paid for everything a family consumes. The grievance has become a very serious one, and we are induced to think that our whole market system is wrong.

We know that many contend that huckstering should not be suppressed: that it is the surest means of keeping our markets supplied and that the argument is urged that competition among the hucksters have a tendency to keep down the prices. "We don't see it."

There is no competition among hucksters in St. Louis. They are a brotherhood that work into each others' hands, and their constant aim is to keep the prices up to the very highest figure that the people will submit to.

Go through any one of our markets and you will find that one price rules at all the stalls of the hucksters. They fix the prices every morning, and if a farmer happens to drop in with a load of produce, they soon relieve him of it, and up goes the articles, whatever they may be, to hucksters' prices. In correcting or preventing these abuses, the market masters generally are about as much account as a fifth wheel to a wagon. They pay but little attention to the evil complained.

We don't know what remedy to suggest, unless it be an entire change in our market system, by abolishing market houses and let the supplying of meats and vegetable be done by shops as any other business is conducted.

The most enterprising would then obtain the business, and at the same time a wholesome competition would be introduced into the system.

We have heard that this plan works admirably where it has been tried, and we can't see but that it would work well in St. Louis. It would certainly be a great saving to the city, for, if we are properly informed, our public markets are not revenue paying institutions.

We clip the above from a St. Louis paper, because the statements and suggestions are generally applicable here. The only competition we have ever witnessed in the matter alluded to in this locality, is the competition in purchasing at low figures from the farmers and selling at high prices to the citizens of the town. And the farmers constantly play into the hands of the huckster, for they find out what prices the hucksters are selling at, and then they go round and demand the same prices of the citizen. While their true policy would be to split the difference between the buying and selling price of the huckster, and divide that difference between the citizen and the farmer.

But the evil complained of, is chronic and universal, and we fear without any adequate remedy, as the world goes.