[Nancy, August 30, 1950. Click for a larger view.]
Sluggo is correct. “Scare buying,” a rush to accumulate in the summer of 1950, was prompted by the Korean War. Articles in the July 21 New York Times reported food hoarding, sharp rises in department-store sales, and high demand on wholesalers for appliances, housewares, and televisions. In a July 26 Times article, an executive of the American Safety Razor Corporation assured the public that there was no need for scare buying of razors, razor blades, or shaving brushes. By the time this installment of Nancy appeared, scare buying had apparently subsided. Click on the August 18 Times article for more.
And notice that in 1950 supermarket was two words.
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Wednesday, August 30, 2017
Scare buying and Nancy
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comments: 2
Never heard of the 1950 scare-buying before. But it reminds me of the lines at gas stations in the 1970s during the oil crises. If there wasn't a shortage of gasoline at the pump, "scare buying" of gasoline would have created the shortage!
They had rules like odd-days and even-days, based on your license plate number. And you had to have less than half a tank of gas or less to get on line.
I rode with a guy years later who still had a knob on the dashboard, a rheostat he had wired in to the fuel gauge so he could make his fuel level look low!
You gotta admire that kind of genius.
I remember the odd-even system, the lines (which might run down the a street or highway), and the homemade signs: NO GAS.
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