REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER. IQ 



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enough, a man cannot get enough out of it, so the manufactur- 

 ers cannot sell the dishes. 



Then we have a method like this, — a man uses paper bags, 

 12 weighing a pound. When the dealer sells articles in those 

 bags, each bag weighing i 1-3 ounces, he gives you short weight. 

 For instance, if he uses those bags for tea, he gets about 60 

 cents a pound for his bags. 



I have seen circulars issued by some of the dealers in paper, 

 one dealer in particular in New Jersey, in which attention was 

 called to the fact that the paper and bags were of the very 

 heaviest made. The circular read "It is a sanitary provision to 

 tear ofif a piece of paper, and put it on the scale and then put 

 the meat on it", and this man was advertising particularly 

 heavy paper for that purpose, and sending out circulars all 

 through the trade. We called public attention to this dishonesty 

 and when he found what a furor it was creating, he called his 

 circulars in. We have another method in boxes like those used 

 for ice cream. Here are two boxes one containing a full quart, 

 the other 5 ounces short. There is another little trick in berry 

 boxes. They have a box that looks all right and you might 

 think it was a very good box but a huckster comes along with 

 the box about 3-4 full, and he squeezes in the side and the ber- 

 ries come right up around the top. 



The junk dealer comes along with a scale like this one whicH 

 you see here. You save up all your rags and rubber and iron 

 in the winter and then sell them to him. He hangs the bag on 

 that scale, and the scale is apparently all right, but he keeps 

 his finger on the top of it and when he gets ready to weigh he 

 pushes the face down and cheats you about five pounds. The 

 face slides up and down. 



Another case of personal error happened right here yester- 

 day. Mr. Buckley and T went out to get two bushels of pota- 

 toes. We went into a store and said we would like to have 

 two bushels of good potatoes. The man showed us a bag that 

 apparently had two bushels of potatoes in it. The laws of the 

 State of Maine require that a bushel of potatoes should contain 

 60 pounds. I asked him if there were 120 pounds in the bag, 

 and he assured me that there were. We paid him $2.10 for the 

 potatoes, $1.05 a bushel. We brought them up here and 

 weighed them and they were 13 pounds short, which makes a 



