430 MARKETING OF BUTTER 



The Elgin Board also changed its method of determining 

 quotations to issuing them on the basis of actual sales made at 

 weekly meetings of the board. In some markets, however, the 

 committee system of issuing quotations still prevails. 



The chief reason why quotation committees proved unsat- 

 isfactory and which led finally to their discontinuation in Chi- 

 cago and New York was the fact that these committees repre- 

 sented largely only the wholesale receivers. The receiver nat- 

 urally is interested in buying as cheaply as possible and this 

 created a tendency for the establishment of quotations lower 

 than the actual sales value of the butter, with its undesirable 

 results on the market, such as dissatisfaction among retailers 

 who could not understand the great difference between the 

 prices they had to pay and the butter quotations of the commit- 

 tee, it also invited the practice of paying premiums to the ship- 

 per, etc. 



The exceedingly small sales on the floor of the Exchange 

 did not justify the price determinations on the basis of the actual 

 sales of the Exchange, hence the only logical alternative ap- 

 peared to be for the Exchange to turn the responsibility of mak- 

 ing price quotations over to independent market reporters. In 

 the case of the Elgin quotations the discontinuation of the Elgin 

 board would have meant the discontinuation of Elgin quota- 

 tions, because the Elgin market itself is a negligible quantity, 

 so the only means to save the Elgin quotation was to comply 

 with the order of the courts and issue quotations on actual sales 

 by the board, in order not to deprive the large sections of the 

 country doing business on the Elgin basis, of the Elgin market 

 to which they have become accustomed as a trading basis. 



It is obvious that the market reporter, assuming the re- 

 sponsibility of making price quotations, is thus vested with vast 

 powers, the abuse of which for his own interests, or through 

 incompetence, would throw the market into a most chaotic con- 

 dition. In the first place, the market reporter must be a man of 

 ability, experience and judgment. He gets his information by 

 going around among the trade and must be able to distinguish 

 between gossip and facts and between fiction and the truth. 

 Aside from the condition of supply and demand he must cope 

 with the difficulties of the influence on the demand for and sup- 



