MARKETING LETTUCE 31 
Prices often fluctuate sharply, slumping rapidly and recovering 
rapidly. The variation of daily wholesale prices of Big Boston 
lettuce from the average price for the period December, 1922, to 
April, 1923, in New York City was twice that of Long Island 
potatoes, for example. 6 | 
It has been commonly believed that jobbing prices in each market 
are influenced inversely by the visible supplies in that market ; that 
is, when receipts are heavy prices fall and as supplies diminish 
prices recover. It is true that at times current receipts exert a 
strong influence upon prices ; but study of the weekly average prices 
to jobbers and total car-lot unloads of lettuce by weeks in several of 
the important markets reveals the fact that the correlation between 
the two over a period of one year is so small as to be almost wholly 
insignificant. Manifestly prices are determined by other influences 
as well as by current car-lot receipts. Doubtless general business 
conditions, weather, production, current loadings, shipments en 
route, business interruptions, and deviations from the normal demand 
caused by holidays, marked differences in the quality and condition 
of offerings, receipts of locally grown lettuce, etc., all exert some 
influence on jobbing prices. 7 Any attempts to forecast price tenden- 
cies can have little success unless all these factors are taken into 
consideration. 
As a rule, in those markets where Big Boston constitutes a sub- 
stantial proportion of the receipts, prices of the two types of head 
lettuce tend to parallel each other, with Iceberg usually outselling 
Big Boston. Evidently factors responsible for price changes in one 
type generally produce similar and proportionate changes in prices 
of the other type, despite the popular belief that each supplies a 
separate and distinct demand. The higher values of Iceberg types 
are doubtless caused partly by the general preference for the crisp, 
compact heads of this type and partly by the better grading of 
western lettuce. 
Jobbing prices in the large markets fluctuate with considerable 
similarity, with due allowance for the effects of temporary local 
gluts and famines that are not experienced simultaneously by all 
cities (fig. 21). For the most part the factors having the strongest 
influence on price seem to be general rather than local, and to affect 
all markets with more or less uniformity. 
Prices paid by consumers in Washington, D. C, and Boston, Mass., 
for Iceberg type lettuce during the 1924 Imperial Valley season 
were apportioned among the agencies of production and distribu- 
tion as shown in Figure 22. It will be noted that the margins are 
approximately the same in both markets. 
The cost of getting the crop to the consumer exceeded materially 
the amount received by the producer. And yet certain essential 
services are performed between the grower's field and the consumer's 
table, and must be paid for. The producer and consumer can not 
perform these services or any appreciable portion of them, and con- 
sequently they fall to the lot of special agencies that have developed 
6 From a study of supply and price of lettuce in New York City, by the Port of New- 
York Authority and the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. 
7 The effects of certain, of these factors in New York City are being studied by the 
Bureau of Agricultural Economics in cooperation with the Port of New York Authority, 
in an effort to determine their relative importance in establishing the price level, so 
that the market may be forecast with reasonable accuracy under known conditions. 
