Business Comes Out of the Depression

Abstract

T HERE HAS BEEN a slight depression. You would hardly know it from current stock market activity, daily increases in commodity prices, steel production or advertising lineage or the real scarcity that has just developed in the available supply of young men interested in selling jobs. Sales managers of large producers selling to retailers and to industrial users report that the supply of recent college graduates is exhausted, and they have not yet found an effective way of recruiting non-college prospects. Railroads are putting back on the sheets freight and passenger runs that have been suspended for years. Railroad shops are active again. Locomotive works and car builders are operating, some on double shifts. Machine tool plants are busy. The automotive and tire industries have set a fast pace in the consumer goods field, following closely by the textiles, shoe and apparel industries. Rayon production is at an all-time peak. Active markets are everywhere, for the man who knows how to reach them. Retailers are handling a holiday business equal in physical volume to the peak of 1929, and short of it in dollar volume by no more than the difference in price levels. You see few vacant stores, and fewer vacant houses anywhere.