A Kingston columnist calls Jamaica’s market women uneconomic

A writer signing as H.P.J. published two columns in the Daily Gleaner in Kingston in June 1955. The first, on the eighth, said that proposals to change the marketing system came from harassed Marketing Department officials who were listening to small farmers whose system was collapsing, while consumers paid high prices that never improved the producer’s lot. The second, on the twenty third, said that few higglers in any category made much money, and that their willingness to work for tiny margins had blocked the growth of greengrocers with telephones and delivery vans. The two charges pull against each other. In one the trader takes too much out of the chain. In the other she takes so little that no better paid trade can establish itself. Jamaica had no formal plan to abolish higglering at the time. The criticism came from middle class townspeople in conversation and in the press, some of whom also complained to visiting researchers about the rudeness of market women.