The shocking Omaha Bee headline on February 28, 1915:
BAKERS TAKE LAW
INTO OWN
HANDS!
The price of flour inflated. Loaves of bread shrank.
Mirroring today’s battles overs government regulation,
consumer protection, and balancing price with serving size, the great Omaha
bread wars made front page of The Omaha Bee in 1915.
 |
| Omaha Bee, February 28, 1915 |
At the time the size of a loaf of bread was regulated by
city ordinance to assure people were getting what they paid for. According to
an article in The Bee “The
present bread ordinance was passed
nearly twenty years ago (that would be
around 1895) and provides
that a loaf of bread shall weigh sixteen
ounces and
that a double loaf shall weigh
thirty-two ounces, no mention being made
as to
price.”
The
professional bakers in town didn’t like being told what size bread they could
sell and proposed the city council get rid of the law.
The bakers, however, were not making any allies by ignoring
the ordinance and selling lighter loaves. It
seems as the price of flour went up, the bakers wanted to keep the price of a
loaf steady at five cents for sixteen ounces of bread.
Customers,
according to The Bee, complained to city hall.
“In response to complaints made by
citizens at the office of the city
sealer of
weights and measures, that official has
started to get busy.”
John
Grant Pegg, Omaha’s “sealer of weights and measures, the stalwart protector of
the consumer, led the investigation. Some loaves baked by the Jay Burns Baking
Company under the "Holsum" brand were up to three ounces short of the promised weight. Charges were
filed against both bakers and the grocers. (Pegg explained to the newspaper
charges against the grocers were necessary so “he can get evidence against the
man who baked the bread.”)
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| 1913 Holsum Bread Ad |
The
city prosecutor, much to Pegg’s distress, was not a zealous and dawdled on
advancing the bread fraud cases to district court. The indignant weights and
measures man told the reporter from The Bee “he does not feel warranted
in
making other arrests on the existing
bread ordinance as long as these
cases
are pending.”
The
paper discovered apparent collusion among the bakers.
“A
south side grocer said he was given to understand that within the last two
weeks the master bakers met and decided to reduce the weight of loaves two
ounces on the sixteen ounce loaves rather than raise the price from 5 to 6
cents,” noted the article in the Bee. The common term today would be “price
fixing.”
Omaha
no longer regulates bread.
