The Sugar War of Coulee City
A local merchant fights back against a Spokane jobber’s price-fixing tactics.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
On account of our price of $9.00 per sack for sugar, we are shut off from buying sugar out of the car carried at Coulee City by a Spokane jobber. They say our prices are too cheap. They have instructed the drayman to deliver us no more sugar. This sudden cutting us off from drawing on sugar here puts us temporarily at a disadvantage. However, we have ordered a car direct from San Francisco, which we trust will arrive in the next two weeks, and we have bought it at a price that we can continue to sell it while it lasts at $9.00 per sack. We do not belong to the association and reserve the right to sell at any price we deem necessary. Most people are willing to pay their home merchant a reasonable handling charge for their services. The wholesale houses pay a drayman for delivering sugar here in town a handling charge of the large sum of five cents per sack, but our fee of 53 cents per sack is too cheap.
“They say our prices are too cheap. They have instructed the drayman to deliver us no more sugar.”
This 1916 dispute over supply chain access and pricing power highlights the perennial tension between small-town independent retailers and large regional wholesalers. Today’s independent grocers face similar pressures from global logistics and corporate pricing structures that often attempt to dictate market terms at the local level.
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