In the case of dressed beef, one finds a most illuminating example of how it is possible to sell the ordinary items of a family budget to the consumer at rates much lower than those obtaining in the United States. According to the most authentic information dressed beef laid down at Panama costs more, quality for quality, than it costs the ordinary retail butcher in the States. At one time in 1912 the commissary was paying $11.94-1/4 a hundred pounds for whole dressed beeves laid down in New York. This was for the best corn-fed western steers, a grade of beef that is found only in the best retail butcher shops of any American city. Yet, with the expense of ocean-refrigerator carriage added, and with other operating costs equal to those of the retail butcher in the States, the commissary found it possible to sell to the consumer, delivered at his kitchen door, porterhouse steaks from this beef at 20 cents, sirloin steaks and roasts at 19 cents, and round steaks at 13 cents a pound. At this same time the average American housewife was paying from 26 to 30 cents for porterhouse steaks, from 22 to 26 cents for sirloin steaks and roasts, and from 17 to 22 cents for round steaks; and in the butcher shops in the United States where grades of meat comparable to those at Panama were handled the figures were usually around the top quotations. One cannot escape asking the question how it is that if the Panama Railroad commissary could pay approximately 12 cents a pound for dressed beef at New York, deliver it in refrigeration at Cristobal, thence to the housewife by train and wagon, and make a gross profit of some 26 per cent by the operation, that the American retail butcher can reasonably claim that at the price he sells his meat he is making little or no net profit. One finds the same scale of prices on other commodities at Panama as meats. Only the very best goods are handled in the commissary. Any reasonable need of any employee could be supplied by the commissary at prices probably lower than a retail merchant in the United States could buy the same commodities. A few instances of how the commissary fared when its supply ran short will serve to illustrate the grasping disposition of the average Panaman merchant.