“The situation as to the retailers of food products in the city can well be illustrated by the situation in Philadelphia. There are at the present time in this city about 490 chain stores, 700 members of the Retail Grocers’ Associations and 4169 independent grocers. In addition there are 258 delicatessen stores, 200 butchers, handling some groceries, and 1923 variety stores. “This makes 1190 chain stores as compared with 6550 independent stores. It is clear that the maximum point to which prices can be boosted by the retailers is that fixed by a subsistence wage on the part of these small independent stores.” Irving Fisher of Yale University, in his opening remarks at the evening meeting, emphasized the growing belief that the real significance of the increased cost of living was to be found in changing the value of money. The most striking address of the evening was an appeal by Frances Perkins, executive secretary of the Committee on Safety of the City of New York, for the living wage. “HIRING A SHEET FROM A MISSUS” In a recent strike Miss Perkins found that many of the girls in factories lived away from home, many coming from rural districts, and that most of them lived by “hiring a sheet from a missus.” That means that two or three of the girls slept in one bed, with a cup of coffee thrown in with the “hiring” in the morning. Many of these girls had coffee and rolls for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with an occasional extravagance, such as a fifteen-cent dinner. Their wages ran from $4 to $5 a week. Other girls, according to Miss Perkins, buy bread and bananas for meals, the bananas being great fillers. Another speaker on this subject was Paul U. Kellogg, editor of THE SURVEY, who talked on the Wage Scale and Immigration. He outlined the proposal of transferring the economic regulation of immigration from the seaboard to the centers of congested industry by applying the minimum wage to unnaturalized citizens after the manner of child labor legislation. It would go far, he argued, toward bringing the common labor market to normal. Margaret F. Byington, associate director of the Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation, pointed out at the session on Waste and Extravagance, that scientific ratios of nourishment, while probably accurate quantitatively, in the number of calories to be supplied to the different age groups, might justly be criticised on the side of cost, as various elements tend to make assimilative power different in different cases. The sedentary worker cannot, for instance, digest the heavy, cheap food of the manual worker, and the infant’s modified milk makes its food not cheaper, as scientific ratios would make it, but dearer than the older child’s. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of The Home: Its Work and Influence, in a paper on Waste of Private Housekeeping, stated that: