Critical Shortages: Groceries
Perhaps the best-known aspect of the Office of Price Administration's restructuring efforts during the Second World War was the use of Ration Stamps, an idea which it imported from Great Britain. The goal was to give America an effective way to reduce hoarding, and to preclude Black Market sales of items that were in short supply (cf. America's more recent panic-created "shortage" of toilet paper).
After starting with the simple black ink tear-out "stamps" illustrated above, Ration Stamps (for food, clothing, gasoline, shoes, and other commodities) evolved in steps into engraved, perforated, color ones, with pictures of warships and guns. The newer stamps were vivid reminders that Americans were risking their lives to win the war. More important, they were harder to counterfeit.
Outer cover and surviving partial interior page of
first Ration Book issued to Agnes Wencer, May 6, 1942
Collection of Ronald A. Wencer
Food rationing shifted to a point system, in which scarcer items required the redemption of more points. This gave the public the ability to choose how it spent its points. A cartoon (created for the government by experienced animators, and led by Warner Brothers legend Chuck Jones) was shown in movie theatres to explain to the public how to use the point system. It is available at a number of locations on The Internet; here's a link to one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLahMe1Gdsk
Note that a retailer's failing to properly enforce rationing, or to do the requisite record-keeping (a red flag that a retailer might be pocketing customers' stamps for Black Market resale), was taken seriously. In the story below, the Big Ben market on Hicksville's West Marie Street was one of several on Long Island penalized for such infractions. That store was forbidden to accept Ration Stamps for one week - a severe penalty in a business where profit margins are small. During that week, regular customers would have to shop elsewhere for their food, and some might not return to Big Ben when that week was done.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 9, 1944
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