A wartime OPA toy-price prior-check system collapsed under its own volume

Evidence

The Office of Price Administration once discovered this in dramatic fashion. One of its early regulations fixed ceiling prices for. a great variety of consumer durable goods. For goods of types which were on the market at the time the regulation was issued, a self-applying formula was provided under which each seller could determine his own ceiling prices by reference to the prices which he himself had charged in a designated base period. New models and new types of goods presented a more difficult problem. As to these, the original version of the regulation said in effect: “Don’t make any sales of a new article until you have submitted a sample of it to OPA and OPA has issued an individual order fixing a ceiling price for you.” One of the most minor of the commodities covered by the regulation was toys. Toy manufacturers change many of their models every year, and in that wartime year of substitute materials were changing almost all of them. As an office corridor the length of a city block began to fill up with samples of toys for the approaching Christmas season, and manufacturers clamored for permission to begin selling, OPA rapidly decided that the technique of a prerequisite was unworkable, and devised a self-applying pricing formula. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process, 773

Categorization

• CANDY: Fun concrete anecdote: toy samples filling an office corridor a city block long.
• XREF: Exemplifies the burden-of-government-inaction argument and ties to ch9 hearings-as-politics material. — connects to: Prior-approval systems fail when they cannot be reduced to simple routine — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 772; Some delayed entrants are forced out of business by waiting alone — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 778