The Galveston Daily News from Galveston, Texas • Page 35

Supermarket shopper Thursday Morning, July 3, 1980 7-D Consumer affairs official attacks coupons By MARTIN SLOANE Esther Peterson, President Carter's special assistant for consumer affairs, has joined Giant Foods, the Maryland supermarket chain, in a war against manufacturers' cash-off coupons. Here is part of a letter sent to Mrs. Peterson by a reader of this column: DEAR MRS. PETERSON I am writing you concerning an article in the Wilmington Morning News that reported your position on coupons. I am one of those women you see with a "fistful of coupons," but it definitely is not a game with me.

We are a low-middle- income family of five, and I only have a limited amount of money to spend on food. I do not buy things I don't need just because I have coupons for them. We live in a town with two chain supermarkets, but I travel 20 miles away to shop at a warehouse store that carries name brands priced 10 percent to 30 percent lower. This store also accepts coupons, which means another savings of 10 percent to 15 percent. With the high cost of living, the money I save with coupons means a lot to my family.

I was especially upset by your remark that you oppose the use of coupons "because the poor people who should be coupons aren't." It is not my fault that the poor people you refer to either don't know how to take advantage of coupons or aren't motivated to use them. Why should they clip coupons when the money to buy food is given to them in the form of food stamps? Mrs. C.P. from Milford, Del, After receiving a copy of Mrs. C.F.'s letter, I called Esther Peterson's office and spoke with her assistant Susan Antigone.

(Mrs. Peterson was in Europe.) "Esther has had a longstanding view that coupons were a mixed blessing," siad Ms. Antigone. "Esther isn't flat out against coupons. They are fine for people who use them, but not everyone is able to use them for example, people who don't read newspapers." I asked Ms.

Antigone how much coupons add to the average price of a supermarket item. (Coupon critics often assert that food prices could be lowered if coupons were eliminated.) "I don't know that anyone has that answer," she said. "I couldn't even guess." "How much do people who use coupons save?" I asked. She didn't know that one either, but she told me that her office had received a lot of mail from people who say they save money with coupons. "Isn't it reasonable to assume," I asked, "that if manufacturers and food processors stopped offering coupons, they would spend these same advertising dollars elsewhere?" (In other words, they would not lower the prices of their products.) "That is a reasonable assumption," she replied.

"I would imagine that they would spend the money elsewhere." At this point, I had heard enough. I have a message for Esther Peterson, Susan Antigone and everyone else in the Office of the President's Special Assistant for Consumer Affairs: If the administration wants to show that it is doing something for the poor, advocating the elimination of cash-off coupons is not the way to do it. If you really want to do something useful, you should be setting up a program of distributing "food day" newspapers to the poor and teaching them how to use these papers including the coupons to their economic advantage. If you would like to tell Mrs. Peterson what you think about her opposition to cash-off coupons, send your post card or letter to: Esther Peterson, Office of the Special Assistant for Consumer Affairs, The White House, Washington, D.C.

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31,1980. CLIP'N'FILE REFUNDS Cambodian mail faces strict censors PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (UPI) After four years of international isolation under the ultra- revolutionary government of Pol Pot, Cambodia is reviving its postal system. Sort of. Sleet and snow are no problem for the two postmen in this tropical capital. The main postal challenge Is getting past censors in Vietnam.

Letters and telegrams to and from Phnom Penh all go through Vietnam's capital, Hanoi, and it is an open secret that everything is carefully checked by Vietnamese censors. "The mail sacks arrive from Hanoi every Monday and Friday," said Pring So Phea, one of the three pretty, giggly post- 'mistresses staffing Phnom Penh's ramshackle old general post office. "Each sack has hundreds of letters in it." In the four years before the Pol Pot regime fell in January 1979, there were no Cambodian postage stamps and no post offices nor any schools, markets, money or even cities. Most of the mail now is destined for the Soviet, Vietnamese and Cuban embassies in the capital, and the vast majority of letters are addressed to the estimated 200,000 Vietnamese soldiers currently stationed in Cambodia. The post office staff admitted that "very few of the letters are for Cambodian people," and even fewer Cambodians take advantage of the outgoing postal service.

Government warnings to the Cambodian people to avoid all contact with foreigners and foreign countries may explain this phenomenon. So Phea said, however, that several letters each week were received from and dispatched to France, where many Cambodians have reatives. "We accept letters for all countries," she said proudly. Asked about postal rates, the three women conferred and decided that for 1.6 riels (40 cents) a letter could be mailed to the United States. "And I'm sure that if the letter is a positive letter about Cambodia it will get through," one of the women said, reassuringly.

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