EXTERIOR COOLIE QUARTERS.
NEAR VIEW COOLIE QUARTERS.
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INTERIOR COOLIE QUARTERS.
ACCOUNTING.
The Company's success can be attributed to two main factors--rigid attention to the requirements of the population and close scrutiny of the working results of each department. An elaborate yet simple system of accounting is adopted, whereby every month the working results of each department are known and checked. Returns are also made of each day's working. Thus is the management enabled to watch the results accruing from the various articles handled in the different departments. OFTEN COMMODITIES THUS SHOWN NOT TO BE IN GREAT DEMAND HAVE BEEN
ELIMINATED FROM THE COMPANY'S PRICE LIST, AND OTHERS INTRODUCED.
WAR ACTIVITIES.
The Company's connections, which, as already mentioned, are world- wide, have enabled it during the most difficult times, notably during the Great War, to meet all demands made upon it and this despite the fact that countries such as Australia and America placed embargoes upon the export of food. In 1915-17, the Company was able to supply the Philippine Islands with many thousands of tons of meats, chilled and frozen in their cold stores, at a time when the Australian Government had prohibited the exportation of beef to foreign countries, and there were no refrigerator steamers to carry supplies from the United States. While it can be safely asserted that it was principally owing to the existence of the Company that the Colony of Hong Kong did not in any degree suffer lack of food supplies at a time when in almost every other part of the world the shortage of food was being acutely felt, no charge of profiteering," of which so much has been heard since 1914, can be laid to the account of the Company. This will be manifest from a study of the following table, showing the rise in the cost of necessaries in connection with the dairy department since early in 1902, when the milk was fixed at the present selling price :-
Bran Beans
166%
100%
Supervision Clerical
101%
150%
Broken Rice
150%
Cow Boys
68%
Rice Meal..
500%
Dairymen
70%
Straw
+
80%
Milk Distributors
64%
Grass
30%
Labourers
43%
Oat Meal
150%
Cattle
140%
Linseed
140%
Light
100%
Linseed Cake
100%
Fuel
262%
Salt
50%
Sundries ..
50 to 400%
Disinfectants
+
100%
Dairy Utensils
200%
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