Corn flakes and chocolate candy, liquor bottles and laundry detergent: all these products and many more are sold in folding paperboard cartons. Now the Government is saying that for about 14 years the prices of these containers and by extension the total prices of products that come in themwere kept higher than they should have been. Last week a federal grand jury in Chicago indicted 23 corporations and 50 present and former executives of 19 of those companies for conspiring to fix prices in the folding-carton industry.
Such containers amount to a $ 1.4 billion annual business in the U.S., and the...