Tales of the Road Part 17

"'"Yes, the goods are all right, and since you have pressed the question I wish to tell you that the reason why I don't care to buy any more goods from you is that you have sold goods to other people for less money than you have to me."

"'I could not deny it, and even when I offered to sell him goods at the same price that I had other people he said to me, "No, sir; you can't sell me goods at any price. I don't care to deal with a man who does business that way."

"'This set me to thinking, and I thought about it so hard that I began to see that I was not doing right and, furthermore, that I was not doing what would help me to build up a permanent business. I saw that I was trying to build business by making many merchants think that I was a cut-throat rather than a man in whom they could place confidence. So I believe in marking goods in plain figures and selling to every one for the same price. And, gentlemen, I even changed territories so I could go into a new one and build a business on the square. Whether or not I have prospered, you all know.'

"The old gentleman arose and said: 'Now, what our good friend has just said, strikes me just right, and if I were a salesman I would follow out his ideas; he has convinced me. But what do you other gentlemen think of this? I would like to hear from you.'

"One by one the boys got up, not all of them, but many. Boiled down, the reasons which they gave for not wis.h.i.+ng to mark their goods in plain figures, were these:

"First. That ofttimes one of their customer's patrons might wish to make a special order and if he saw the samples marked in plain figures he would find out just how much profit was being made.

"Second. That often they showed goods in a man's store and people who were standing around would see what the wholesale price was.

"Third. That most merchants like to feel that they are buying goods cheaper than any one else.

"After all of these arguments were made, the old gentleman asked me to reply to them. I did so in these words:

"'Now, as to your first argument about special orders. The man on the road should not try or wish to sell one hat or one pair of shoes or one suit of clothes to some special customer who will take half an hour to make his selection. What he should do is to sell a merchant a good bill--and he can sell a whole bill of goods about as quickly as he can sell one special item. If marking my goods in plain figures would do nothing more than keep away from my sample room these special order fiends which hound every merchant in the country, that alone would lead me to do it.'

"When I said this, several of the boys clapped their hands, and I saw that things were coming my way.

"'Now, as to your second argument regarding showing goods in a merchant's store. If there is anything I detest it is to do this, because when you go to show a man your goods you should have his complete attention. This you cannot get when there are customers present or a lot of loafers around the store cutting into what you are doing. I would rather open up in the office of a burning livery stable than have a whole day in a store. What you want to do, gentlemen,'

said I, 'is this: Not to carry your samples to your customer's store, but to take your customer to your store--your sample room. There you get his complete attention, without which no one can make a successful sale.'

"Still more of the boys applauded me and I continued:

"'Now, gentlemen, as to the last point. Several of you have said that some merchants wish to think that they buy from you cheaper than other merchants in neighboring towns. They do not wish to think anything of the kind. What they do wish to think is that they are buying them _as cheaply_ as their neighbors do.' Still more of the boys applauded what I said, and one fellow who traveled down in Missouri yelled like a c.o.o.n hunter.

"'The basis of love, gentlemen,' I persisted, 'is respect. Some of you have had the good sense to marry. To each of these I say: Before the girl who is now your wife found that she loved you, she discovered that you had her respect and admiration.

"'And there is not a single one of you who has a customer that does not have at least a little confidence in you. Confidence is the basis of business.

"'Now, I want to tell you another thing'--I was getting warm then--'It is impossible to tell a lie so that the man to whom you tell it will believe it is the truth. If a man has a lie in his heart, that lie will be felt and spotted by the men he talks to while he affirms with his lips that he speaks the truth. If a merchant asks you if you are selling him goods as cheaply as you sell them to other people, and you tell him "Yes" and you are really _not_ doing so, he will know that you are telling him a lie, and you will lose his confidence and you will lose his business. The one thing to do then, is to treat everybody alike--to sell them all at the same price.

"Now, it is possible for a man to mark his samples in characters and to do a one-price business, but you can bet your life that the stranger will be leery of you if your goods are marked in characters.

But if you mark your goods in plain figures and you say to a merchant when you begin to show them to him that your goods are marked in plain figures and that you do not vary from the price, he will believe you and will not try to beat you down. Then you will gain his confidence and he will have more confidence in you, the plain-figure man, than he will in the character-price man from whom he might have been buying for years.

"'Judgment is scarcely a factor in business; even many good merchants are not judges of goods. They are all free to confess this. The best merchant is the best judge of men. These merchants, therefore, must and do depend upon the salesmen from whom they buy their goods. Here, again, is where confidence comes in. This whole thing is confidence, I say. Many a merchant pa.s.ses up lines of goods that he thinks are better than those he is handling--pa.s.ses them up because he does not _know_ their superiority and because he does not trust the man who tries to sell them to him.

"'Merchants themselves--many of them--give baits to their customers.

They know this game full well, and they do not care for baits themselves. I remember that I once sold a bill of goods in this way: I had sold this customer regularly for five or six years every season.

This time he told me that he had bought. He said to me: "The other fellow gave me his price one morning and then he came over to see me in the afternoon and dropped on the price and I bought the goods then because I knew I had him at the bottom."

"'Now, do you suppose I went to making cuts to get even with that other fellow? Not a bit of it. I first showed my old customer that he did not know the values of goods. Then I told him: "Now, you may buy my goods if you like; but you will buy them no cheaper than I have been selling them to you for the last five or six years. Do you suppose that I would come around here to-day and make an open confession that I have been robbing you for all of these years? No, sir; I try to see that my goods are marked right in the beginning and then I treat everybody alike." Although he had turned me down, this man bought my goods and countermanded the order of the other fellow.

"'And, boys--you who have been so dishonest so long'--said I, 'don't know how happy it makes a fellow feel to know that what he is doing is right, and you cannot beat the right. It is good enough. When you know in your own heart that you are honorable in your dealings with your merchant friends, you can walk right square up to them and look them straight in the eye and make them feel that you are treating them right. They will then give you their confidence, and confidence begets business. Therefore, gentlemen, I don't care what any of you are going to do. I, myself, shall mark my goods in plain figures and sell them at the same price to everyone, and I only wish that I worked for a firm that would compel all their salesmen to be honest.'

"With this, the old man arose. I saw that I had him won over, but I heard one of the boys who sat near me whisper, 'Now, watch the old man give it to him.' But he did not. Instead, he said to me: 'This is surely a case where, although there were ninety-nine against him, the one is right. I hereby issue an order to every salesman to mark his goods in plain figures and to sell his goods at the marked price. I wish you, furthermore, to do another thing. On every sample on which I told you you might make a cut, _if necessary_, I wish you would make that cut on the start. I have always wished to do business as our one-priced friend has suggested but I have never been strong enough to do so. I had always thought myself honest, believing that business expediency made it necessary to give a few people the inside over others; but I am going to make a frank confession to you--I can say that I have not been honest. "'I feel like a certain clothing manufacturer felt for a long time. I was talking with him at luncheon the other day; he is a man who marks his goods in plain figures. If the salesman, by mistake, sold a ten dollar suit for eleven dollars, the goods when s.h.i.+pped out are billed at ten dollars. He is the one, gentlemen, who put this plain-figure idea into my head. One of his salesmen, as we all sat together at the table, asked him: "Mr. Blank, how many years have you been doing the one-price, plain-figure business?"

"'"A little over four years," said he.

"'"And how old are you?" the salesman asked.

"'"Fifty-five," was the answer.

"'"In other words," said he, "you have been a thief for over half a century."

"'"Yes; you're right," said the clothing manufacturer--and this was the only time I ever heard him agree with anybody in my life!

"'His business philosophy was quaintly summed up in the one word PERVERSE. "Give a man what he wants," he said, "and he doesn't want it." "When you find other people going in one direction, go in the other, and you will go in the right one." He saw nearly every one else in the clothing business marking their goods in characters, and, true to his philosophy--"Perverse"--marked his goods in plain figures, and he is succeeding. Now, gentlemen, I am going to do the same thing.

"'And, another thing--I am not going to mark just part of them in plain figures. Do you know, I called on a wholesale dry goods man the other day--the President of the concern. He told me that he marked a part of their manufactured goods in plain figures and the rest in characters. I said to him, "You confess that you are only partly honest; in being only half honest you are dishonest." So, gentlemen, I am going to mark our goods in plain figures, and I want you to sell them to everybody at the same price; if you do not, I will not s.h.i.+p them.

"'Now, I thought I was through, but one more idea has occurred to me.

By selling our goods at strictly one price I can figure exactly how much money I am making on a given volume of business. Before, this matter of "cuts" made it a varying, uncertain amount; in future there will be certainty as to the amount of profits. And another thing, so sure as I live, if all of you go out and make the same increase that the one who stood out against all of us has made, our business will thrive so that we can afford to sell goods cheaper still. Until to- night I never knew why it was that he took hold of what seemed to me a big business in his predecessor's territory and doubled it the second year. His success was the triumph of common honesty, and we all shall try his plan, for honesty is right, and nothing beats the right.'

"When the vote was taken the second time, every man at the table stood up."

CHAPTER XII.

CANCELED ORDERS.

"Do I like cancellations? Well, I guess not!" said a furnis.h.i.+ng goods friend, straightening up a little and lighting his cigar as a group of us sat around the radiator after supper one night in the Hoffman House. "I'll tell you, boys, I'd rather keep company with a hobo, than with a merchant who will place an order and then cancel it without just cause. I can stand it all right if I call on a man for a quarter of a century and don't sell him a sou, but when I once make a sale, I want it to stick. This selling business isn't such a snap as most of our employers think. It takes a whole lot of hard knocking; the easy push-over days are all over. When a man lands a good order now it makes the blood rush all over his veins; and when an order it cut out it is like getting separated from a wisdom tooth. Of course you can't blame a Kansas merchant for going back on his orders in a gra.s.shopper year; but it is the fellow who has half a notion of canceling when he buys and afterwards really does cancel, that I carry a club for.

"Usually a fellow who does this sort of funny work comes to grief. I know I once had the satisfaction of playing even with a smart buyer who canceled on me.

"I was down in California. I was put onto a fellow named Johnson up in Humboldt County, who wanted some plunder in my line--the boys, you know, are pretty good to each other in tipping a good chance off to one another. I couldn't very well run up to the place--it was a two- day town--so I wrote Johnson to meet me at 'Frisco at my expense. He came down, bought his bill all right, and I paid him his expense.

Luckily, I put a clothing man on and we 'divied' the expense. We treated that fellow white as chalk; we gave him a good time--took him to the show and put before him a good spread.

"Do you know that fellow just simply worked us. He wanted to come to 'Frisco, anyhow, and just thought he'd let me foot the bill. How do I know it? Because he wrote the house canceling the order before he started back home. I figured up how long it would take to get a letter to Chicago and back; and he couldn't have gone home and written the firm so that I could get the notification as soon as I did unless he wrote the cancellation the very night we took him to the theater. I never had a man do me such dirt. I felt like I'd love to give him just one more swell dinner, and use a stomach pump on him.

"But didn't I get beautifully even with Brother Johnson!

"The next season, as a drawing card, I had my packer carry on the side, in his name, a greatly advertised line of shoes. It didn't pay a long commission, but everybody wanted it; and it enabled me to get people into my big towns so that I did not have to beat the brush.

"I had failed to scratch Johnson from my mailing list, so he got a card from my packer--as well as a letter from myself--that if he would meet him in San Francisco his expenses would be paid. He did not know that my packer and myself were really the same man.

"Johnson jumped at the advertised shoe line like a rainbow trout at a 'royal coachman.' It's funny how some merchants get daffy over a little printer's ink, but it does the work and the man who advertises his goods is the boy who gets the fat envelopes. I'd rather go on the road to-day with a line of shoes made out of soft blotting paper, if they had good things said about them in the magazines and if flaming posters went with them than to try to dish out oak-tanned soles with prime calf uppers at half price and with a good line of palaver. It's the lad who sticks type that, when you get right down to it, does the biz.

"The letter which Johnson wrote in reply to the card of my packer went something like this: "'My dear sir: In regard to your favor of the 23d inst., I beg to say that I could use about $2000 worth of your line if you could come up here, providing that I would be the only one that you would sell your line to in my town.

"'Hoping to hear from you soon in regard to this matter, I remain, very truly, -------- Johnson.'

"'P.S. If you can't possibly come up, I'll come down.'