Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 September 1894 — The Cash Customer. [ARTICLE]

The Cash Customer.

Go to a grocery or dry goods or notion store anywhere in England to make some purchases and inquire the price. You will receive a polite answer, and then, if you happen to have credit at the particular store and you a-k to have the article you covet charged, you will be politely told that the article, whatever it is, whether a half-pound of sugar or tea, will be tuppence' or thrippence more for “booking.” The first named price is the cash price, since the presumption always obtains that when prices are asked the transaction is to be a cash transaction. And what is true in England is for the most part true on the continent of Europe. If books must he kept, merchants and shop-

keepers entertain a pet theory that the people for whom the books are kept should be made to pay the cost of the same. Merchants of the the city can tell of repeatedly receiving bills from German houses and always finding even the cost of postage on the bill charged in the account. Throughout Europe the eminently equitable plan obtains of encourag. ing a cash business by giving the cash customer an advantage over the one who pays his hills but once in a month or once in six months, or sometimes not at all. Here in free America in retail establishments both cash customers and debt customers are placed on nearly the same footing, only that the cash customer pays a trifle more for his necessities than he ought to in order to make up the losses arising from bad accounts.— Kansas City Grocer.