Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 171, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 July 1911 — THE MAIL ORDER BUSINESS. [ARTICLE]

THE MAIL ORDER BUSINESS.

The System That Bakes ft Prosper is The System It Will Take To Kill IL I There have been many foolish contentions and many absurd arguments made, pro and con, 6h the mail order question. A great deal of abuse has been pritted of the mail order Concerns by local papers and most of it, in our judgment, is little short of good advertising, and ineffective argument against the mail order concern. The reason that country people buy goods of mail order houses, or of the dealers of home larger nearby town is because they are influenced or made to believe that there exists some advantage to them in trading elsewhere than with the home dealer. And this perhaps is not stating the fact sufficiently strong. There are those doubtless who fee) that they are able to save a great deal on tbe purchase of their goods elsewhere than of the home dealer.

One very marked oversight on the part of local business men and of the general public as well is the insignificance or unimportance of things that often produce a lasting and almost ineffaceable impression. Little things very often cause us to reach decisive conclusions that, may be entirely incorrect and easily disapproved, yet remain forever a settled conclusion unless emphatically disproved. A 19 cent oast monkey wrench may have the same, finish and appearance as a genuine forged steel wrench, worth three or four times as much. A ten cent cast claw hammer, polished and plated may have an equal appearance with a 75 cent forged steel hammer. A shrewd salesman always seeks to impress his prospective patrons with the advantages to be enjoyed by trading with him, and the mail order man may very properly be classed as a shrewd salesman. He has no objection to the general public getting under a wrong Impression, provided the error is in his favor. But what does the local merchant do to disprove the error? Nothing, absolutely nothing as a rule. He just sulks! That’s ail. The catalogue man tells the consumer over and over from start to finish of his big book that he can and does buy and sell cheaper than any other dealer. He prints plausible arghments why it is so—his big purchases, his ownership of factories and his millions of dollars of sales annually, etc..

etc., are all cited. But did you ever know of one of them to tell how much the rents, taxes and insurance cost on the big city block? How much the salaries of the thousands of employees amounted to annually? How much the million or so of big catalogues they put out every year come to? How much the hundreds of men at the heads of departments which they employ at |IOO to <SOO per month salary come to? How much the army of truck wagons they employ to cart the goods from cars to warehouses and warehouses to cars come to? No, they do not boast of any of these things, but we know that all these things in a big city cost great sums—enough to make the goods thus handled and sold in a retail way, shipping direct to consumer, cost fully as much or more than goods of similar quality do, wh?n sold from the retailer’s stock, direct to the consumer, without any packing, billing, booking and shipping expense like the mail order house has to stand

But the mail order man spends great sums annually advertising and educating the public to believe in tun.. The country retailer in the small town holds his advertising expenditures down to a dollar or two a week, and most of them not even that much, and many of them nothing. The result is the mail order man sweeps the country over with his deceptive argument and gathers in the trade. A skilled writer can produce sound logical argument and proof that knocks the whey out of every claim the mall order man makes in behalf of his system of doing business as against the system of tbe country retail merchant But the retailer will not sand for the service and the mail erder man finds him easy prey, and a I but wipes him off the face of the earth.