Jasper County Democrat, Volume 14, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 August 1911 — WANT REAL PARCELS POST. [ARTICLE]

WANT REAL PARCELS POST.

Entirely Too Much Energy Wasted on Roads From Town to Country. As to some products of the farm, there is a difference of 40 to 50 per cent between the price that the grower receives and the price that the consumer pays. There are even cases in which this price difference amounts to 300 per cent. Part of the loss is due to a bad system of retail distribution, as when a dozen city milk wagons travel over the same route, each delivering one bottle here and another bottle there, when one wagon might as well make all the deliveries along the route. This same waste appears even more markedly between the farm and the town. How many fully loaded wagons do you pass in driving to town? From a dozen farms a dozen packages, of butter, poultry or vegetables may go to town the same morning, each in a different vehicle. Every day a dozen parcels of merchandise are hauled out of town along the same road in a dozen different conveyances, and the time and labor Of eleven men and eleven horses go for nothing. The rural free delivery mail wagon now comes to your house with a load that you could put in one or two bushel baskets, and it goes back to town with an even smaller load. Under present conditions it looks’ as if the postoffice department was not giving the farmer his money’s worth.—Country Gentleman.