Jasper County Democrat, Volume 15, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 May 1912 — Advertising Talks [ARTICLE]

Advertising Talks

AFTER MANY YEARS ■ r Never Can Tell When Advertising Brings Results. The man is not & grouch; far from it J He is a successful merchant, on Canal street. He pays his bills, and does the right thing In other than financial matters. But he does not know much about advertising. He advertises In nearly all the cheap dodges that are presented to him. With him advertising is an expense, and not, an investment.

If he should, some day when he gets a little more money, ever go back to the soil, it is doubtful if he wouldn't kick on planting any seeds that would not come up the very next day and bring a large profit. When a solicitor for the “Fair Book!?' went to him to talk about the advantages to be derived from bring-! :ng several hundred, thousand dollars ■ to the city during fair week, he looked tiioughtful for a moment and then tsaid he would think it over. Nothing would change that attitude. He wanted to think it over. The missionary for the fair went away andreturned the next day, hoping that the merchant’s thoughts had been steered in the right direction. 'Nothing doing.” said the merchant, when the hopeful solicitor shoved his nose in the doorway. “I have been looking over my books, and I fall to see where the Fair does me any good. My sales are never larger that week than at any other time in the fall.” “Well.” observed the solicitor, “you ; can't expect every man who brings money here during fair week to walk, straight to your store with it and shove it under the door If you chance to be out. You’ve got to wait for some man who waqts something Id your line to get hold of this new money and bring it to yon.” “Nothing doing,” insisted the merchant. Now, the solicitor was prepared to demonstrate—with a fountain pen and' a pad of copy paper—that a certain per cent of all the actual currency_ handled in his city is every year invested in the sort of goods this merchant exposed for sale. Have you ever figured that out? But that merchant would not listen. He would not even give the solicitor a couple of hours in which to make himself understood on the law of averages. If the money that came to town in the pockets of Fair visitors during the Fair didn’t reach him the first day the visitors struck the citv. that settled it

He was wining to admit that the Fair would be likely to bring a heap of money to the city, but he expressed the further conviction that if his fellow merchants got hold of it first that would be the end of it for him. He •new he had bo pass his own cash receipts out to Tom. Dick. Harry and the good Lord enly knows who else, but he seemed to think that his contemporaries kept theirs. Well, while the merchant and the solicitor argued over the matter Uncle Ike came into the store and sat down by the radiator near the desk. Uncle Ike is a favored character there. He sat listening to the war of words for a time, and then hunched closer to the speakers. “Nothing doing.” he beard the merchant saying. "What I wouldn't get during the Fair I wouldn't get at all.” “That's funny, too,” said Uncle Eke. "What’s funny?" demanded the merchant. Uncle Ike grinned at the Fair man. “Ever hear about Aunt Sarah’s new rflk dress?" he asked, pretending to Ignore the merchant, but, all the same, watching him out of the corner of a shrewd eye. “It was funny about the new silk dress.” . “Come on. Uncle Ike," the merchant said. “You’ve got a story secreted •bout your person somewhere. Out with ft."

The merchant wasn’t overly anxious to hear the story Just then, but he was anxious to have the stream of eloquence pouring out of the solicitor shut off. Even the stories of a lazy aU man were preferable to the longwinded arguments of the Fair book “Aunt Sarah would go to the World’s Fair," Uncle Ike began, “and the wont of it was that she had nq one to go with her but me, her longsufferin’ brother. Someway, we always called Sarah ’Aunty.’ I got Into the notion by hearin’ others call her ‘that, and just dropped into the habit, although I am her brother. “So Sarah and me started off to the World’s Fair. Sarah gave me the money mhe had saved up for the trip, and I put it with mine. Altogether, we had somethin’ over SIOO in cash, besides the return tickets, an* felt like we could buy about everythin' there was in Chicago if we wanted to. 1 kept the money in an Inside pocket of my vest, an’ kept the vest buttoned up mighty tffcht, at that. The reason Sarah did not want to cony it was that she had a brand new silk dress, made by Almira Talmadce out es the best silk to be bought at

Slmon’B new store. She was proud as a peacock of that new silk dress. She used to keep lookin’ behind, hpr on the Fair grounds, to see was effect its magnificence was a-creatin’. She thought it was about the swellest thing that ever took a year’s savings up to get. “You know how it was in Chicago World’s Fair year—hot and close and crowded—with a lot of hotels just knocked up out of pine boards and furnished with stuff from the installment stores. We got into one of them hotels down near the Fair grounds. “Sarah’s room was right next to mine, an’ there was a transom over each door.. We had been there ft week, and was most ready for a square meal back on the old humstead when somethin’ happened. About 1 o’clock in the momin’ I heard Sarah a-poundin’ on the inch pine wall between the rooms an’ shoutin’ like she was crossing of the dark river an’ no boat in sight. "I hits the floor mighty quick, thinkin’ of all I had heard about thieves an’ murderers in Chicago, an’ prances into Sarah’s room. I finds Sarah in a panic, a-rockin’ back an’ forth on the side of her wrenchin’ an’ screechin’ bed,, an’ a-lifting up her voice like all go-bang. “ ‘Oh, Ikey,’ she says to me, Tve been robbed. I folded up my new silk dress in a neat package and hung it on the wall t here, an’ now it’s gone. Some man reached right through the transonfi an’ took it. I saw his hand.’ “There ain’t no use tryin’ to console a woman for a new silk dress when it’s been stole from her, so I didn't try. I just stood there and expressed my oifinion of Chicago, from Kensington to High Ridge avenue. “ 'Now. Ikey,’ says she to me, when I stopped on account of havin’ nothin’ more to say that was original, ‘l’m never goin’ back without that new silk dress. I’d be the laughin’ stock of everybody. You’ve got to take enough of ; our money an’ buy me a new silk dress. I’ll save up eggs and butter m6ney until I’ve paid you back.’ "It might be a mistake,” said L /‘You lie quiet for a day or two an' mebbe the party what took the dress will bring it back. In the meantime, I’ll advertise it in the newspapers. ‘So I went back to my room to put on my new suit, an’ the vest wasn't under my pillow where I had put it It was tucked away in a eorner under the'bed. When I looked In the inside pocket there wasn’t any more money there than a robin could carry In his left eye. An’ us with the hotel bill only half paid and the tickets back home gone. I could see the finish for the new silk dress. "T ain’t a-goln’ to tell you what 1 sai<j to Siarah for losin’ of her dress, nor yet what she s«id to me for lostIs’ of our money. She wouldn’t go out of her soom until I got money from home, an’ I was mighty hungry i before I thought of pledgin’ my new I gold watch. But I put the advertise ments in as soon as I could, and offered a reward for the return of the dress.

“So we went back home an’ waited eighteen years for that new silh dress to be brought back. Every let fer Sarah’s got in all that time looked to her like it had a hint about that dress in it, until she got it open. “ ‘Don’t be impatient,’ I used to say to her. ‘Give the advertisement n chance to percolate.’ So she waited, and I waited, and the other day it come.” “What's that?” demanded the mer chant. “You never got that silk dress back again, did you? Where was it all that time? Who stole It?” “It wasn’t stole,” replied Uncle Ike “A man who was leavin’ the hotel reached through the wrong transom an’ got It. It was three weeks before he found out his mistake, and then there was no tracin’ the occupant ot that room. Well, sir, not long ago, he bought some seed onions of a farmer, and the farmer’s wife went to the garret and brought out an old, old newspaper to wrap them up in. On the way home he noticed the paper was dated World’s Fair year, and so he read it, kind of to bring that time back to his mind, I guess. And there he saw the advertisement for Sarah’s new black silk dress. After more than eighteen years that advertisement bsought results! I heard you two talking about advertising, and 1 thought I’d tell you about Aunt Sarah’s new silk dress.” “Is that right?” asked the merchant.

“Sure! The dress came back good as new. Hadn’t never been taken out of the package, so it was wrinkled some, but Sarah’s wearin’ of It today. Mhde over? Why, yes, a little, but it’s a pretty good dress yet Wasn’t that funny? After eighteen years.” “And if you don’t get returns the same day,” laughed the agent, turning to the merchant, “you think you have been defrauded.” “It begins to look to me,” said the merchant “as If you brought Uncle Ike in here to tell that story! Anyway, I*ll take that advertisement If It doesn’t bring results for eighteen years I may be dead, but my son will be right here in business, and he'll get the benefit of it” You never can tell when a properly written advertisement will bring results. A mall order man told a friepd, the other day, that It was the advertising he did last year that was selling goods tor him now.—Alfred B. Toser, la The Michigan Tradesman.