Buchanan County bulletin. [volume] (Independence, Iowa) 1869-1891, 1876-05-19
PntFonize Your Homo Merchants.
Burlington Uawkeye

RuiiIHStou L4aNheJct
At this season of the year peddlers
do not flourish, They are usually u
flourishing weed, at all seasons of tho
year; frost, sun, nor rain has very
much power to blight them. They
are busy when local merchants, retail
dealers and jobbcrs have plenty of
time for taking account of stock
Nothing interteres with the opera
tons of the great tribe of "Pedullah,"
not even . dearth Of money, for to
such science have these peripatetc
merchants reduced their business,
that they do not contino themselves,
as in former days was their lnvariable
custom, to an exclusively cash busl-
ness, but sell their goods on very
long time. Our farmer friends are
very well acquainted with this class
of dealers, and our city readers, al
though they live within q stones
throw of the houses from which
many of these ltinerant merchants
purchase their little stocks, are fire.
quently so short-sighted as to deal
with the wandering middle-man, in
stead of the principal. If this policy
is 4 very singular and foolish one tor
the city man to follow, it is much
more lneycusable and to b. wondered
at in tho granger, who, forgetting his
natural antipathy to the middleman,
deals with the secondary middleman,
a middleman between the middleman
and himself when he buys of the
peddler whom he has never seen be-
fore, and probably will never see
again, in preference to dealing with
tho village merchant whose sign was
out before the farmer had finished
fencing in his farm.
The cloth peddler is also abroad in
the State. He has been here for
year or more. He has been selling
cloth all winter, and often the farmer
buys more cloth than he oan use in
three years, Just because the peddler
sells him the lot on his note for one
year. The pcddler sells his cloth, II
yards wide, folded i'll two three quar-
tiers, at, in one instance that has just
come to our knowledge, four dollars
per yard, and he measures 1t off by
the square yard-a method of meas
uring which the farmers merchant
would not think of imposing upon
him-thus making the deluded pur-
chaser pay at the rate Of six dollars
a yard for the whole piece. Then
he takes the farmers note, payable i'll
one year, and has no trouble III nego-
tiating it to good advantage some
where in the neighborhood, and then
disappears from that locality. A
short time ago q farmer who had
made such bargain In cloth, came
into Burlington with the greater part
of his purchase desiring to realize on
it, because he could not use all he had
bought in two years. He was great
ly amazed, and little edited, by dis
covering that he could duplicate his
purchase anywhere in Burlington for
two dollars yard. The same cloth,
responsible men, who advertise in his
home paper, who are known to him
rs old neighbors and honorable men,
would sell him for two dollars yard,
and he had paid three times that
price for the privilege of dealing with
a pcddler who, never expecting to
sell another dollars worth to him,
want to clean him out while he had
chance. And there are other ped
oilers selling laccs and silks in the
same way. They sell in great guam
titles and on long time, and long
time is apt TO catch a man who is
ready to believe that times will be