The Red Cloud chief., 1906-11-23
The AAltatlsn Crews.
BLADEN, Nov. 49,.

is, he has hit the catalogue business
just about right. I am feminist the
large cities controlling everything. 1
believe we ought to do a little of this
controlling ourselves. The harvester
trust went 20 work to drive the small
Ter fellows out of the business, and
succeeded so well that they have real
ly cornered the entire harvester trade.
Then we have the nail trust, the hard
ware trust, and trusts of all kinds. /
am not exactly satisfied with this idea
of shipping our cream to the large
central creameries, which looks to me
like an effort to drive our home cream
cries out of business and then they
will pay us whatever they please for
II cream and will control the price
of butter as well as cream.
There is danger in such things, and
for n | do not propose to harbor the
mail order and catalogue house trusts.
1t seems to me our home merchants
occupy the same relation to us as the
small manufactures does to the differ
ent trusts. If the big fellows once
get hold of us we are their meat.
This nonsense about our home mer-
chants making too big a profit is all
wrong. 1t seems to me any man cap
able of reading and of compromising
the way business is done nowadays,
knows that competition in all lines is
so strong that it is pretty nearly i'm
possible for a man to charge nor
than he ought to for any length of
time. Suppose any home merchant
should ask me or anyone else a dollar
profit on an article he ought to sell
for % cents profit, how long would it
be before the other fellow selling the
same thing would see this chance of
cutting under the man who wants
such "a large profit and get the bust
ness?
l remember Of readiug only a short
time ago "a lecture delivered by the
professor of economics in one of our
large eastern colleges, in which he
warned the people to look out for this
mail order and catalogue business, for
it was only another form of the trust
idea. He went ON to say that these
concerns bought only what are called
seconds or slightly damaged goods,
from factories, and in that way got
hold of stuff they could handle. He
said the most of their goods which
be detected by the average person.
He drew the illustration of a customer
buying dried fruits, or groceries of
any kind, and said if it was only a
quarter or a half pound short, the
person buying thought it was SO small
al item as not to be worthy of notice,
but to the catalogue house, handling
thousands of pounds. it made a nice
profit. This he called robbery, and l
guess he is about right.
l once had the pleasure of visiting a
large factory where they made knives,
forks and other things in that line.
The foreman of one of the rooms
showed me a pile of these goods and
said they were damaged. l examined
some of them, but 9 declare until he
showed me where the flaw was l was
unable to detect it. 1t seemed to me
a big waste to throw those damaged
pieces away, and l asked him what
they did with them. He said they had
n contract with a large catalogue
house to- take all damaged goods they
had and showed me how they wrap
r ped and packed so as to keep the
flaws from being seen unless the eX.
l animation was pretty thorough. This
was the first time | had my eyes open,
!. ed on this kind of business.
Two or three years ago everybody
1 vas going crazy over buying from
catalogue. but | notice of late n goo6
a many people are getting their fill of it
y. Is. 5.