Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1910-10-30

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 economists, is found in the fact that John Smith has discovered that he cannot compete as an individual. Buy ing one tenderlOin steak at the top price and running the risk of having 1t ruined 'by an incompetent cook at home, buying coal to cook it and the like, is, he has discovered, more ex- pensive than ordering the same steak at place where they were bought by the thousand and prepared without risk of loss.
 1 Likewise when 1t comes to furnish ing home similar condition arises. The individual must purchase retail;
 the hotel or communal home pur- chases wholesale. As a result, de- partment store heads say that the to- tai buying done by hotels for the bene- 1 fit of the individual patroniz- ing them is greater than that done by the individuals who own their own homes. Specific illustrations in this, the largest hotel city in the country, are plentiful enough to satisfy the most careful investigator. At the Hotel Rector, for example, Broad ways newest though not largest ho- | tel, since size has been made second ary to quality, nearly $50O,OO0 has been spent in purchasing the furnish ing attendant to Ithe beginning df communal housekeeping. Yet it is the opinion of expert buyers that had this sum been divided among one thousand newly married couples giv- l ing each $500 for the furnishing of an individual home, not one of them could have secured anywhere near the proportional value buying retail which 1t has been possible for the hotel buying wholesale to get. Of course the communal housekeeping orders must be large to secure this advantage for the individual dwell CT, but how enormous these orders have become, as compared to the old fashioned Individual house-keeper's wants as instanced by the detailed l figures of the furnishings which are going into the Rector. The shopping lis,' contains items calculated to stag- ger the oldfashioned housekeeper and more than sufficient to satisfy the most confirmed shopping fiend. To begin with this building with it's s. 000,000 bricks and it's 30 miles of electrical wiring and ts 5000 electric lights would furnish building material for nearly fifty good-sized homes. Yet lit will be able to care for and feed number of people equal to nearly a thousand average families daily. thus bringing forth in most striking manner the economic reason which Is causing individual homes to disap- pear. The Furnishing housekeeper" to complete his work-all the order ing has been done by one firm-has found 1t necessary to buy the follow ing incidentals, which form strik- ing Illustration of the enormous con- centration of purchasing under the new regime. Approximately 4500 rolls of wall paper will be used which represent total length of over twen- ty-five miles in single width, while five miles of draperies will adorn the windows and doorways. More than 5000 pieces of furniture and 15 miles of single width carpet are included in this list, while china and glassware reach enormous totals as to be be- yond the comprehension of the indi- vidual housekeeper. No less than 4O,- 900 pieces of the former and nearly o0,000 pieces of the latter go to make up this item. to which must be added some 25,000 pieces of silverware. More than anything else these figures ii- lustrate in concrete form chieI cause for the disappearance of the in' dividual hcme-the saving which can be made by buying in carload lots, or by tho thousand dozen in the case ol the hotel, as compared to the com- paratively insignificant order of the individual. To take an extreme H. lustration, the individual who lives in his own home, so far as expense is concerned, is much in the same position as the small farmer whoI grinds his own flour, while the hotei dweller-and this in a smaller sense applies to apartment dwellers since they at least buy space and neat a' wholesale, finds his counterpart ln the person who purchases his Hour from the largest manufacturers m tne country. Likewise in service the sanie argument applies, since a hotel coon can look after the wants of twens' just as cheaply and much more saus factorily than the home cook can Io. those of two. Likewise ton or cue will produce far better results, pro-