Norwich bulletin., 1920-12-17
NEED EFFICIENCY, ABILITY AND PUBLIC SPIRIT
 FETCHED TOGETHER

(Written Specially For The Bulletin.)
 The Hope Farm" man of The Rural New Yorker took his wife and daughter to a New York city restaurant, one day recently. They had "a plain meal with out any extras" Apparently the most expensive items were a small steak and 8 chicken salad. They paid eighty-five cents for about four ounces of beef steak, not of the highest quality, and fifteen cents for a plain boiled potato weighing about five ounces. They also 1 paid twenty cents for piece-oIie sev- enth-of an apple pie. And the charge for one baked Greening apple was twen- ty-five cents. Altogether their bill for l "plain mear' for three persons came l to $40, and the boss humbly notes that l this sum manifestly stamped him and | his family as ''pikers" in the minds of the restaurant people
 Perhaps. The rest of us are not spe- cially interested in that. What we all are or ought to be interested in is. the | little computation he made during that dinner of where the $40 went. Twenty
 five cents of it went to the waiter as a tip" in accordance with the widespread but utterly indefensible habit of paying
 that workman twice-once in the bill
 and once in a tip" That brings the
 
 five cents of this went to pay the pro- | ducer who raised the beefs and the chicken and the salad stuff, etc. This | leaves $320 which went to the restau rant and to the several middlemen be-
 tween the restaurant buyer and the
 original producer.
 II Sixty-five cents for tie actual food il a $40 meal: $3.4S for the handing i
 over, cooked, to a hungry trioi This in an admittedly unpretentiou
 eating-house, in the heart of the grea city which plumes itself on the acunel and shrewdness of its inhabitants in al
 matters per raining to business. There is little doubt that most of tn frequenters of this dining place regar
 .he average farmer with good deal o contempt, either expressed or implied He is an "easy mark" he is slow witted yokel; he is a "rube," he has ad dled brains and hayseed in his hail S etc, etc He works twice the hour
 they do for less than half the wage
 they exact; he invests all his capits and gets one-tenth to one-fiftieth of th profit they extort; he pays them nor han his supplies are worth for what | has to buy of them, and he sells thel his products for less than they al worth Of course, in the view of pro H1 lcSoIOndl anu D worshippers, he is a numb head who d, E serves to be cozened and despoiled. I them he is "our meat" a carc ass jul ' made to be battened on.
 But if you can imagine such thiI las visitor from esome other plan
 dropping down on us to- investigate ol
 ways of doing things, a being whol I ignorant of human history and una
 quainted with human characteristics 2 if you can imagine such one disco ering, after his first meal in the eartf ,a chief business city, that it had co - s3.45 to get sixty-fve cents worth ls food on his plate-can you then ina ~ ~ inc what opinion he would form of tn si city's business acumen and "busine 2 efficiency?"
 :. We haven't yet got through with tn 10 Jersey farmers downtown lunch in N,
 York city. He made still another col
 putation, and found that, at prices tn 2 paid farmers for their truck, he wou
 have had to give four bushels of pot 2 toes, or a barrel of apples-extra go ones at that-or fifty-five quarts of mi or 150 pounds of cabbage for tn plain mear' for three people
 Do you still wonder at crime?
 Off, course, the restaurant keeper " plead mot guilty to everything ] H will say to begin with. that he does1 ' buy his meats and vegetables from t
 v