Opinion ID: 1543700
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Typical Letter from Petitioners to All Dealers in a Community.

Text: Now, where there is so much smoke, there must be some fire, and we are quite convinced that some of the jobbers in your community are cutting prices in this fashion. Our purpose in writing this bulletin is to point out how supremely foolish this practice is. `TOLEDO' prices are stabilized. For over a year now, our price schedule has been lower that competitive tools have been sold at, or are being priced at now. Our larger tools are strictly on a pre-war basis. Our price schedule provides a reasonable margin of profit. It does not permit of any lowering of this margin, however, by rebates, or price cutting in any other fashion, if you are to have any profit whatever on the sale of our goods. Because the general market has gone crazy, and you are selling certain commodities for about half of what they cost you, does not justify you from the standpoint of good sense, in selling `TOLEDO' tools at any other price than our regular published resale schedule. And to those of you jobbers who do business west of the Mississippi river the above statement applies in the securing of our western resale schedule, which is, in all cases, 5 points higher than the Chicago schedule. You jobbers are a funny lot. Every so often we are beseiged to provide a wider margin of profit, because you say you can't make any money at our regular schedule, and yet you will not keep for yourself the margin of profit we do provide. Now we propose, if it is at all possible, to see that our resale schedules are maintained. The `TOLEDO' factory is running full time and is busy, and, if we have to, we can well get along without Chicago business. We are going to sell our tools to the jobbers who do maintain our prices, who will get a reasonable margin of profit on which to do business. May we not have your co-operation? We want a real show-down in this matter with all the cards on the table. Trusting that we may have a full and complete reply by return mail, we are.