Tales of the Road Part 4

"Remember that the traveling man must not overlook the wife of his customer. Generally a man's nearest and truest friend is his wife. The business man feels that she is his best counselor. If you can get the good will of the 'women folks' of your customer's household you may be sure you will be solid with him for keeps.

"But I must not overlook my furnishing goods friend. He had been trained for an opera singer and would have made a success of it had he kept up with that profession. His business, however, prospered so well that he could never go and look the prompter in the face. He had a rich, full, deep voice which, when he sang the Holy City, made the chandeliers fairly hum. There is something in the melodious human voice, anyway, that goes away down deep into the heart. My friend won everybody there with a song. He with his music and I with my speech had done a courtesy to those merchants which they and their wives appreciated. You know you can feel it, somehow, when you are in true accord with those you meet.

"We really did not think anything about the business side that night.

I forgot it altogether until, upon leaving the hall, my friend Ike said to me: 'Tonight we dance, tomorrow we sell clot'ing again.' Both of us did a good business in that town on the strength of the charity ball, and we have held our friends there as solid customers. I say 'solid customers' but actually there is no such thing as a 'solid customer.' The very best friend you have will slip away from you sometime, break out your corral, and you must mount your broncho, chase him down and rope him in again."

A mighty true saying, that! It is a great disappointment to call upon a customer with whom you have been doing business for a long time and find that he has already bought. Ofttimes this happens, however, because when you become intimate with a merchant you fail to continue to impress upon him the merits of your merchandise. However tight a rope the salesman feels that he has upon a merchant, he should never cease to let him know and make him feel that the goods he is selling are strictly right; for if he lets the line slacken a little the merchant may take a run and snap it in two.

One of my hat friends once told me how he went in to see an old customer named Williams, down in Texas, and found that he had bought a bill.

"When I reached home," said he, "I handed my checks to a porter, slipped half a dollar into his hand and told him to rush my trunks right up to the sample room."

This is a thing that a salesman should do on general principles. When he has spent several dollars and many hours to get to a town he should bear in mind that he is there for business, and that he cannot do business well unless he has his goods in a sample room. The man who goes out to work trade with his trunks at the depot does so with only half a heart. If a man persuades himself that there is no business in a town for him he would better pa.s.s it up. When he gets to a town the first thing he should do is to get out samples.

"When I had opened up my line," continued my friend, "I went over to Williams' store. I called at the window as usual and said, 'Well, Williams, I am open and ready for you at any time. When shall we go over?'

"'To tell the truth, d.i.c.kie,' said he, 'I've bought your line for this season. I might just as well come square out with it.'

"'That is all right, Joe,' said I. 'If that is the case, it will save us the trouble of doing the work over again.' In truth, my heart had sunk clear down to my heels, but I never let on. I simply smiled over the situation. The worst thing I could have done would be to get mad and pout about it. Had I done so I should have lost out for good. The salesman who drops a crippled wing weakens himself, so I put on a smiling front. This made Williams become apologetic, for when he saw that I took the situation good-naturedly he felt sorry that he could not give me business and began to make explanations.

"'I tell you,' said he, 'this other man came around and told me that he could sell me a hat for twenty-one dollars a dozen as good as you are selling for twenty-four, and I thought it was to my business interest to buy them. I thought I might as well have that extra twenty-five cents on every hat as your firm.'

"There! He had given me my chance! 'Williams,' said I, 'you bought these other goods on your judgment. Do you not owe it to yourself to know how good your judgment on hats is? You and I have been such good friends--Heaven knows I have not a better one in this country, Joe-- that I never talk business to you and George, your buyer. Now, I'll tell you what is a fair proposition. You and George come over to my sample room this afternoon at 1:30--I leave at four--and I will find out how good your judgment and George's is when it comes to buying hats.' Williams said: 'All right, 1:30 goes.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: "To-night we dance. To-morrow we sell clothes again."]

"I immediately left, having a definite appointment. I went to my sample room and laid out in a line twelve different samples of hats, the prices of which ranged, in jumps of three dollars per dozen, from nine dollars to twenty-seven dollars. In the afternoon I went back to the store and got Williams and George. As we entered the sample room, I said: 'Now, Williams, we are over here--you, George and myself--to see what you know about hats. If there is any line of goods in which you should know values, certainly it is the line you have been handling for six years. You have fingered them over every day and ought to know the prices of them. Here is a line of goods right out of the house from which you have been buying so long. The prices range from nine dollars to twenty-seven dollars a dozen. Will it not be a fair test of your judgment and George's for you to examine these goods very carefully--everything but the brands--for these would indicate the price--and lay out this line so that the cheaper hats will be at one end of the bunch and the best ones at the other? Very well! Now just straighten out this line according to price.'

"'Well, that looks fair to me,' said Williams.

"He and George went to work to straighten out the goods according to price. They put a nine dollar hat where a twelve dollar hat should have been, and vice versa. They put a twenty-four dollar hat where a twenty-four dollar hat belonged, and an eighteen dollar hat right beside it, indicating that the two were of the same quality. The next hat I handed them was one worth sixteen dollars and a half a dozen. It contained considerable chalk that made it feel smooth. After examining the 'sweat,' name and everything they both agreed that this was a twenty-seven dollars a dozen hat. When they did this, I said:

"'Gentlemen, I will torture you no longer. Let me preface a few remarks by saying that neither one of you knows a single, solitary, blooming thing about hats. Here is a hat that you say is worth twenty- four dollars a dozen. Look at the brand. You have it on your own shelves. You have been buying them of this quality for six years at eighteen dollars a dozen. And, what is worse still, here is a hat the price of which you see in plain figures is sixteen dollars and a half, and you say it is worth twenty-seven dollars a dozen.'

"The faces of Williams and George looked as blank as a freshly whitewashed fence. I saw that I had them. Then was the time for me to be bold. A good account was at stake, and at stake right then.

Besides, my reputation was at stake. When a salesman loses a good account the news of it spreads all over his territory, and on account of losing one customer directly he will lose many more indirectly; for merchants will hear of it and on the strength of the information, lose confidence in the line itself. On the other hand, if you can knock your compet.i.tor out of a good account it is often equal to securing half a dozen more. I did not wish to lose out even for one season, so I said: 'Now look here, Williams, you have bought this other line of goods, and perhaps you feel that you have enough for this season and that you will make the best of a bad bargain. You are satisfied in your own mind, and you have told me as plainly as you ever told me anything in your life, that my goods are better than those that you have bought. I am going to tell you one thing now that I would not say in the beginning: that you have bought from a line of samples the goods of which will not equal the samples you have looked at. It is not the samples that you buy but it is the goods that are _delivered_ to you. Those which will be delivered will not be as good as those which you looked at. You know full well that my goods have always come up to samples. You know that they are reliable. Why do you wish to change? If you wish to change for the sake of making an additional twenty-five cents on each hat instead of giving it to my firm, why did you not take the hat which I have been selling you all the time for $18 a dozen and sell it for three dollars, the price you have always been getting for my twenty-four dollars a dozen hats? In that way you would make an additional twenty-five cents. Be logical! If that's not profit enough, why not sell a $15 or a $12 a dozen hat for $3? Be logical! If that's not enough, why not hire a big burly duffer to stand at your front door, knock down every man who comes in so that you can take all the money he has without giving him anything. You could bury him in the cellar. Be logical.'

"''Fraid they'd put me in the "pen",' said Williams.

"'If I were a judge and you were brought before me charged with selling the twenty-one dollars a dozen hat that you have bought to take the place of mine (for which I charge you twenty-four dollars a dozen) I would give you a life sentence. Let me tell you, Williams, a man who is in business, if he expects to remain in the same place a long time, must give good values to his customers. In the course of time they will find out whether the stuff he gives them is good or poor. Go into a large establishment with a good reputation and you will find out that they give to the people who come to buy merchandise from them good values. Now, the goods I have sold you have always given your trade satisfaction. Your business in my department is increasing, so you say, and the reason is because you are giving to your customers good values. Why not continue to pursue this same policy? I am in town to do business and to do business today. I cannot and I will not take a turn down. If you want to continue to buy my goods you must buy them and buy them right now, even if you do have to take them right on top of the other stuff that you have bought. I shall make no compromise. My price is $1,000--more than you ever bought from me before.'

"'George,' said Williams, turning to his buyer, 'I guess d.i.c.kie has us. Give him an order for $1,000 and don't let's go chasing the end of a rainbow in such a hurry any more.'"

CHAPTER IV.

TRICKS OF THE TRADE.

The man who believes that on every traveling man's head should rest a dunce cap will some fine day get badly fooled if he continues to rub up against the drummer. The road is the biggest college in the world.

Its cla.s.srooms are not confined within a few gray stone buildings with red slate roofs; they are the nooks and corners of the earth. Its teachers are not a few half starved silk worms feeding upon green leaves doled out by philanthropic millionaires, but live, active men who plant their own mulberry trees. When a man gets a sheepskin from this school, he doesn't need to go scuffling around for work; he already has a job. Its museum contains, not a few small specimens of ore, but is the mine itself.

Let your son take an ante-graduate course of a few years on the road and he will know to what use to put his book learning when he gets that. I do not decry book lore; the midnight incandescent burned over the cla.s.sic page is a good thing. I am merely saying that lots of good copper wire goes to waste, because too many college "grads" start their education wrong end first. They do not know for what they are working. If I were running a school my way and the object was to teach a boy _method_, I'd hand him a sample grip before I'd give him a volume of Euclid. Last night a few ideas struck me when I thought my day's work was done. I jumped out of bed seven times in twenty minutes and struck seven matches so I could see to jot down the points. The man on the road learns to _"do it now."_ Too many traveling men waste their months of leisure. Like Thomas Moore, in their older days they will wail:

"Thus many, like me, who in youth should have tasted The fountain that flows by philosophy's shrine, Their time with the flowers on its margin have wasted And left their light urns all as empty as mine."

Yet many improve their hours of leisure from business; if they do not, it is their own fault. I met an old acquaintance on the street yesterday. "My season is too short," said he. "I wish I could find something to do between trips." I asked him why he did not write for newspapers or do a dozen other things that I mentioned. "I'm incapable," he replied. "Well, that isn't my fault," said I. "No," he answered, _"it's mine!"_

I know one man on the road who found time to learn the German language. And, by the way, he told me how it once served him a good turn.

"Once," said he, "when I was up in Minnesota, a few years ago, I got a big merchant to come over and look at my goods. That, you know, was half of the battle."

And so it is! When a merchant goes into a drummer's sample room, he is on the field of Liao Yang and, if he doesn't look out, the drummer will prove himself the j.a.p!

"It was my first trip to the town," continued my friend. "The first thing my prospective customer picked up after he came into my room was a sample of a 'Yucatan' hat. You know how it goes--when a merchant comes into your sample room for the first time he picks up the things he knows the price of. If the prices on these are high, he soon leaves you; if they seem right to him he has confidence in the rest of your line and usually buys if the styles suit him. The way to sell goods is either to have lower prices or else make your line show up better than your compet.i.tor's. Even though your prices be the same as his, you can often win out by _displaying_ your goods better than your compet.i.tor does. Many a time he is too lazy to spread his goods and show what he really has; and his customer thinks the line 'on the b.u.m' when, in truth, it is not.

"The merchant, Alex Strauss was his name, couldn't have picked up a luckier thing for me than this Yucatan hat. The year previous, my house had imported them finished, but that year we had had them trimmed in our own shop. The duty was much less on the unfinished body than on the trimmed hat; therefore, the price had dropped considerably.

"'How much do you vant for dis?' said Strauss, picking up the Yucatan.

"Nine dollars a dozen," said I, without explaining why the price was so low. It would have been as foolish for me to do this, you know, as to play poker with my cards on the table face up.

"Strauss turned to his clerk Morris, who was with him. They both examined the hat, and Alex said in German to Morris: _'Den selben Hut haben wir gehabt. Letzes Jahr haben wir sechzehn und ein halb den Dutzen bezahlt. Das ist sehr billig!'_ (The same hat we had. Last year we paid sixteen and a half a dozen. This is very cheap.)

"Then Alex turned to me--he was a noted bluffer--and said in English: 'Hefens alife! Nine tollars! Vy, I pought 'em last year for sefen and a half!'

"I never saw such a bold stand in my life. The expression on his face would have won a jackpot on a bob-tailed flush. But I was in position to call his bluff. _His_ cards were on the table face up.

"I merely repeated his own words in his own tongue: _'Den selben Hut haben wir gehabt. Letzes Jahr haben wir sechzehn und ein halb den Dutzen bezahlt. Das ist sehr billig.'_

"'Hier, dake a seecar on me,' said Alex, offering me a smoke. He bought a good bill from me and has been a good customer ever since.

"Just to let you know what a hard proposition Strauss was, I'll tell you another incident in connection with him:

"'After I had known Alex for two years I went into his store one morning, when I was on my fall trip. He came from behind the counter to meet me, wearing upon his face a smile of triumph. He had never approached me before; I always had to hunt him down.

"I said, 'h.e.l.lo, Alex, how goes it?'

"'Dis is how choes id,' said he, handing me a card. 'Dot's de way id choes mit ev'rypody dis season.'

"On the card which he handed me--and to every traveling man who, came in--were these words: 'Don't waste your time on me; I will not buy any goods until I go to market. Alex.'

"Reading the card quickly, I said to him: 'Thank you, Alex, may I have another one of these cards?'

"He handed me another one, saying, 'Vot you vant mit anudder vun?'