Fixed charges are sums you have to pay out regularly, week after week,
or year after year. When you buy materials and supplies, when you lease
property or hire employes, or pay interest on borrowed money all such
things are fixed charges, and it calls for the best there is in a man
to keep these fixed charges down as low as possible. When you buy a
single item, such as a desk or a chair or a waste basket, do not lose a
lot of valuable time trying to save too much on those articles.
When you go to New York once a year, do not stay at a second class
hotel for the several days you are in New York, when by the expenditure
of fifty cents a day more you could stop at a good hotel.
It is false economy to spend five dollars' worth of time to save fifty
cents.
When you are buying single articles that are not fixed charges you have
a little more leeway in the matter of price than when you are buying
things that come under the head of fixed charges.
In the matter of fixed charges the penny you save on the unit assumes
vast proportions in the many multiples.
Some men will deny themselves a respectable desk because they can buy a
cheaper one for ten dollars less, and this same person will lose a
thousand dollars through laxity in buying things that come under the
head of fixed charges.
If you buy one lead pencil never mind whether the price is five or ten
cents, but if you buy great gross lots every few weeks you can afford
to be very circumspect and painstaking in the matter of price.
If you are buying a shirt, fifty cents one way or the other does not
make much difference, but if you are in the furnishing goods business
and buying thousands of shirts at a time, twenty-five cents a dozen
means quite a lot.
The matter of stationery and printing comes under the head of fixed
charges. If you are buying letter paper for your personal use and you
require but three or four hundred sheets in the course of a year, don't
bother very much about the price per quire. The stationery you use in
your business, which you buy in large quantities, you should be careful
of. Plain, respectable, good quality letter paper is the kind used by
successful concerns. The fancy-colored, freakish paper is nearly always
used by the four-flusher in business. He is trying to put on a good
front. He uses hand made paper and hand made envelopes. All the
get-rich-quick people use fancy, high-priced stationery.
The successful house uses a good quality of linen or bond paper, and a
medium grade, regular stock size envelope. Envelopes are thrown away;
letters are saved. That is why an envelope does not require to be as
good quality as the letter. It is the letter and what you put on the
letter that cuts the ice.
Fixed charges usually hide a lot of little leaks. Stop them. Many
little leaks make a big aggregate in the course of a year, and there is
no place where these leaks start as easily as in the matter of fixed
charges.