"It's a crime, that's so-what," Flowers blurted indignantly. "And that's
where Freer Enterprises comes in. Very shortly, we're going to enter the
market with an electric razor retailing for exactly one dollar. No name
brand, no advertising, no nothing except a razor just as good as though
selling for from twenty-five to fifty dollars."
Tracy scoffed his disbelief. "That's where you're wrong. No electric
razor manufacturer would sell to you. They'd be cutting their own
throats."
The Freer Enterprises official shook his head, in scorn. "That's where
_you're_ wrong. The same electric appliance manufacturer who produced
that razor there will make a similar one, slightly different in
appearance, for the same price for us. They don't care what happens to
their product once they make their profit from it. Business is business.
We'll be at least as good a customer as any of the others have ever
been. Eventually, better, since we'll be getting electric razors into
the hands of people who never felt they could afford one before."
He shook a finger at Tracy. "Manufacturers have been doing this for a
long time. I imagine it was the old mail-order houses that started it.
They'd get in touch with a manufacturer of, say, typewriters, or
outboard motors, or whatever, and order tens of thousands of these, not
an iota different from the manufacturer's standard product except for
the nameplate. They'd then sell these for as little as half the ordinary
retail price."
[Illustration]
Tracy seemed to think it over for a long moment. Eventually he said,
"Even then you're not going to break any records making money. Your
distribution costs might be pared to the bone, but you still have some.
There'll be darn little profit left on each razor you sell."
Flowers was triumphant again. "We're not going to stop at razors, once
under way. How about automobiles? Have you any idea of the disparity
between the cost of production of a car and what they retail for?"
"Well, no."
"Here's an example. As far back as about 1930 a barge company
transporting some brand-new cars across Lake Erie from Detroit had an
accident and lost a couple of hundred. The auto manufacturers sued,
trying to get the retail price of each car. Instead, the court awarded
them the cost of manufacture. You know what it came to, labor,
materials, depreciation on machinery--everything? Seventy-five dollars
per car. And that was around 1930. Since then, automation has swept the
industry and manufacturing costs per unit have dropped drastically."
The Freer Enterprises executive was now in full voice. "But even that's
not the ultimate. After all, cars were selling for as cheaply as $425
then. Let's take some items such as aspirin. You can, of course, buy
small neatly packaged tins of twelve for twenty-five cents but
supposedly more intelligent buyers will buy bottles for forty or fifty
cents. If the druggist puts out a special for fifteen cents a bottle it
will largely be refused since the advertising conditioned customer
doesn't want an inferior product. Actually, of course, aspirin is
aspirin and you can buy it, in one hundred pound lots in polyethylene
film bags, at about fourteen cents a pound, or in carload lots under the
chemical name of acetylsalicylic acid, for eleven cents a pound. And any
big chemical corporation will sell you U.S.P. grade Milk of Magnesia at
about six dollars a ton. Its chemical name, of course, is magnesium
hydroxide, or Mg(OH){2}, and you'd have one thousand quarts in that ton.
Buying it beautifully packaged and fully advertised, you'd pay up to a
dollar twenty-five a pint in the druggist section of a modern
ultra-market."
* * *
Tracy had heard enough. He said crisply, "All right, Mr. Flowers, of
Freer Enterprises, now let me ask you something: Do you consider this
country prosperous?"
Flowers blinked. Of a sudden, the man across from him seemed to have
changed character, added considerable dynamic to his make-up. He
flustered, "Yes, I suppose so. But it could be considerably more
prosperous if--"
Tracy was sneering. "If consumer prices were brought down drastically,
eh? Mr. Flowers, you're incredibly naïve when it comes to modern
economics. Do you realize that one of the most significant developments,
economically speaking, took place in the 1950s; something perhaps more
significant than the development of atomic power?"
Flowers blinked again, mesmerized by the other's new domineering
personality. "I ... I don't know what you're talking about."
"The majority of employees in the United States turned from blue collars
to white."