The "bucket shop," like the lottery and the faro bank, finds its
profits in its customers' losses. If its patrons "buy" wheat and wheat
goes up, the "bucket shop" loses.
Many a bucket shop commission merchant would hardly know wheat from
oats, and none of their grain and produce "exchanges" ever had a
sample bag on its counters. Their transactions are wagers and their
existence is an incitement to gambling under the guise of commercial
transactions. The pernicious influences of the gaming house are,
in the bucket shop, surrounded by the allurement of a cloak of
respectability and the assumption of business methods.
The legitimate exchange is a huge time and labor saving machine. Its
benefits are universal. While its privileges are valuable they have
been rendered so only by hard work, and its members are entitled to
the protection of the state against thieves. The "bucket shop" is
a thief. The quotations upon which the "bucket shop" trades are the
product of the labor and intelligence and information of the exchange.
The exchange gathers its news at great cost from all over the globe
and disseminates it for public advantage. But its quotations should
be its own property. They are the direct product of its energy, its
foresight and its business sagacity.
The "bucket shop," at no parallel cost, usurps the functions of the
exchange and endeavors to secure for itself the returns for a labor
performed by others. Were it to use honorable methods with its patrons
it would be a dishonorable institution. Using the methods it does, the
"bucket shop" is twice dishonored.
As a matter of fact, all other forms of gambling or swindling are
commonplace and comparatively innocent when compared to the "bucket
shop" which has caused more moral wrecks, more dismantled fortunes and
made more of the innocent suffer than any other agency of diabolism.
Just why so brazen an iniquity in the guise of speculation should be
allowed to exist it is difficult to explain.