I think a merchant who does not want to buy usually feels uneasy to have
a traveling man about the store. He keeps up all the barriers that he
can, so that he shall not be led farther than he intends to go. If he
becomes very friendly it may be all the harder for him to say “no” by
and by, so he keeps up an uncomfortable stiffness and is glad to see the
salesman go. I have seen this, or thought I saw it, often and often in
my own case. I could not get the dealer to be friendly with me while
I was in his store, but perhaps I met him in the hotel and found him
cordial and sociable.
The retail dealer who had invited me to take a glass of beer with him
had been rather stiff in his own store, but the moment he turned the
key in the lock he seemed to throw away his coldness and became very
talkative. We sat down at a table and our beer was brought.
I doubt if any traveling man ever became a drunkard, because of the
drinking necessary to be done among his customers. A little of it
appears to be really necessary. But this little would lead no one to
excess. The men who drink to excess are those who patronize bars with
other traveling men, and who drink alone. The temptation is great. Every
hotel has its bar; all introductions and intimacies have to be sealed
with a drink, and the man who does not feel bright, or fancies he does
not, has a row of bright bottles beckoning to him to “brace up” with a
glass of their contents.
I do not wonder that the pulpits and all thoughtful people cry out
against the drinking of liquor. Every traveling man's experience,
the tales he could tell of the financial and moral ruin of men from
drinking, and men who are usually the most intelligent and who ought to
be the most influential, are all in the line of the injunction to taste
not the accursed stuff. I say this after years of experience; I felt
it on my first trip, but I was so anxious to ingratiate myself into the
good graces of every man I wanted to sell to that I drank with customers
when asked, and when it seemed wise invited them to indulge with me.
Do you say that the foolishness of this was that I must continue it each
trip and do more each time? No, you are not correct. I had less occasion
for it the next and each succeeding trip. I was able to meet the men on
a different footing after the first trip, and I had but little use for
liquor as an engine to help business.
A man must needs, too, be very cautious in inviting men to indulge. If
it is done in any way so that it appears to be to help make sales it
will do more harm than good. A certain class of traveling men will
invite a merchant to go out and get a drink as if they were offering him
a new paper collar, or to pay for his having his boots blacked. Their
manner seems to say, “I must buy you a drink and then I'm going to stick
you on an order.” They disgust where they expected to please.
Yet, as I have said before, men seem to come close together over a glass
of beer. My friend had positively refused to buy a dollar's worth from
me, and I had put him down as rather a surly fellow, but as we sat there
over our beer he chatted about himself, his business, and his partner,
as if we were old friends.
“I have been seventeen years in trade,” said he, “and we have been
tolerably successful. I began with $1,500, and I suppose I am worth
$35,000, but I work fourteen hours a day, and I have to carry all the
responsibility on my shoulders. My partner waits on customers when he
is in the store, but when he wants to go out driving or to go anywhere
else, he goes. I never let him do anything but he makes a bull. He
contracted for advertising the other day, $300 worth, in a paper that
will never do us three cents' worth of good. We have the meanest kind of
competition here; every wholesale house retails, too, and retails a good
many goods at wholesale prices. They buy in larger quantities than
we do, and of course can buy cheaper, and they look upon their retail
profit as so much clear gain. I am tired of the business, and if I could
sell out I would get into the jobbing trade.”
There it was. The man who wants to sell out is one of the most numerous
men that exist. But it was my business then, and it has always been
my business since, to listen sympathetically to all such tales, and to
promise to have an eye out for any possible purchaser.
“We don't do much in your line,” he continued, “because men don't come
to a stove store to buy revolvers, but if I don't sell out I'm going
to do some wholesaling, and see if I can't eventually work up into
wholesale exclusively.”
This was a much more promising opening for me, and I led his fancy
over a bed of roses to the not distant day when he might put up that
fraudulent sign--“No goods at retail.” And I was reminded of a very
cheap pistol that we had that I would sell him at 52 cents, which he
could job to any country dealer at 75 cents. I don't know if it was the
beer or my eloquence, but I sold him fifty then and there, and added
some other goods to the sale, so that my evening was not wholly wasted.
I saw him not long ago. He is still retailing at the old stand and still
grumbling about his partner, but we have been the best of friends since
our first evening together.
As I ate my breakfast the next morning I overheard two men at my table
talk about trade, and I quietly listened.
“It only takes a little thing to help out a line of goods or to kill
them,” said one. “Nimick & Brittan got out that burglar-proof attachment
on their locks and just kept themselves going by it.”
“Is Brittan on the road now?”
“Guess not. The Big Three, Brittan, Rashgo, and Bond, work some kind
of a syndicate, though, and make a good thing out of it. I met Brittan
twenty years ago or so. He was a hard worker, good-natured, understood
human nature and was a success. He represented several concerns, and
used to make ten or twelve thousand clear a year. Finally he got into
the lock factory.”
“Most traveling men are crazy to get into something.”
“Yes; that's so. We think if we had a shebang of our own we'd just make
things fly; but we miss it oftener than we hit it when we do get the
factory.”
“You're right. The man on the road with a good trade and a good salary
has a pretty good thing of it.”
“Well, some men expect to strike it rich by silver stock. Do you know Al
Bevins?”
“The sleigh-bell man? Yes, I know him well.”
“Has he told you about the silver stock?”
“No.”
“He has been investing in Deming's--”
“Oh, d--n Deming! He's a nuisance with his silver stock.”
“Yes, but he gets the boys in all the same. Henley has bought a lot
in Providence on the strength of his investment, and Deacon Hall, of
Wallingford, will buy out Wallace when his dividends come in. Bevins
says it's better than sleigh-bells, and Al knows how to run a factory.”
“Still, some of the men at the factories are born idiots. You can't
teach them anything. If the managers were compelled to make one trip a
year they'd find out a good deal. Here's my ax trade. I've been cussed
from one end of the trip to the other. My orders for October shipment
were billed about January 1. And it's the same way year after year.
I swear, I often wonder that I get any orders at all! They damn me in
February, and yet they give me new orders in May. But it is sickening to
hear the same story over and over, year after year.”
“What excuse do they offer at home?”
“Oh, it's never two years alike. One year the streams dry up; then the
foreman is discharged; then they booked too many orders.”
“A little thing happened that riled me when I was last home. A customer
ordered a certain spoon, using a special number of his own, on the 18th
of May. I was in the shop late in June, and the shipping clerk asked me
what spoon that was! Here he had held the order six weeks before he took
steps to find out what the man wanted. I gave him a piece of my mind.”
“Talking of spoons, do you ever run across Kendrick, of Mix & Co.? I
traveled with him a few years ago.”
“He sticks close to the factory. There is an instance where the
traveling man took the management of the factory to good purpose. I
don't believe there is a better-managed business anywhere. Kendrick has
become a deacon in the church, with a weather eye out for fast horses.”
“Talking of spoons reminds me of Father Parmelee, of Wallingford. Do you
know him?”
“Who, Sam? Yes, indeed.”
“We were in Detroit together, and the way Parmelee talked William Rogers
was enough to drive a man crazy. He's just chock full of William Rogers,
and I'll bet he'll want Rogers on his plated grave-stone.”
“Parmelee is one of the kindest-hearted men on the road. I never heard
him say a bitter word against any one; I never knew him to bore any one;
I never heard a merchant speak other than kindly of him. He travels for
a big house, but they probably do not know how much of their business
in the West is due to Parmelee's push and tact. He has been a long time
traveling, and I always like to meet him.”
When the two men went away I ruminated over what they had said, and I
laid up several points for my own use. I was especially glad to hear
them praise other traveling men. It's a mighty good sign of any man to
find him generous in his praise of others. I thought this all over as
I started down the street to find Shull & Cox and try to sell them 100
bull-dogs. I caught their sign and marched boldly in, wishing there was
a law on the books that would compel every dealer to give a salesman an
order whether he needed goods or not.
A young clerk was at work near the door, so I asked if the buyer was in.
“That's him over there with that drummer.”
“Is it Mr. Shull or Mr. Cox?”
“That's Shull; Cox won't be here for an hour yet; he don't get up till
the school bell rings.”
I saw the young man was talkative, so I prodded for more information.
“Who is that drummer?”
“I don't know his name; he's selling revolvers from More & Less, of New
York.”
This was fun for me, and I wished I was out of the way, and out of the
town. I concluded that the best thing I could do would be to interview
some one else immediately, and I started off at once.