The term inventory is readily understood when used in commerce
by persons who are engaged in some manner with the supply of the
satisfaction of man’s desire. If your industries figure into the
millions, or if you are a clerk selling calico; if you are spending
an allowance, or are a housekeeper depending on your husband’s or
children’s wages, you take stock. The method and time of taking
stock varies. In vast industrial or commercial enterprises it is
not so frequent as with the man of meager resources. The large
commercial dividend-paying houses ought to take stock before they
declare dividends. If they don’t take inventory of the assets and the
liabilities, they take inventory of the stockholders. The ones who can
be easily frozen out of their stock considered as assets, the ones who
cannot are marked as liabilities, for they have to be taken along in
the combine when reorganization takes place.
The man who sells his labor at one dollar per day need not work
overtime to take stock; he takes stock mentally. “I get six dollars per
week; can’t have champagne for dinner; saloon must be my club; free
lunch and ‘schooner’ is my bill of fare; one dollar for the week’s
lodging, fifty cents to Lizzie or Mary, and by Christmas I will have
enough to get me a second-hand suit of clothes and an overcoat.”
Success in business does not depend so much on the largeness of the
capital as upon the knowledge of how to use this capital to the best
advantage. You find when you take stock what goods sold best, what
paper is the best advertising medium, who is your best clerk, what
departments you are to enlarge, and from what charity donation you
got the most benefit. All must focus to this one point if you wish to
succeed--to increase the assets, decrease the liabilities, get as much
as possible, give as little as you can, and have the people satisfied.
The taking of stock is not only in what we call legitimate business.
Even the criminals have a way of taking stock. The assets are the
plunder, the liabilities are the risks. They have to figure as to the
price of the policeman on the beat, what a pull with the alderman will
cost, and how about straw bail. The robber has his way, the preacher
his way; there is not one that can escape it.
It is not business alone that monopolizes stocktaking. In whatever you
are trying to accomplish you must take inventory. Success does not
depend so much on vastness of resources as on the knowledge of how to
use the capital with which to work to the best advantage.
In European countries even the family is inventoried--daughters are
the liabilities, sons the assets. With an income per annum of so much,
if his children be sons he can live up to the limit; if girls he
cannot; he must be saving for the dowry. It is amusing how some try to
minimize the liabilities and maximize the assets when they are being
inspected.
The young man who calls on a girl with the intention of making an
impression upon her, dresses in his best, takes out his Sunday manners,
and shows himself off all assets and no liabilities. And she has the
parlor and sitting-room furniture dusted, massages and powders her
face, sprinkles rose-water on herself. If her cheek or her chin is
beautiful she takes pains that he may see them, so a beauty spot is
pasted that it may call attention; he cannot fail to notice it. And her
language, how choice, and her voice, how different, when her best young
man is there than when she scolds the cook. I know a lady who changes
her voice automatically whenever a stranger is near. If you see her at
that time you see a bundle of assets and no liabilities.
Stocktaking is not monopolized by man. The taking of stock goes on
everywhere; it is the most important factor in the world; it is
responsible for everything there is.
The forest with its animal life, the sea with its life, the air with
its life, owe their being to the taking of stock in the beginning by
the molecules and atoms which compose them. The world, with its pains
and its pleasures, its happiness and its misery, its arts and its
sciences, its progress and its woes, its smiles and its tears, is the
net balance of the inventory.
Natural selection is the result of the summing up as to whether you
will remain where you are and receive hard knocks, or struggle to
get ahead and change your environment to escape the knocks--and you
have decided to change--which results in evolution. It began with the
mystery of the world. It has been kept up ever since, and will continue
unto its very end. Things that came into being are records; and the
things brought into being by the things are records. The world is a
counting-house, life its book-keeper, and the net balance, man.
The balance is the working capital of the future, and while the present
balance cannot be changed, as that is the net results and is final,
yet man thinks he can and exerts himself to change the balance, and
does change it, but not for himself; the change is for the future. Man
is working for the future by working in the now--for what he thinks
the present will bring to him. Being uncomfortable where he is, he has
to move. His motives in stepping up is the betterment of himself, and
in so doing he unconsciously carves the future. Life is a series of
stocktaking, from the cradle to the grave; the figures are alive; they
are actors, spectators, and critics; some have the privilege of being
players, and some are being played upon.
Stocktaking is Judgment Day; then we get the net balance of the
past, but do not forget that the lessons for the future are the most
important in the day of inventory. If you miscalculate on that day you
shall surely “go broke.”