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 some one else immediately, and I started off at once.
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