126 COMMERCE AND EXCHANGE 



the retailer. Again, it sharpens the competition of dealers in the 

 same line. The use of packages and trade-marks has, in a few years, 

 vastly increased the list of goods which can be recognized by cus- 

 tomers as identical in different establishments. The significance of 

 this lies in the use of leaders and other forms of price competition. 

 A leader, in retail trade, is a line of goods put on sale at a very low 

 price to attract the attention of the public and impress upon it the 

 idea that the establishment in question has very low prices in general. 

 There is no direct profit in leaders to the trade, since they must be 

 sold at or near cost. Now those articles serve best as leaders which 

 can be identified by customers as absolutely the same in different 

 establishments, because this identity gives force to the price differ- 

 ence. If there were not identity the customer and the higher-priced 

 dealer could easily claim that the difference in quality accounted for 

 the difference in price. Consequently the widely advertised goods 

 which carry trade-marks everywhere known and which are bought by 

 most dealers, all of them serve more or less as leaders. That is to say 

 many of them do not yield satisfactory profits, unless specially pro- 

 tected, because of the directness of the competition of dealers with 

 respect to them. The manufacturers have also created a new form of 

 competition between dealers in different lines of trade. The majority 

 of retailers have handled a restricted group of merchandise, as drugs, 

 shoes, hardware, or dry goods. There are many articles which cannot 

 well be sold by one not expert in the business. The druggist could 

 probably not explain the operation of certain tools; the dry goods 

 merchant would be dangerous as a compounder of prescriptions. 

 Within certain limits, therefore, stores in different lines have not com- 

 peted directly. There has always been, however, a class of goods so 

 easy to sell that they have been carried by dealers of all sorts as 

 side lines. The manufacturers have succeeded so well in rendering 

 simple the retailing of many of their wares that they have vastly 

 increased the list of articles which any dealer, regardless of his line, can 

 sell. The consequence is that dealers of all types are introducing side 

 lines taken from each other's field of trade. Reprisals are every- 

 where made, and so the number of competitors with whom each dealer 

 has to reckon is increased. The manufacturer, by direct selling to 

 large retailers, whether they be department stores or mail-order 

 houses, has put the small dealer, who depends upon the jobber, 

 under a great disadvantage. This compels the jobber and semi- 

 jobber, with the various classes of syndicate buyers, to take part 

 in the confused competitive strife now prevailing in the distributive 

 trades. 



In this struggle, for which the manufacturers are largely responsi- 

 ble, it is interesting to see that appeals for help are made to them by 

 the dealers. These appeals, through trade associations and other- 



