THE MANUFACTURER AND DOMESTIC MARKET 125 



A pamphlet of instructions is given away by the manufacturer, who 

 advertises extensively to attract trade. The price is fixed and is 

 everywhere the same. If you look for the goods in a strange city you 

 will probably be guided by a sign furnished to the dealer by the 

 maker and you will be attracted by large photographs, from the 

 same source, to show the range of work possible. As the films must 

 be developed, the company offers to do this, but it also puts on the 

 market a simple apparatus and all the necessary chemicals. The 

 value of films depends largely upon the possibility of obtaining them 

 in travel; consequently the makers have established agencies in almost 

 every important locality in the world. In the solution of this dis- 

 tributive problem, which was unusually complex and difficult, the 

 manufacturer has originated all the plans, done all the work, and 

 controls all the essential conditions. The most ignorant clerk can 

 quickly learn all that remains to the retailer to be done. 



The inventive genius and advertising talent shown by leading 

 American manufacturers in putting their goods upon the market 

 are certainly remarkable. By advertising, with the powerful indi- 

 vidualizing agency of the trade-mark, by sample distribution, by 

 demonstrations at the consumer's house or the merchant's place of 

 business, by exhibits at universal expositions, such as can be seen in 

 endless numbers and variety upon these grounds, the manufacturer 

 educates new wants in the customer and makes known new goods. 

 By explicit printed directions, in several languages perhaps, and 

 accompanied by ingenious pictures, he so clearly shows the use of the 

 goods that the advice of the dealer is rendered unnecessary to a 

 person of any intelligence. By the use of a package, perhaps air- 

 tight or moisture-proof, the dealer loses all credit for keeping goods 

 in presentable condition. As the customer knows, when he opens the 

 package, that it was closed at the factory, he feels that responsibility 

 for its quality is removed from the dealer; and when with the package 

 there is a strong and carefully emphasized guarantee, the dealer sinks 

 into a mere agent for the transfer of any complaints to headquarters. 

 Personal relations of customer with dealer are in this way weakened, 

 and the more so since the customer realizes that in any store where 

 this article with its identifying trade-mark can be had, an absolutely 

 identical ware is found. The package furthermore does away with 

 the necessity of weighing or measuring, and it usually carries pro- 

 minently marked upon it a price which sets a maximum upon the 

 charges of the dealer. 



This incursion of the manufacturer into the province of the dealer 

 has been disadvantageous to the latter in several ways. In the first 

 place it has reduced the portion of the profit which the manufacturer 

 leaves to the dealer, for with every function which the manufacturer 

 takes up he makes a corresponding reduction in the profits allowed 



