TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART V 453 



conditions of the market and how each side works under those changing 

 conditions. This cattle market is almost exclusively a consignment mar- 

 ket and the animals have to be sold quickly and it is very seldom desir- 

 able to carry any of them over in hopes of a better market. Theoretically, 

 the advantage in such a market Is with the buying forces, for they do 

 not have to buy in the same sense that the sellers have to sell, and espe- 

 cially is this the case in a market where a great part of the buying power 

 is concentrated in a few hands. And in actual practice this is the situa- 

 tion — which means that the demand side of the price-making force is al- 

 most always in better position to assert its interest than is the supply 

 side, because at the end the seller is always a forced-seller and the buyer 

 is not a forced-buyer. This does not mean that there is a lack of compe- 

 tition, for there are plenty of evidences of it. With a good strong beef 

 market, and especially with an advancing one and limited supplies of 

 cattle, the competition for the available raw material is quite keen and 

 the price can be marked up easily; but with a big run of cattle, particu- 

 larly in the face of a declining beef and by-products market, the compe- 

 tition among salesmen to sell is even keener than that among buyers to 

 buy, in the other situation,* and the breaking of the market is an easy 

 matter. And even with small receipts, if the beef market is going bad, 

 salesmen are powerless to get any advantage out of the cattle-supply situ- 

 ation when confronted by indifferent buyers. And this simply means 

 that in a consignment market for perishable commodities the buyers have 

 a superior position and can always push the risks on the market back 

 onto the furnishers of the supplies. 



Another aim of this market observation has been to estimate to what 

 extent cattle are sold at fairly uniform prices for the same grades in 

 different sections of the yards on the same day; that is, whether they 

 are bought largely according to their value as raw material or whether 

 the price varies according to the changing judgments as to different 

 salesmen as to the market and as to values. This is not an easy thing 

 to do for it is quite difficult for one who is on the market every day and 

 seeing different grades of cattle every day to carry comparative impres- 

 sions in the mind's eye as it were, from one alley to another and one sec- 

 tion of the yards to another, and be able to say that one lot sold higher 

 than another. Undoubtedly the buyers are better equipped to pass a 

 judgment as to beef values than are the salesmen, for they see many 

 more cattle in the course of the day, and they have their daily killing- 

 sheets which show them the beef results of their previous purchases, 

 and their positions are much more dependent upon their knowledge as to 

 actual values in terms of product. Indeed one of the weaknesses of the 

 system from the producers' and salesmen's standpoint, is that there is no 

 method of check-up to know whether a particular sale was in line with 

 the market, or not. The producer can only judge as he sees a few other 

 sales made, if he does, and under the handicap of seeing the various lots 

 of cattle under strange conditions and under an unknown variety of 

 market presentabilities. Cattle in the yards are so unstandardized, and 

 price is to such an extent a matter of chance, that with a salesman of 

 trading skill, knowing when to sell and when to hold a kind of intuitive 



