14 FLIGHT FROM THE CITY 



trade press in 1922; my book appeared a year later, 

 in 1923. 



My voyage of discovery into the realm of advertis- 

 ing economics led to a deeper search for the truth. 

 Three years later, in 1926, I published the results of 

 several years of study in a book ( for which Lew Hahn 

 wrote the introduction) , which I called The Distribu- 

 tion Age. 



Here I came much nearer to a satisfactory explana- 

 tion of the curious results of our cost studies of home 

 canning. Factory production costs had, it is true, de- 

 creased year after year as industry had developed. 

 Nothing had developed to stop the factory in its suc- 

 cessful competition with handicraft industry, so far 

 as costs of production were concerned. Our econo- 

 mists, therefore, took it for granted that the superi- 

 ority of the factory in competition with the home 

 would continue indefinitely into the future. What 

 they overlooked, however, was that while production 

 costs decrease year after year, distribution costs in- 

 crease. The tendency of distribution and transporta- 

 tion to absorb more and more of the economies made 

 possible by factory production was ignored. Trans- 

 portation, warehousing, advertising, salesmanship, 

 wholesaling, retailing all these aspects of distribution 

 cost more than the whole cost of fabricating the goods 

 themselves. Less than one-third of what the consumer 

 pays when actually buying goods at retail is paid 

 for the raw materials and costs of manufacturing 

 finished commodities; over two-thirds is paid for dis- 



