MARKETING COSTS MONEY 151 



retailing. The consensus was that the retailers, particularly in 

 the country towns, are needed by the farmers, and hence the mail-, 

 order houses of the city should not supplant them. The country 

 town, consisting largely of retailers, should prosper with the 

 farmers, and not at the expense of the farmer. For, of course, 

 the farmer knows that his land values are substantially raised 

 by the prosperity and growth of the nearby village. The retailers, 

 in the Winnipeg conference, blamed the wholesalers for high 

 prices, claiming that the wholesaler would not sell goods to them 

 at a low enough rate. The answer was that the retailers ought to 

 combine in cooperative groups, and purchase jointly in larger 

 volume, thus enabling the wholesalers to do business on smaller 

 margins. The Conference had one beneficial effect, namely, to 

 call public attention to the problem of the small town retailer. 



Marketing Costs Money. One important lesson which many 

 farmers have apparently not yet learned is that marketing costs 

 money, and is worth money. Indeed marketing in certain products 

 must always represent a large margin of the consumer's cost. 

 Where farmers have successfully organized in any part of the 

 United States and done their own marketing, one of the first lessons 

 they have learned is that the information service alone has cost 

 them a large amount of money. Thus the produce growers in 

 two eastern counties of Virginia (Eastern Shore of Virginia Produce 

 Exchange) spend as much as twenty-five thousand dollars a year 

 for telegrams and telephone service. The Orange farmers of 

 California (California Fruit Growers Exchange) spend as much as 

 seventy-five thousand dollars a year for telegraph and telephone 

 service. An individual buyer of potatoes in North Dakota spends 

 seven hundred dollars a month for wire service during the busy 

 season. If a farmer in the United States to-day is asked to name 

 one example of the highest possible efficiency in marketing, of 

 marketing conducted on the lowest margin of " middleman's" 

 expense, he would probably name the Ford automobile. This is 

 admittedly an example of a business which has been, up to the 

 present writing at least, conducted with an idea of fair service to 

 the consumer. And yet the " middleman's " margin, the profit 

 taken by the retailer, is fifteen per cent. The so-called " direct 

 marketing" is not encouraged in the distribution of this product. 

 Indeed, if the consumer orders his car direct from the central house 

 in Detroit, he pays his fifteen per cent commission joist the same. 

 And this method of doing business has had two results: It has 

 caused a great expansion in the volume of the business. This 



