592 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



reported to be made often, if not usually, with the expectation that 

 the produce involved will be delivered at about a certain time on a 

 certain day. For instance, a car of vegetables from a South Atlantic 

 shipping point may be bought by a dealer, who expects the car to 

 reach Jersey City on a Friday night in time to be ferried across North 

 River to a wholesale market in New York, which opens at i : oo A.M. 

 Should this car be delayed several hours the vegetables would miss 

 the Saturday market and might be delayed two days hi reaching the 

 retail merchants. 



Two instances of delays will serve as illustrations. A merchant 

 in Philadelphia mentioned a consignment of strawberries which 

 reached that city from Florida six days late, and a Chicago dealer 

 complained, about the same time, of losing $500 on a car of straw- 

 berries that reached him too late to take advantage of a good market. 

 Delays like these, it is believed, are by no means as frequent under 

 present conditions of freight service as in earlier tunes. 



Information as to the location of a given car in transit may usually 

 be obtained from the railroad company which is hauling the car. 

 But some large shippers have a system of their own by which they 

 trace the movement of cars in transit, in order to distribute them 

 among the different markets to the best advantage. One organiza- 

 tion in California adopted this system of distributing shipments: 

 When a member shipped a car of produce, he turned the bill of lading 

 over to the manager of the organization and allowed him to direct the 

 movement of the car to market. The object of having one central 

 authority select the markets was to prevent sending an oversupply to 

 any one place. On receiving the bill of lading, a record of the car was 

 made on a card in the office of the organization and the card filed in 

 its proper place in a drawer. This drawer was divided into several 

 rows of compartments, opening upward; each row had 31 compart- 

 ments, and there was one row for each principal market in the United 

 States. The 31 compartments represented each one day of a month. 

 When a card was filed, its location was determined by the destination 

 named in the bill of lading and by the day of the month on which the 

 consignment was due at the destination. For instance, a carload of 

 cherries shipped to New York from a point in the Sacramento Valley 

 on May 27 would be represented by a card filed in the New York row 

 of the drawer and in the compartment numbered 7, if the consignment 

 would be due in New York on June 7. The arrangement of these 

 cards showed at a glance the intended distribution of this association's 



