MARKETING THE FAT SHEEP 107 



he will buy, he figures who is coming out ahead before he 

 ever makes a bid on tops and ends. For instance, you are 

 on the market with three hundred eighty-five-pound lambs, 

 totaling twenty-five thousand five hundred pounds, and are 

 offered a flat bid of seven cents, which you refuse. Then 

 comes a bid of eight cents for the one hundred tops and 

 six and a quarter cents for the ends. If the tops weigh 

 nine thousand pounds, they bring seven hundred and twenty 

 dollars, the others one thousand and thirty-one dollars and 

 twenty-five cents, or a total of one thousand seven hundred 

 and fifty-one dollars, and you may be sure that the buyer 

 has figured, before he makes the offer, that if you accept 

 he will be in the neighborhood of thirty dollars to the good. 

 Even six and three-quarter cents for the ends and eight for 

 the tops is better from the buyer's standpoint than seven 

 and a quarter flat, and it is only forty-eight dollars and 

 seventy-five cents more than the original seven-cent bid. 



Points to watch while on the market. Another point that 

 sometimes confronts a man while on the market occurs 

 as follows : He arrives a little late in the day with one 

 thousand head of lambs. Bidders are not very active, and he 

 thinks he can afford to hold over until the next day rather 

 than take the bid offered. Every buyer that enters his pens 

 has to feel his sheep, walk among them, and stir them up ; 

 and in some cases the same buyer makes three or four 

 visits, the last one or two being made in the afternoon while 

 the owner is uptown, and each time it seems necessary to 

 thoroughly arouse every sheep. The next morning prices 

 are no better and the feeder feels satisfied with the original 

 bid. If all the careful examining of the day before and 

 the extra time in the pens has caused only half a pound of 

 shrinkage per head, it amounts to five hundred pounds on 



