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123 



TENTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE 



If it is impossiljle to make this busi- 

 ness remunerative, I am going out of 

 the business and, more than that, I 

 don't like to see the bee-papers come 

 out, cutting the price of honey — quot- 

 ing low prices — because there are 

 many people in little towns, seeing 

 those low prices, think they are get- 

 ting a good deal when they are offered 

 13 cents. You must not put these low- 

 price agitations in the bee papers if 

 you want to keep the prices up. 



Mr. Ahlers — At these prices I am 

 selling eO.OOO pounds of honey. When 

 I get to the middle of January there 

 will be over 60,000 pounds, I am 

 closing up my business for the rest of 

 the winter, putting my driver at home 

 to take care of the house, and my 

 wife and I are going South until May. 



Mr. Wheeler — Did you produce aJl 

 of this honey? 



Mr. Ahlers— I produced 32,500 

 pounds myself, the rest I bought. I 

 bought 9,000 pounds from one person 

 and 6,000 from another; I paid one of 

 them one-fourth cent more than we 

 agreed on. 



Mr. Wheeler — The purchaser of 

 honey will get the price down as low 

 aa he can; I don't blame him for that. 



■Mr. Ahlers — No one is in business 

 just for himself. I don't want to get 

 the price down if I know an article is 

 good. I want to treat the other man 

 as I want to be treated. That is the 

 right" sort of a rule to follow all round. 

 I pay enough for my honey so that I 

 can always get what ihoney I -want. 



A member — Mrs. Hol'brook spoke 

 about having confidence in your goods 

 and asking a price commensurate 

 with your work. I offered my white 

 clover honey to the jobber to whom I 

 have sold for several years, at 15% 

 cents (comb honey), delivered, and he 

 wrote back and said my price was too 

 high. I got a letter in a few days from 

 a larger jobber, asking me what I 

 wanted for my honey. I thought, if I 

 had asked too much in the first place, 

 I would ask a little more, so I asked 

 him 17 cents, and he wrote back and 

 said, "ship it as soon as you can." 



Mr. Niver — My little talk yesterday 

 I think has created a wrong impress- 

 ion. The impresion must be — from the 

 few remarks I have heard — that all 

 dealers wanted to cut the prices down 

 to the producer. My talk was in the 

 interest of bringing the two ends to- 



gether — raising the price to the produ- 

 cer, and getting the price down to the 

 consumer. There is too much margin. 

 The producer gets 8 cents on an aver- 

 age perhaps this year, while the con- 

 sumer, on an average, pays 30. I think 

 that is too wide a margin, and it cuts 

 down th« consumption of honey. 



iOut in New York State, where I got 

 my first education in the honey-busi- 

 ness, we got honey down to 5 cents a 

 pound, and Coggshall's were advertis- 

 ing 21 pounds for $ 1.00, dielivered any- 

 where in town. I quit the business. It 

 got too strenuous for me. 



Then, coming up here to Chicago, I 

 saw there were good deal higher prices 

 in vogue, and I went to selling honey 

 to private houses — talking honey as a 

 food value and its cheapness as a food. 

 I have been at that for the last 10 years, 

 in selling it to private families, and 

 trying to educate the people to eat 

 honey and pay good round prices for 

 it, but in the stores, I found, where I 

 was traveling,, that the general price 

 was from 30 to 35 cents a pound; that 

 cut down the consumption; people did 

 not eat honey as they ought to. 



Now about my dislike for comb 

 honey: I find that very few people eat 

 comb honey to any extent. The 25 and 

 30 and 50 cents a pound men don't eat 

 honey; it is the poor man that con- 

 sumes X,he most honey; the rich man, 

 who can pay 50 cents a pound for 

 honey, does not eat it at all, as a rule. 



I have yet to find one man out of the 

 10,000 customers and over that I reach 

 every year, that eats over 24 pounds of 

 honey in a year. I have found good, 

 big grocers that run three and four 

 hands to attend to the trade of the 

 grocery store, that only take 24 sec- 

 tions of honey a year, to supply their 

 regular trade, while I was selling quite 

 a large number of tons of it in the 

 same locality, of extracted; and all 

 these things we have to think about. 



My friend here says when you get 

 honey too high he cannot sell it at all; 

 people will not buy it, only in a very 

 limited way, and that limited way is 

 what makes the producer stay at home. 



I have quit — like Mr. Ahlers — there 

 is not margin enough in it to keep me 

 on the road', so I am going to take a 

 vacation. 



Last spring (in April) one large pro- 

 ducer in Wisconsin wrote to me: "I 

 have 10,000 pounds of fine white clover 



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