Housing 153 



But do not these things hold good also in "little business?" 

 I was once managing a large poultry farm and was unable 

 to sell my eggs in the town where I was located because the 

 retail stores had made contracts with the cold storage 

 interests to take their eggs at a certain contracted price. The 

 retail stores were selling these eggs to their customers for 

 as high as 60c per dozen. One store did buy two cases from 

 me, on which my name was plainly marked and they put two 

 or three of my fresh eggs in with the cold storage eggs and 

 claimed that the whole lot were my fresh eggs. They kept 

 these cases in front where everyone could see them and sold 

 eggs from those two cases for over two months. 



The interests see the value of cooperation, but the tragedy 

 of it all is you do not. You travel along under the disadvan- 

 tage of competition with out-of-date methods, methods con- 

 demned and discarded years ago by "big business," methods 

 so crude, so unbusinesslike that you are the easiest kind of 

 "game" for men who employ the business methods of cooper- 

 ation. You still cling to business methods of the past century 

 and until you wake up and learn the value of cooperation you 

 cannot expect to be any better off than you are today. 



If you will not help yourself, who will help you? The daily 

 papers tell you the low prices of eggs is due to the over- 

 production which occurs every spring and that you must 

 expect the low price. But as "big business" interests are 

 not strangers with the daily press, you are only listening to 

 the voice of "big business" singing, in the greatest coopera- 

 tive act known, a song entitled "If the Poultrymen Want Us 

 To Do Him We Will." 



In the California Legislature during the session of 1913 a 

 bill was introduced to establish a State Produce Exchange 

 where the poultrymen and other producers of food stuffs 

 would all ship to one central house, which would handle the 



