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traveling salesman and the demand only 
meet by accident. It takes one man 30 
days to cover the state of Iowa through- 
ly. When he is in Keokuk the demand 
may be in Council Bluffs, and vice versa. 
The average fruit dealer buys from hand 
to mouth and does not anticipate his 
wants very far ahead. Only a few of the 
larger operators in the big cities do that. 
That the principle of resident salesmen 
is correct, it is only necessary to point 
out that practically everyone of the large 
successful organizations have adopted it; 
the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange, 
the United Fruit Company, etc. In the 
same government publication from which 
I have already quoted, appears the fol- 
lowing: 
“The co-operative marketing associa- 
tion keeps itself well informed with re- 
gard to prices and market conditions in 
all the markets in which it sells or can 
sell its goods. This is done by means of 
telegraphing. The prosperous marketing 
association doing a large business at the 
present time expends a large amount of 
money in telegraphing. The annual ex- 
pense of the Hastern Shore of Virginia 
Produce Exchange for telegraphing is 
about $25,000, and the annual expense of 
the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange, 
which handles the principal portion of 
the citrus crop of California, is $75,000. 
The best success of the marketing asso- 
ciation necessarily depends on a knowl- 
edge of the best markets in which to sell 
the products. The manager of the asso- 
ciation must in effect be in every market 
in which he sells and all the time.” 
Obviously, under a system of traveling 
salesmen, this would be impossible. Do 
not misunderstand me—traveling sales- 
men are all right, as an auxiliary, but 
not as a system. 
Resident Salesmen 
In the presence of the necessity of hav- 
ing resident agents in all the markets, 
the problem that confronted the exchange 
(and it is the problem of the whole in- 
dustry) was how to maintain, without 
assistance, such a comprehensive and 
costly system. The California Fruit 
Growers’ Exchange can do it, as they are 
dealing in a commodity which is packed 
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PRACTICAL HORTICULTURE 
and shipped from California every day 
in the year. Their system of sales 
branches costs them, so I have heard, 
$25,000 per month, or $300,000 per year. 
The United Fruit Company can maintain 
52 branches of their own throughout the 
year, and without assistance, as they, too, 
have a product which is shipped the year 
’round. But we in the Northwest are 
dealing in a commodity which is har- 
vested through a period of about 100 
days, and marketed through a maximum 
period of about six months. No matter, 
then, what our total volume, we could 
never afford to maintain a branch office 
system without assistance, unless we 
wish deliberately to adopt an economi- 
cally wasteful method. For, with the 
salesmen busy six months and idle six 
months, there would be not only an un- 
thinkable economic waste, but also de- 
terioration in the men. No man can work 
actively for six months and loaf the 
other six months and be as good a sales- 
man or business man at the end of his 
six months’ idleness as he was before. 
Besides all this, the men would fall out 
of touch with the trade and become rusty. 
Had the exchange been unable to find a 
solution to this question before it started 
business, it would never have started. It 
found the solution in operation. It found 
there were other associations in other 
parts of the United States producing 
other and non-competitive fruits and 
vegetables, whose commodities came into 
the market at opposite or nearly opposite 
seasons to ours, and who had the same 
need for resident salesmen that we had, 
and who had also the same economic 
problem. And by intelligent combination 
of these factors a tonnage was provided 
that rotated all the year ’round, and the 
service thus co-operatively established 
was put in charge of specially trained su- 
perintendents and has worked beautifully, 
and at a cost vastly lower than any one 
of the co-operating concerns could have 
created it independently. At the present 
time there are 123 branch sales offices in 
the exchange system. Each of these 
offices is responsible for a certain terri- 
tory in its vicinity. Thus we aim and 
come very near to being in contact every 
