70 



REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON MARKETING 



morning. It was not quite twelve o'clock and there had been six 

 special deliveries made to her house besides the regular ones. Grocery 

 men in many places claim that sixty to seventy per cent of their 

 gross expense is the cost of delivery. It seems that the smaller the 

 grocer, the greater his expense; for he has to go several blocks to 

 make one delivery, while the large department store makes several 

 deliveries in one block. We also find the small grocer does not want 

 to handle our products on as small a percentage of profit as the large 

 retailer. 



It has been proven that the producer of grapes, by packing in a 

 labeled, registered trademark, four pound basket, has successfully 

 set the price to the consumer by advertising in the daily papers. 



It has also been proven that the producer of New York State 

 potatoes has set the price to the consumer by putting up his potatoes 

 in peck burlap sacks under a registered trademark brand, and adver- 

 tising in the daily papers. In order to do this economically, the 

 farmers must get together co-operatively and stand together, — in 

 fact, follow in the footsteps of the producers of the West. 



Last year the irregular shipping of potatoes caused the glutting 

 of first one market, then another, potatoes often selling in car- 

 lots for forty cents in large markets that were overstocked. All 

 potatoes should have brought the producer ninety cents per bushel, 

 for the season closed at over a dollar. 



There are as many potatoes consumed in the large cities when 

 they are a dollar per bushel at loading station as there are when 

 thirty cents. One reason is they are still the cheapest standard 

 article of food, and another is that the consumer pays practically 

 the same price when the producer receives thirty cents as he does 

 when the producer gets a dollar. 



We find that the bushel box for apples is an improvement over the 

 barrel, but it is not a small enough package to reach the consumer 

 without being broken eighty-three to eighty-seven times out of a 

 hundred; while the four pound basket of grapes and the peck sack 

 of potatoes reaches the consumer without being broken or its identity 

 lost ninety-nine times out of a hundred. We also find that eighty- 

 five per cent of the potatoes consumed in the large market centers 

 reach the consumer in peck and less than peck lots. 



Cucumbers should probably be packed in bushel baskets. How- 

 ever, we believe it would be a good plan to use a sticker label on each 



