DOES ADVERTISING PAT? 
Well, that depends upon a variety of 
circumstances. There are millions of mon¬ 
ey annually expended in this country in 
newspaper advertising, some of which has 
resulted in bringing fortune to the door of 
the advertiser, and some has instead, 
brought the sheriff. We have, during the 
past ten years, had a great deal of experi¬ 
ence in this line and will give our readers, 
without cost, the benefit of what we have 
learned at great expense. We might boil 
our convictions down to the simple state¬ 
ment that as a rule directly it does not pay, 
but indirectly , it does. That is to say, that 
if a man inserts an advertisment in the 
best medium known in this country and 
looks to the direct returns or incoming cash 
which results from the insertion of the 
advertisement to pay for its insertion and 
leave him a profit after filling his orders, no 
matter what he advertises, he will nineteen 
times out of twenty be disappointed. If 
the gross amount of money which comes in 
as direct returns from the advertisement 
is sufficient to pay the advertising bill, 
leaving him to fill his orders without 
recompense, it is about all he ought to ex¬ 
pect, or at least, it is about all he will re¬ 
alize regardless of his expectations. So we 
will go so far as to say that if a rogue ad¬ 
vertises something that he never expects 
or intends to send, he will make nothing 
unless he cheats the printer out of the ad¬ 
vertising bill. Novr all this may look as 
though we had decided that advertising 
does not pay, and yet we know from ex¬ 
perience that, in the long run, it does pay 
handsomely. In the case above cited, if the 
advertiser does not fill his orders satis¬ 
factorily he, of course, will never get 
another order from that customer or his 
friends, and there is where he foolishly 
loses the only chance there is of a profit 
emanating from the insertion of his adver¬ 
tisement. The best advertisement a man 
can have is a pleased customer. He will 
send you good orders from time to time 
and induce his friends to do the same at no 
expense to you whatever, but it is neces¬ 
sary to get a new customer before you can 
please him, and this is the prime use of 
advertising. You can afford to fill a man s 
first order for nothing if you are shrewd 
enough to secure him as a permanent cus¬ 
tomer, and this is just what advertising 
for a customer amounts to, and as much 
as you should expect it to amount to. So 
money spent in advertising is invested in 
your business. It will bring you a hand¬ 
some interest but it may be a long time 
before the principal is returned. Yet we 
believe if you do your whole duty by your 
customers as fast as you get them, you will 
in the end be rewarded with the return of 
both principal and interest. We began 
business without capital and expended all 
we could afford, sometimes more than we 
really should have afforded, in advertising. 
We did not expect the direct returns from 
each advertisement to afford a profit on the 
investment, and should in many cases have 
been sadly disappointed if we had expected 
it. The result is that we now have ten 
thousand or more good customers scattered 
all over the broad Union. A great portion 
of them are subscribers to Seed-Time and 
Harvest and we believe they will, in most 
instances, bear witness to the fact that we 
have tried to please them in every deal. 
Of course, like any other rapidly growing 
business establishment, we have, many 
times, been short of sufficient help to do 
the right thing at the right moment, and 
we beg the pardon of any who may feel 
that they have suffered loss or incon¬ 
venience on our account. We sincerely 
hope that we have not lost the patronage 
»f any from neglect. If we have, we wifi 
record the case as one where advertising 
did not pay. We realize and deeply feel 
and deplore the loss of a customer who 
drops out of the ranks in such a way, and 
whenever such a case exists we shall feel 
obliged to that customer if he will state to 
us kindly his dissatisfaction and what he 
desires us to do to satisfy and re-instate 
him. Leaving moral responsibility entire¬ 
ly out of the question we believe that if 
advertising pays—and w© have said that 
our own experience has proved that it 
does—it will pay any business firm to suffer 
a considerable pecuniary loss, even to the¬ 
re-filling of an order where necessary, to 
save themselves the loss of an old customer. 
This we have for years practiced doing, 
and are frank enough to say it is not done 
on account of any unusual goodness of 
heart, but purely qut of selfish business 
motives, believing that money so expended 
is about on par with money expended in 
newspaper advertising, “thrown upon the 
waters’’ and sure to return though it may 
be “after many days.” 
