lOO 
Business  Possibilities. 
(Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
(     February,  1920. 
facturing  department  of  such  concerns,  and  that  he  can  be  his  own 
research  worker  with  a  versatiUty  not  equaUed  by  these  speciahsts. 
He  forgets  that  his  ingenuity  and  skiU  can  overcome,  in  many  cases, 
the  vast  accumulation  of  special  machinery,  and  that  an  immense 
plant  means  an  immense  "up-keep." 
Many  stores  have  certain  hours  of  the  day  during  which  very 
little  business  is  transacted.  In  this  time  the  employees  have  but 
few  tasks.  This  waiting  time  might  be  employed  in  manufacturing 
with  actual  saving  of  overhead  expense.  I  am  not  advocating  "slave 
driving."  It  is  a  well-established  fact  that  machinery  will  deteriorate 
most  rapidly  when  lying  idle.  The  same  is  true,  in  a  way,  of  human 
machinery,  and  druggists'  assistants  employed  pleasantly,  sanely 
but  continuously  will  be  more  efficient  in  every  way  than  those  al- 
lowed to  stand  idle  during  slack  time.  There  is  another  point  that 
here  suggests  itself.  No  salesman  can  sell  goods  with  a  "snap" 
equal  to  that  of  the  man  who  makes  them  and  therefore  knows  all 
about  their  intrinsic  value. 
The  advantage  of  quality  should,  and  often  does,  rest  with  the 
product  of  the  small  retail  manufacturer.  The  workman  in  the  large 
laboratory,  to  whom  the  real  manufacturing  is  intrusted,  is  usually 
a  mere  laborer  in  whose  eyes  the  work  is  only  mechanical  routine. 
The  workman  in  the  store  is  the  proprietor  and  his  clerks,  men  of 
better  training  and  intelligence  and  with  a  more  active  interest  in 
the  work.  As  an  instance  of  this,  I  have  seen  fluid  extracts  manu- 
factured by  a  retailer  which  were  far  superior  in  brilliance,  aroma 
and  body  to  many  turned  out  by  the  large  manufacturer  with  his 
advantage  of  stills  and  vacuum  apparatus.  That  this  advantage 
may  be  capitalized  has  already  been  pointed  out. 
Certain  classes  of  preparations,  such  as  coated  tablets  and  pills, 
which  require  expensive  machinery;  fluid  extracts,  in  general,  which 
require  the  recovery  of  quantities  of  alcohol;  and  biologies  and  al- 
kaloidal  extracts,  which  require  expensive  control  and  assay  processes, 
are,  in  the  main,  beyond  the  reach  of  the  small  manufacturer  to 
produce.    Yet,  even  here,  are  exceptions. 
While  coated  tablets  and  pills  are  practically  impossible  of 
production,  economically,  on  a  small  scale,  the  same  is  not  true  of 
plain  compressed  tablets,  tablet  triturates  and  hypodermatic  tablets. 
While  the  cost  of  these  on  a  small  scale  would  be  somewhat  higher, 
such  manufacture  permits  of  suppplying  the  local  demand  with 
products  of  superior  quality  as  regards  solubility  and  disintegration, 
