Feilding Star. TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 1884. Merchants v Companies

Feilding Star, Volume V, Issue 41, 8 April 1884, Page 2

Feilding Star. TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 1884. Merchants v Companies

• In the course of his address to the Wellington Chamber of Commerce, Mr Habcourt made some very pertinent remarks in the difficulty merchants and other importers find in competing with certain money institutions. Mr Harcoubt has only echoed the sentiments previously expressed by the Dunedm Chamber of Coinmer.e, and of many other merchants in this and adjacent Colonies. They complain that the properly so called merchant is rapidly being extinguished by the large corporate bodies. At this writing, we will not discuss fully how far merchants are themselves to blame, or the general causes which have led the public to give such willing and hearty support to the said bodies. But one or two points may be mentioned which apparently are overlooked by importers when considering the broad question — or to which they conveniently shut their eyes when the sin is committed by themselves. We need only refer to what are really branch establishments of a large house, which are opened in the country towns to compete against storekeepers who are already in business, and with whom the importing house may already have had transactions. It is not likely that the country storekeeper will continue to deal with a house which is underselling him almost next door. From a large experience we have formed the opinion tbat ruin to both is generally the result. Mr Habcourt complains of English houses sending out travellers to compete in the Colony. It is the same thing only perhaps on a larger scale. It is a well-known fact that the thousands of commercial travellers who now travel over the face of the Colony, will in nearly every case take orders from private individuals, as well as the dealer, who is also solicited, and the prices to each will be the same. That tbis sort of thing is exposed over and over again but only results in the dealer giving a different firm an order, whose traveller may in turn serve him much the same as the other. It is thus legitimate business is spoiled. A country storekeeper has as much right to live as a town merchant. H a merchant confines himself to only wholesale dealing he must in the end secure a safe and lucrative trade. On the otber hand, where he attempts to be a wholesale and retail dealer he will fail in both. Merchants have a remedy — which would savor of Boycotting — against banking institutions that are opposing uhem in a line of business outside of banking proper. Let one and all gradually transfer their business to banks which work legitimately. To do this would require time and an amount of moral courage which the mere trader does not always possess. Many of them are large shareholders in the very companies that are sapping their mercantile financial constitutions. The mental intoxication given by fat dividends has a wonderful charm, no matter how the said dividends are earned, and at what cost. To give these up and depend only on their own capacity as exercised in the employment of their whole capital in one business would be too much perhaps to expect, yet if merchants (so called) had confined themselves strictly in the past to the lines laid down by tradition and experience, and avoided competion with the retail dealer, no company would ever have been able to enter into successful competition with them.