THE LIFE OF THE “ C.T.”

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 5159, 1 August 1927, Page 1

THE LIFE OF THE “ C.T.”

CONDITIONS “ON THE ROAD.” THE “LIVERISH” CUSTOMER. “Customers are very much the* same as they were fifty years ago. They are liverish, captious, and critical. .You 'have never got th© right goods at the right price.” This was the view expressed by Mr E. Parry James', of Bristol, in his presidential address at the annual conference of the United Commercial Travellers’ Association of Great Britain and Ireland. “Those customers often say, ‘So and So has got better goods-; in fact, you represent one of the .worst houses in the trade.’ Yet that traveller, by the exercise of tact, perseverance, and good temper often gets an order at . an enhanced price. I call a man who does that a commercial traveller. There are those who hold the view that, great though the changes in the life of the commercial traveller have been in the last twenty-five or fifty years, the changes in the next twenty years will be more rapid and totally different from what they have been in the last twenty years. We are moving fast and perhaps instead of using motor-cars in our work we may be using flying machines.