TEN-MINUTE TALKS WITH WORKERS.

Taranaki Daily News, 3 July 1920, Page 11

TEN-MINUTE TALKS WITH WORKERS.

THE COST OF SELLING. When the coal-man carries a hundredweight of coal round to the back of your houae and dumps it down in the shell, it is natural for you,'especially in these daya, to compare two things: (1) the half-crown which you put into his grimy hand; and (2) the shilling wliictt tha mine-owner got for it at the pithead. These may not be the exact figures, but they are near enough for our purpose, and indeed any figures not wholly irrational would serve us equally well. At any rate, it will be well to note that the argument ia not necessarily upset if the figures are proved not to be quite right. Then what does the eighteen-pence stand for? It is only coal still) now that it is in your shed. You give a tailor a bale of cloth and he returns you a suit Here you can see the difference, and understand that you art) paying hioi for the visible and useful change he has made in the thing itself, for a bale of cloth is not a suit of clothes. But, whether at the mouth of the mine or in a London liouso, a hundredweight of Derby Brights is. so far as the eye can see, one and the same thing, and should, it would seem, be sold at the same price. Clearly, however, there ,is a great difference between coal in the place where you want it and the same coal in a place where you cannot get at it. You want coal in your scuttle, and if your scuttle is empty, and the weather is cold or the dinner uncooked, a train load of coal on the railway behind your house can bring you no comfort. In other words, when a commodity is physically ready for use in" satisfying human needs it has to be placed in the hands of the human beings who want those needa satisfying. It must hare place-utility added to form-utility, as the economists put it. THE CHAIN BETWEEN. Suppose that, at a given moment when you urgently need coal, you would give twenty shillings for a hundredweight rather than go without it—a not extravagant supposition. In fact, however, you pay only half-a-crown for it. On this occasion then, you do not lose eighteen-pence, as some shallow minds would have you believe. On the contrary, you gain seventeen shillings and sixpence—quite a different matter, to be sure, but surely the right way of looking at it. Occasionally, there is no gap between the place in which the article is ready for use and the place in which it is to be used. If you have a garden, potatoes come out of .it into the saucepan and on to the table. For most of up who live in towns, however, there if such a gap, often a very broad one; and that gap is filled with a number of men who arc hard at work bridging it for us, and the' work of these men, being done from purely economic motives, must be paid for. From our point of view it is just as imnortant, for us to have men to deal in coal as it is to have railwavmen to transport it and miners to dicr it. Tf when yoil wanted coal you had to knock off work, and race around, Jinglintr two shillings and sixpence in your breeches pocket, hunting for a man with coal to sell, your life would bo much poorer and less pleasant. THE MIDDLEMAN. Tt is quite usual to speak sarcastically of the "middleman."' as to say that he is a parasite, who renders no return for the -payment he exacts. He is no parasite, for we cannot do without h'm —which is the final test in life. Like a coal-owner or a coal-miner, ho may exact from us more than we think he is worth, and then the simple plan is to see if we can get his service rendered by some one else at a cheaper rate. The co-operative societies originated in the determination of the Rochdale pioneers to see whether they could cut out the retailer, and as the plan succeeded their successors have cone still farther, and. in some lines at any rate, cut out the wholesaler—only, however, to replace both by retailers ana wholesalers under their own control. Similarly. State action could not dispense with the chain of middlemen. It could only turn them into civil servants. dnins their work for salaries instead of profits, and there is not an atom of assurance - that the addition made to the final selling price by these new salaries would be less than that added by the old profits. The cost of selling, in short, is as much a part total cost as the original cost of production, and must be met out of the retail price _ paid by the ultimate consumer. The service rendered bv the middleman is therefore an indispensable one, and is measured, as shown above, by the price actually paid by the consumer for a given article and the price he would be willing to nay rether than go without it. So that if you look at the complicated process of selling irom your own point of view as consumer, you see that you gain by it. Now look at the same process from the other end of the chain. As a producer, engaged, we will suppose, in a Lancashire weavinsr shed, it is necessary that there should be in existence men who will devote • : themselves to the selling, of the "grev cloths" yon turn out. True, they do it not because they love you or like the color of your eyes, but beeauae they want to make money. Whichever end of the chain yon stand at —the producer's end or the consumer's end—the advantage of the links in between is obvious. Of course there may be unnecessary links, which cun be cut out with profit. The odds are, however, that there are not. Men cannot permanently set pay for unnecessary work. What the middleman nets, it is generally worth our while to let him get.