“Yes, coffee. There are three things that must be selling well in these days: soap, tobacco, and coffee. Just look at the advertising pages of the papers and magazines. You see nothing but these three things and patent medicines. But then you expect patent medicines, so they don't count. Soap! Great Caesar! It's in everything. 'Queen Soap, 'Sulphur Soap, 'Ivory Soap', 'Pears' Soap,' and all the other soaps. The advertising is by all odds the largest expense, and the poor devil of a retailer is expected to sell at about 5 per cent. margin. Then see the whole country painted red on tobacco. And now we're catching it on coffee. If Arbuckle isn't a nephew of Barnum's he ought to be, for he knows how to advertise. I long ago gave up eating bread made from baking powder, because each manufacturer proved the other fellow's goods were poisonous, and I don't know but I must give up coffee since the advertisements expose how easy it is to doctor it. But at present I'm sort of holding on to Arbuckle's, and when my confidence in that goes then I'm done for.” “You are right,” said a grocer. “Arbuckle has made an immense business in coffee, and made it by his brains. It's encouraging to see a concern get out of the rut and show folks that the end of everything hasn't been reached yet.” “Seems to me,” said a manufacturer, “that you grocers have done more to demoralize business, by your gift enterprises, than any other class has done. Is the thing holding its own?” “No, there is a decided feeling growing against it. The large wholesale grocers of New York, Austin, Nichols & Co., say, in a recently published letter: “'We do not believe in “gift schemes” of any sort, and are not in the “give away” business. When the time arrives (if it ever does) when we are unable to sell good goods on their respective merits we will quietly retire from business.'”