Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 09: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great ReformersHubbard, Elbert
History
Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 09: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers
Hubbard, Elbert
Reformers
The best lawyers now are businessmen, and their work is to keep the
commercial craft in a safe channel, where it will not split on the
rocks of litigation nor founder in the shallows of misunderstanding.
Every lawyer will tell you this, "To make money you must satisfy your
customers."
The greatest change in business came with the one-price system.
The old idea was for the seller to get as much as he possibly could
for everything he sold. Short weight, short count, and inferiority in
quality were considered quite proper and right, and when you bought a
dressed turkey from a farmer, if you did not discover the stone inside
the turkey when you weighed it and paid for it, there was no redress.
The laugh was on you. And moreover a legal maxim--caveat emptor, "Let
the buyer beware"--made cheating legally safe.
Dealers in clothing guaranteed neither fit nor quality, and anything
you paid for, once wrapped up and in your hands, was yours beyond
recall--"Business is business," was a maxim that covered many sins.
A few hundred years ago business was transacted mostly through fairs
and ships, and by pedlers. Your merchant of that time was a
peripatetic rogue who reduced prevarication to a system.
The booth gradually evolved into a store, with the methods and customs
of the irresponsible keeper intact: the men cheated their neighbors
and chuckled in glee until their neighbors cheated them, which, of
course, they did. Then they cursed each other, began again, and did it
all over. John Quincy Adams tells of a certain deacon who kept a store
near Boston, who always added in the year 1775, at the top of the
column, as seventeen dollars and seventy-five cents.
The amount of misery, grief, disappointment, shame, distress, woe,
suspicion and hate caused by a system which wrapped up one thing when
the buyer expected another, and took advantage of his innocence and
ignorance as to quality and value, can not be computed in figures.
Suffice it to say that duplicity in trade has had to go. The self-
preservation of the race demanded honesty, square dealing, one price
to all. The change came only after a struggle, and we are not quite
sure of the one-price deal yet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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