Postal service -- United States -- Second-class matter
Here is another postal bill of one of the many great “mail order”
magazine advertisers--a company which sells excellent clothing to
women who can not come to the great cities and their department
stores. The president of the company writes:
“As we are a mail-order concern, our business is derived
entirely, either directly or indirectly, from our magazine
advertising. During the year 1909 we paid the Postoffice
Department for carrying our first, third and fourth class mail
matter the sum of $433,242.”
What an advertisement in one issue of one magazine did for
another women’s “wearing apparel” house is recorded in their
books as follows:
The postage required to answer the 15,000 replies from the
one-column insertion in the magazine, also to send the
merchandise required by 2,000 of the inquirers, also to “follow
up” other inquirers, etc., amounted to $5,460.
The government charge for carrying this advertisement through the
second-class mails was $38.83.
That $5,460, by the way, did not include the several hundred
dollars spent on postage by the inquirers themselves.
The president of a concern which publishes encyclopedias, natural
histories, classics, etc., investigated the relations with the
postoffice of a recent page of his advertising inserted in a
single magazine, and the correspondence which resulted.
The stamps and money orders bought by the inquirers and by the
publishing company, as the result of the 4,000 answers to this
one advertisement, amounted to $884.
The publishers paid the postoffice to carry that page, at
second-class rate, $12.
Thus, even if it had not already been disproved that the
second-class rate is insufficient, it would still have been
mightily unfortunate for the department’s business if that page
advertisement had not appeared. A good business man would be
willing to lose several times $12 in order to do $884 worth of
business as profitable to himself as first-class mail is to the
government.
Scores of apparently small advertisers are found in any issue
of any popular magazine. They are just as good customers to the
postoffice, in proportion, as the big concerns using columns or
pages.
ONE INCH--$5,492 STAMPS A YEAR.
A modest 1-inch magazine advertisement is printed by a company,
which reports that its yearly postage account from that cause is
$5,132. Adding the approximate postage on the 1,500 letters a
month sent to the company, the yearly total of postage created by
this inconspicuous concern through the magazine is found to be
$5,492.
ONE-HALF INCH--$590 A MONTH.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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