“You’ve said it! When I remember how I used to hope that perhaps if we scrimped and saved we might be able to buy a part interest somewhere, after I’d put in the best years of my life working for other men! Doesn’t it make you afraid the alarm-clock will ring and wake you up any minute?” “But did you really settle the bonus question for the non-selling force?” asked Mrs. Willing, returning relentlessly to the most difficult point. “I worked it out by giving it up for the present,” he answered promptly. She laughed. “Well, that’s _one_ way.” “I tell you, I’ve given up trying to make it all fit together like clockwork. Jobs in a store aren’t alike. Salespersons are one thing, and you can find out exactly what they’re worth in dollars and cents and pay them what they _earn_. But when they don’t sell, it’s different. What I’m going to do is to decide on basic wages for all the employees who don’t sell--just about enough to get along on. And then pull the really good work out of them with a bonus--I’ll call it a bonus. It’s really a sort of disguised fine for poor work....” “I wish you’d start at the beginning and get somewhere,” said his wife rigorously. “If I put woolly statements like that into my advertising copy....” “Well, here’s the idea. Take the delivery crews for example.--There’s only one of them now, of course, but there are going to be more soon. I offer them--oh, anything you like, twelve or fifteen dollars a week. That much they’re sure of until they’re fired, no matter how they do their work! ‘But if you do your work perfectly,’ I tell ’em, ‘there’s ten dollars a week more,’ or something like that--I haven’t made up my mind about the details.... ‘There’s ten dollars apiece for each of you if you get through the week with a perfect record.’--No, that doesn’t put emphasis enough on team spirit; I’ll make it ten or fifteen for the crew to divide--that’ll give them an incentive for jacking each other up. We put the money in dimes and quarters in a box with a glass cover where they can look at it. Then every time they run without oil, or with a dirty car, or lose a package, or let a friend ride with them, out comes a dollar or a quarter or fifty cents, depending on how serious the case may be. Don’t you just bet when they see their bonus shrinking before their eyes they’ll buck up and _try_? Of course I couldn’t use such a raw line with the better class--the accounting department, for instance, but something with the same idea.--By the way, that reminds me. I had to let Lester Knapp go--remember him? That dyspeptic gloom, second desk on the left as you go in.” Mrs. Willing nodded. “I don’t know that I ever noticed him, but I’ve heard about him through the St. Peter’s women. I thought you said you could manage.”