SHOPPING IN DANGER.
TWELVE times five is sixty. Sixty is twice as much as thirty.. Some extremely acute member of the Civil Service, possibly a Jew, probably a Scotchman, but certainly some one with an incapacity for examinations, or he could not have had so much sense, last year arrived at those recondite conclusions, and fancied them applicable to the ordinary affairs of life. Consequently he has organized an Association, called the Civil Service Association, but really the Buyers' Association, the economic principle of which is this. John Smith, after allowing for rent, breakages, spoilages, bad debts, and all other evils of business, can sell goods on twelve months' credit at 30 per cent. profit, and yet thrive. Clearly, if he could get even 5 per cent. ready money, actual cash delivered over the counter, he would thrive a great deal better. For, in the first place, in most trades it is possible or easy to demand a discount of 10 per cent. from the original producer for ready money. The tradesman who is paid cash can give cash, and cash strikes the manufacturer as a pleasant thing. He not only saves his interest, being paid ordinarily in three or four mouths' bills, but he is relieved of bad debts, of troublesome considerations about the comparative solvency of his customers, of wearing fears about bills and wages, and the pro- bable state of the money market when his claims fall due. He will give 10 per cent. for all those mitigations of his lot, and the tradesman, besides saving that, can in many businesses turn his capital over eight or twelve times a year. Consequently, if he saves 10 per cent. and makes five on each turn-over, he can secure annually just three times or four times what he made by heavy prices and a system of credit averaging one year. An association can do this as well as an individual, and an association sure beforehand of its customers can do it very mach better. Therefore, an association with the Civil Service for customers can afford to sell first-rate guaranteed goods at 25 per cent. less than average tradesmen, and yet be perfectly solvent. The Civil Service Association does this, does at its central store, in the. City, sell any- thing that the wives of Civil servants usually want, or are likely to want, of very good quality, or rather of exactly the quality represented,—people have a right to sell junk for rope if they like, if only they will clearly say it is junk,—at a redaction of one-fourth the usual price. The reduction is not nominal, but real, the goods are, by the testimony of notable women, who can detect starch in calico and know tea from tea sticks, very un- usually good. Such a scheme, even if confined to the Service, would be sensible, being an application of the co-operative prin- ciple to the needs of a class which seldom co-operates, but it has gone further than this. The gentleman who devised the scheme, —we have not the faintest idea who he is, but he would be worth a large salary to the proposed Railway Federation,—must be in his way a genius. Clearly, if it will pay a store to sell goods on these terms to twenty persons, it will also pay to sell them on the same terms to two hundred. The general public may as well buy as Civil servants and their wives. Publicans' money is not much worse than Pharisees' money, and everybody, therefore, is permitted, after purchasing a ticket, costing five shillings per annum, —which ticket is a stroke of social genius, as it is wholly unnecessary, but makes thrift look artistic, instead of mean,—to buy goods for ready money at the Association's general store, which contains, or is intended to contain, everything except anchors. Moreover, as London is vast, and branch stores cost much in rental, and many tradesmen are aware, in some vague way, after it is properly put to them, that twelve times five are sixty, and that sixty is twice thirty, arrangements have been made all over London, under which customers presenting the ticket will be served for ready cash at a fixed discount, which makes the prices charged about equal to the prices at the store. It is in fact possible at this moment for any lady who wants any household thing, to buy the same under a guarantee as to quality at three- fourths of the price a good shop will charge her, and half the price a fine shop will think too moderate. She is in fact, as one of an association, a wholesale instead of a retail customer, and can effect a real economy, visible in the weekly bills, without much exertion, without risk of buying inferior goods, and without an internal sense of loss of caste.
We are not going to defend or praise an effort of the kind. Wholesale dealing is cheaper than retail dealing, ready money more profitable than a bill at six months. The basis of the new enterprise is common sense applied to ordinary affairs, and common sense which the workmen of Rochdale, with whom the civilians probably would not shake hands, showed before the gentlemen did. There is no reason in the world why civilians should not unite to buy good tea, soap, and candles cheap, and much reason why they should, for they, of all men in England, have most to do with their cash, and the most rigidly fixed amount of cash to do it with. Our object is only to point out to the managers of a scheme which does them thorough credit as men of business and of kindly feel- ing, two or three of the obstacles which after a time will impede their complete success.
In the first place, they must not destroy the feminine luxury of " shopping," which their scheme threatens in a great measure to do. The love for that luxury is not, as male humanity is too ready to suppose, a mere foible of the less occupied sex. It is defensible on true commercial and economical principles. The most serious work which, in our scheme of society, is entrusted to women, if we except such trivialities as the early education of the human race, is making household purchases, and like all the work fairly entrusted to them to manage their own way, it is well done. No man not by nature a fool can compete with his wife in buying any thing he really wants, whether it be an epergne or a shirt button, and no man not a loiterer in life will waste his time in trying. After losing his time and ruining his temper, he will either pay too much or get a bad thing ; she does neither, and the reason she does neither is that she can " shop," can, that is, devote to the comparison of the different qualities and prices of many small articles the amount of attention which, whether they deserve it or not,—just drink bad tea for a week !—they most certainly require. She gets a skill from habit as valuable as that of the broker, who knows, by instinct as much as reason, that certain shares are mil- dewed, certain others starched, and a very few more unusually Cheap. Nobody gives up an occupation in which he excels without a sigh, and if shopping is forbidden, competent women, even when married to civilians, will find in the end some excuse, graceful or graceless, for going somewhere else than to the selected shop. It is needful, if the system is to succeed on any very broad scale, that the number of shops open to arrangement should be as large as pos- sible, large enough to allow of variety and comparison, and the expenditure of a certain amount of brains. One shop in each trade per district or subdivision, which is, we fancy, the ideal of the Association, is not enough, unless English wives are to feel like American boarders, as if household cares were nuisances to be obviated by people other than themselves, as if the privileged shopkeepers were authorized purveyors, and themselves living the hotel life. Besides, no inducement is offered to any shopkeeper to be better to-day than he was yesterday, competition being virtually killed. Then, though this is a minor point, perhaps the system to be perfect wants a bank as part of the store, a bank which will cash shilling cheques, and accept the wife's cheque as if it were the husband's, and so dispense with the necessity of personal attendance for every order, however small, or however distant the purchaser's residence may be. Such a bank properly worked might be as valuable as a store, might, for instance, in a very short time, destroy the advertising money-lenders' business. Bat, above all and before all, it will be necessary to guard, and guard carefully, constantly, and with a certain harshness, over the honesty of all connected with the system as to the quality of the things sold. At the store this may be easily done. Paid servants have small temptation to adulterate ; there are the goods, there is the invoice, there is the fixed per-tentage, and there is an end of trouble and responsibility. But the affiliated shops will require a great deal of looking after. The temptation to sell goods just on the wane, draperies just losing their gloss, groceries just too long kept for perfection, stationery with a suspicion of mildew, china which will " twizzle,"—is there such a word as twizzle ? everybody uses it, but it probably does not exist—will be very strong, indeed, often irresistible. One such case will destroy the customer's confidence in the entire system. She believes in her own eyesight, and knowledge, and experience pretty strongly ; but a reduction in price fills her, nevertheless, with a secret distrust, which very slight evidence would confirm beyond removal. It is very weak and very wicked no doubt, only do you believe in that very cheap horse quite as much as in that very dear one? After a little time the tendency will be either to seek the old profit, as well as the profit on ready money, by giving inferior goods, or to treat ticket-holders as persons who are asking for goods not as wholesale customers, which they really are, but as inferior customers who are entitled to their deduction, but to nothing else ; who may be kept waiting ad libitum, and made to feel that they are asking, not conferring favours. No affiliated shop should be allowed to extend the " privilege" to only one class of goods, or there will be constant importunity to purchase the excluded articles, and no shopkeeper pardoned after a single proved offence. With these rules the acute Civil servant who has managed to apply his arithmetic to such practical ends will have made a real reform in tradesmen's bills, and if he will only extend his scheme to butchers' meat will have half London for customers. There is the point to catch the wives. They will put up with the grocer's prices, but the butcher is a foe. The co- operative system applied to his business by an Association which can guarantee sufficient custom and cash down, would at this moment reduce the price of meat threepence per pound.
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