A Sixpence to Sit Down

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town the word free brought the whole market to your table, and the whole market is not the same thing as a customer.

Two spectacle sellers at one Saturday market, the same trays of lenses off the same Birmingham maker.
Both charging one and sixpence for the plainest frame and four shillings for the best.
Both with a printed card of letters nailed to the tent post for trying a sight by.
One had a board that said sight tried free, and tried sights all day.
The other asked sixpence of anybody who sat down, and allowed it off the pair.
Only one of them went home with an empty tray. Which, and why?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two spectacle sellers, in the town I have never named, took pitches at either end of the same Saturday market. The trays came from the same warehouse: oval lenses bedded in felt grooves, numbered by strength, frames of steel and horn and brass. The method was the same as well. You sit the customer with his back to the light, nail the printed card of letters at eight feet, and go up the tray a number at a time until the bottom row comes clear. It takes a quarter of an hour done properly, and it is the whole of the trade. The lenses sell themselves once a man has read a line he has not read in four years.

The first seller chalked a board and set it against the trestle. Sight tried free. It was a generous board and it worked exactly as a generous board works. From nine until noon there was a knot of people at his table and a queue behind them. Boys tried the strongest lenses on for the pleasure of seeing the world swim. Two farmers' wives tried four pairs each and said they would think about it. A man who had come in for a scythe stone sat twenty minutes, read the whole card with the number fourteen lens, said it was a wonderful thing, and went off to buy his scythe stone. By four o'clock the seller had tried nineteen sights and sold five pairs, three of them the cheapest in the tray.

The second seller nailed up his card and wrote a line on a slate. Sight tried at this table, sixpence, which is allowed off any pair bought today. For the first hour nobody sat down at all, and he had leisure to regret the slate. Then a woman in her fifties put sixpence down and sat, and he spent twenty minutes over her, and she bought a four shilling frame with the number eleven lens in it. After her a carpenter, who had been holding his rule at arm's length for a twelvemonth, and who asked the difference between the steel and the horn and listened to the answer. By four o'clock eight people had sat down at that table. Seven bought, and the average pair was better than two shillings.

Reckon the two days up. The first man gave away four hours and three quarters of attendance and took something over nine shillings. The second gave away under three hours, took four shillings in sixpences and nineteen in spectacles, and had the afternoon to walk the market and arrange a pitch at the November fair. He also had seven people wearing his better lenses about the parish, which five cheap pairs could not do for the other man.

Both were selling the same lenses out of the same trays at the same prices. One of them had put a sixpenny fence around the only thing he actually had to sell, which was his quarter of an hour.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A thing given away for nothing is not a cheaper version of the same thing, it is a different thing, and people treat it as one. The moment you price it at sixpence it changes in the customer's hands, and in yours.

Three things happen at once. The first is that a person with no price in front of him has nothing to weigh your offer against. He cannot tell whether a sight testing is a serious piece of work or a diversion, so he decides by what it costs him, and it costs him nothing. The free testing is filed as an amusement and attended to as one. Sixpence is a small sum, but it states that the man on the other side of the table believes the quarter of an hour has worth, and a customer will generally accept that judgement, having no better one to put in its place. This is the ordinary business of a price speaking before you do, working on a thing most trades never think to price at all.

The second is the matter of who comes. A free offer is answered by everybody with an idle half hour, which is not the same population as everybody meaning to buy spectacles. A sixpenny charge is a fence a foot high. It stops nobody who came to buy and turns back the boys, the browsers and the man after a scythe stone. You have not reduced your enquiries, you have sorted them, and the sorting costs nothing to run. Trades that are busy and poor are very often trades with no fence anywhere on the premises.

The third is what the payment does to the person who made it. A man who has laid sixpence on a table has made a small decision in your favour, and he will sit still, answer your questions and listen to the recommendation, because people prefer to look consistent with what they have already done. He is also far likelier to use what he is given. The free guide goes in a drawer and the paid one gets read, which is the difference between a gift and a purchase, and it is why the second seller sold better lenses rather than the cheapest in the tray.

Now the fair objection, because there is a good one. Free samples do sell goods, and anybody who has eaten a crumb of cake at a baker's door knows it. The distinction is not between generous and mean, it is in what the giving costs you. A crumb of cake costs a farthing, is eaten in a moment, and decides the sale on the spot. Your attendance is not a crumb of cake. It is the one stock you cannot make more of, and it decides nothing on the spot. Give away what is cheap and plentiful. Put a number on what is scarce and dear, which in nearly every small trade is you, sitting down with somebody for twenty minutes. A free hour given away in the hope of a sale is the commonest unpriced stock in the country.

Two cautions. The first is that there are things your trade gives free by long custom, and an estimate for work you are going to do is usually one of them. Charging for those reads as meanness and costs more than it brings. The sixpence belongs on the thing that is a piece of work in itself: the testing, the diagnosis, the survey, the place in the class, the hour of advice. The second is that the sum must stay token, must come off the bill, and the slate must say so before anybody sits down. Sixpence allowed off is a filter. Sixpence kept, unmentioned until afterwards, is a trick, and a trick is paid for twice.

The Answer to the Riddle

Only one of them went home with an empty tray. Which, and why?

The second, and not because he was the better salesman. He charged for the quarter of an hour, which told every customer that the quarter of an hour was worth having, turned back the people who were never going to buy spectacles at all, and left those who did sit down readier to take his advice. The first man gave away the only thing he was short of, all day, to a crowd that was never in the market, and called it generosity.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What do I give away that is made of my hours rather than my stock? Write it down by name. The visit, the call, the sample design, the first lesson. Then add up how many hours of last month went into it.
2. What proportion of the people who took it bought anything? Better than two in three, and your fence is high enough already. One in five, and you are running a free amusement, paid for with the hours the buyers needed.
3. What is my sixpence, and what does it buy them? Name a small, plain sum, and what the payer gets for it that the passer-by does not. Then write the sentence allowing it off the bill, since that sentence is what makes it a fence rather than a wall.

The verse:

The board that said the trying of a sight would cost you nought,
Brought every idle fellow in the market, less the sort who bought.
A sixpence on the table is a fence a foot in height,
It turns away the passer and it keeps the man who might.

Until next time. Go and name the one thing you give away that is made of your own hours, put a small plain price on it today, and write the line that allows that price off the first bill.

P.S. Watch what the sixpence does to you, as well as to them. A man who has been paid for his quarter of an hour conducts it differently. He begins on time, asks his questions in order, and says what he honestly recommends, because he is doing a job rather than auditioning for one. Half the value of charging for a thing is that you begin to treat it as work.

Also in the archive: What Your Price Says Before You Do, The Millwright's Two Pounds and Twopence and Half a Mile.