Any Figure He Liked

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where two corn dealers kept their granaries at either end of one street, and a single hungry winter decided the next twenty years for both.

Two corn dealers in one town, the same loft, the same scales and the same sound wheat.
Both bought at the same market, and neither ever gave a customer short weight.
Both met the winter the water fell and the mills up the river stood idle.
One asked what a household with nowhere else to go would pay, and was paid it for eleven weeks.
One raised his price by what the wheat had cost him, chalked the reason on a slate, and let nobody carry off more than a stone.
Why was the second man's shop the busier for twenty years afterwards, in winters when nobody was hungry at all?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two corn dealers, in the town I have never named. A loft reached by a ladder, sacks standing open with their mouths rolled down, the brass scoop, the beam scales with the weights kept bright, and the smell of meal that gets into a man's coat and never comes out. Both kept dry lofts, and both were honest in the way trade requires, which is that the weight was the weight.

Then the river fell. The mills could not turn, flour came in by cart from thirty miles off when it came at all, and for eleven weeks those two lofts were very nearly the only meal the town could get at.

The first dealer put his price where the demand stood. Not out of cruelty. He had bought dear himself, a note falling due at the bank in March, and five children at his own table. Every stone was sold to a willing buyer over a true weight at a figure agreed before the scoop went in, and he turned away no household that had the money. In eleven weeks he made what an ordinary year brought him, and thought himself a sound man who had read a market correctly, which in the narrow sense he was.

The second dealer had bought dear too, and he also put his price up, which disappoints people who tell this story expecting a saint. He put it up by what the wheat had cost him and not a penny beyond, and chalked the figure on a slate by the door with the reason under it, the price of a bushel at market and the day he paid it, so any man in the street could do the sum himself. Then a second line: one stone to a household at a time, while the mills are standing. That line cost him the easy trade of the winter, the man with a cart who would have emptied the loft in a morning. By February he had earned a little over an ordinary February and no more.

Spring came, the river rose, and flour was flour again. Nothing happened to the first dealer. No crowd, no broken window, nobody shouting in the street. His trade simply began to go, by a very little, every year. A woman with a choice of two shops walked the extra hundred yards. A couple taking a house was told which end of the street to buy from, and the telling did not always include the reason, because by then it needed none. Inside ten years his takings were two thirds of what they had been, and he laid it to the new shop by the bridge, and the railway, and the times.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A customer records a price raised because he had no alternative not as an expense but as an injury, and that account is never closed. Money has a memory of about a fortnight. Unfairness has a memory of thirty years, and it is handed on to people who were not there.

The reason lies in how a price is read. Nobody judges your figure against the value of the goods, which they cannot assess. They judge it against three marks they have to hand: what you charged last time, what you charge other people, and what you would have charged them had they been free to walk away. A gap between your price and those marks is not felt as a price at all. It is a sum taken out of them, and the taking is laid to your character rather than to the market, because character is the only explanation a householder has. Nor is a willing buyer the defence it appears. A yes from a man with no second door is remembered as a no that was overruled, and he will tell it that way for life.

Now the honest objection, because there is one and it is not foolish. A high price in a shortage does useful work. It stops the first comers clearing the shelves and it calls in supply from elsewhere. That holds where the market is wide and the buyers are strangers the seller will never meet again. It does not hold in a trade of forty streets, where the same forty households will buy from you for thirty years. And the second dealer rationed too. He used a rule instead of a number, which cost him a winter's profit and cost his name nothing. Where you can ration by a rule, the rule is the cheaper instrument.

Your own trade will not involve flour, but it will involve the moment. The figure invented at the door while water comes through a ceiling. The renewal price set above the one offered to strangers, because this customer is unlikely to move. The charge for leaving. The fee that appears once the floor is up. Each exists because of the customer's lack of options, and each is being written down.

Two cautions. First, fair does not mean cheap, and holding a price in a crisis is no argument for never raising it. A rise announced in January with a reason and a date, applying to everybody, injures nobody, because it fails all three comparisons above. The injury was never the size of the number. It was the moment the number appeared, and that it was aimed at one person. Second, fairness is not absorbing every cost. A rush job genuinely costs you, and somebody is already paying for it, so it must be charged. The test is whether the charge existed before the customer's emergency did. A published figure for urgent work is a fact about your trade. The same figure found while looking at a desperate man is a fact about you.

Three questions, and the first can be answered tonight with your own list of charges in front of you:

1. Which of your charges are higher because the customer had nowhere else to go? Mark them. Call-out figures set by eye, renewal rates above new-customer rates, anything payable on the way out. Each is a withdrawal from an account whose balance you cannot see.
2. Would you be content for this customer to see what you charged the last one? If not, you have not found a clever price. You have found one that depends on secrecy, and secrecy in a trade of regulars has the shelf life of a week.
3. Did this price come from the work or from the moment? Name the cost behind it. If you can point to the extra hours, the materials, the evening given up, you have a price you can chalk on a slate. If you cannot, your customer will supply the explanation himself, and it will not flatter you.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why was the second man's shop the busier for twenty years afterwards, with the same loft, the same scales and the same sound wheat? Because both men sold flour that winter and only one knew he was selling anything else. The first was paid handsomely by people who had no choice, and every one of them kept the memory. The second was paid very little by the same people, who kept it too. The flour was eaten by March. The memory was still being repeated when both men were old.

The verse:

The river fell, the mills stood still, and both men had their day,
One took the price the hunger bore, one chalked the reason up,
The flour was gone by Lady Day in every house in town,
But what was done that winter keeps, and is not undone.

Until next time. Go and read your own list of charges tonight, and mark every one that exists only because the customer had nowhere else to go.

P.S. One further thing, which catches out the generous as often as the grasping. The second dealer never told a customer he could have charged more. Had he said it, he would have claimed the credit in the same breath as the kindness, and people do not care to be reminded they were at somebody's mercy and were spared. The slate said what the wheat had cost and what he was asking, and nothing else. That is why it was still being told forty years later by people who never met him.

Also in the archive: Made for a Colder Winter, The Cousin's Gate and Twenty-Two Kitchens.