The Four Days Out of the Shop

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town every trade had a figure that all of its men charged and none of them could account for. A rate asked for long enough stops sounding like an opinion and begins to sound like the weather.

Two bootmakers in the old town, the same calf leather and the same waxed thread.
Both asked eighteen shillings for a pair of strong boots, because eighteen shillings was what the parish asked.
Both had asked it for eleven years and neither had ever been argued with.
One spent the slack of February at his bench.
One spent four days of that February out of the shop with a notebook.
Same trade, same eighteen shillings. What did the second man come home with?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two bootmakers in the town I've never named, their shops a quarter of a mile apart on the same road, each with a boy, a bench worn into a hollow where the knee goes, and the smell of wax and wet leather about him. February is a thin month in boots.

Eighteen shillings was the price of a pair of strong boots and had been since either man was out of his apprenticeship. Neither could have told you who set it. It was the figure, as a yard is a yard.

The first bootmaker spent his February well. He mended, tidied his lasts and taught the boy to close an upper, and he thought himself priced about right, because nobody ever complained of him. What worried him was the cheap ready-made stuff coming in by rail, and against that he had no answer but to hold his figure.

The second bootmaker left the boy with the mending and took four days. He walked to the two market towns and read what was chalked and printed in every boot shop window in both, then went inside two of them and said plainly that he was in the trade and wished to know what they got for a pair like the one on his own feet. Both told him, as tradesmen will if you are honest about the asking and not from their parish.

He called on three householders who had been his customers once and had stopped coming, and asked what they had paid elsewhere. He asked a saddler and a corn chandler, men who sold to the same kitchens and competed with him for nothing, what they charged and how often they were refused. He came home with nine real figures in a notebook.

Two things came out of them. In both market towns a boot no better than his fetched twenty-two and sixpence. He traced his own eighteen shillings back as far as anyone could remember, and it stopped at a shop at the cheap end of the old town, shut these nine years, whose master had wanted the whole parish's custom and whose widow sold his lasts to pay his debts. The rate that governed the trade had been one dead man's appetite for work.

The second thing was less comfortable. He charged two and threepence to resole where both market towns charged one and ninepence. He had been dear by sixpence on the commonest job in his trade for years and never heard a word of it, because a man who thinks your mending dear does not argue, he walks past your door with his boots under his arm.

So he moved both. Strong boots went to twenty-one and sixpence, written on a card in the window, with an honest lighter boot at sixteen for those who needed one. Resoling went down to one and ninepence. He lost two customers and got back a trickle of mending, which is how a bootmaker is introduced to the feet of a parish, and ended the year with a third more in the book and less work in it.

Be fair to the first man. He was the better bootmaker. His trouble was that in eleven years nobody had told him one true thing about his prices, and he had never gone out and asked.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

The going rate in your trade is not a measurement, it is a rumour, and it is kept alive chiefly by the men in it who want the work most. The rest of this letter is the argument for going out and measuring it, and for expecting bad news in both directions.

Begin with where your own figures came from. One is what your old employer charged. One you worked out the year you started, when you knew least about your costs. One you copied from the only competitor whose prices you could see, which generally means the cheapest, since the cheapest are the men who publish a figure. Each was then raised a little, now and again, by an amount chosen to feel defensible. Nowhere in that history is there a measurement.

Now consider why nobody corrects it. Your customers cannot: they know one price, yours. Your competitors will not, because the cheap men in a trade believe the rate is a law and the dear ones are content for you to think so. Your books cannot, since they record what people paid you, which measures your asking. That is why a price nobody has ever refused has told you nothing. Silence is the sound of a parish with nothing to compare you with.

The measuring is dull and takes a week of odd hours, which is why it is seldom done and why doing it puts you ahead of better tradesmen. Three honest places to look. What is published: windows, price lists, printed rates, whatever your trade puts where anybody may read it. What was actually paid: ask three customers you lost what the other man charged and what they got, which people answer freely once they are no longer buying. And what a disinterested neighbour charges: another trade serving the same households, who will also tell you how often he is refused, the number no rival will give you.

Expect the news to run both ways, for that is the proof you measured rather than argued. Our man was cheap on boots and dear on soles, and the dear price did the greater harm. A trade that has drifted into one figure for everything has drifted into the cheap end of its market without deciding to, while carrying a price or two that sends good work up the road.

Two cautions. Do not mistake an advertised figure for what a man is paid; the competitor with a number in his window may be discounting it all day. And do not come home from four days of counting and raise everything at once. Move the prices you have evidence for, one at a time, and watch what comes back.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Where did this figure come from? Write beside your five commonest prices the reason each is what it is. Any you cannot trace, you inherited, and an inherited price is another man's guess.
2. What has anybody actually paid, outside my own shop, this month? Three real figures with dates. The rate you believe your trade charges is usually the one you charged in a leaner year.
3. Where am I the dear one, and do I know why? The job you are dear on will not announce itself. Nobody argues about small work, they take it elsewhere.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same trade, same eighteen shillings. What did the second man come home with?

Nine figures that were not his own. Not a higher price, which is what his rival would have assumed, but a measurement of the rate they both obeyed. It raised one of his prices, lowered another, and left him the only bootmaker in the parish who knew what his work was worth rather than what it had always fetched.

The verse:

The rate of the parish is nobody's rate,
for the man who first named it is gone.
So go out and measure what others are paid,
then come home and settle your own.

Until next time. Go and get three real prices from outside your own business, with the date you got them, and keep them beside your price list.

P.S. Do it again each spring and the second time takes an afternoon. Measure your market yearly and you will know which way the trade is moving before your competitors do.

Also in the archive: What Your Price Says Before You Do, The Prices Nobody Argued With and The Figure He Did Not Tidy.