Four Lots of Two Hundred

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, a man who wished to know whether a thing would pay had to buy the answer out of the same pocket as the rent. Most bought too little of it to be told anything, and then believed what they had not been told.

Two clockmakers in one town, the same bench and the same small oil can.
Both laid four pounds on the counter of the same printer in March.
Both carried away eight hundred handbills, the same words on every one.
One put two hundred into each of four parts of the town.
The other put the whole eight hundred into one part, and went twice.
Which of the two knew, by Michaelmas, what to do the following March?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two clockmakers in the town I have never named. Both cleaned and regulated house clocks, both called for the clock and carried it home again, both charged two and sixpence and were worth it. Neither had ever advertised. In the February of a thin year each decided, separately, to try it, and each went to the same printer. Four pounds, eight hundred bills, the same seven lines on every one.

The first clockmaker was the more careful man, and his care took the form of spreading. He would not put four pounds into one basket. Two hundred bills went to the new villas on the hill, where the money was. Two hundred went to the cottages along the canal, where the clocks were old and wanted doing. Two hundred went down the farm lane, and two hundred he gave out at the market on a Saturday.

What came back was this. One enquiry from the hill, which turned into a job. Nothing from the canal. Nothing from the lane. One at the market, from a man who then thought better of it. He wrote in his day book: handbills, four pounds, two enquiries, one clock. Then he wrote the sentence that cost him six years. The canal cottages will not pay for cleaning, and handbills do not answer here.

The second clockmaker did the lazier-looking thing. He took all eight hundred to the cottages along the canal and nowhere else, and since that district would not yield eight hundred doors, he went down four hundred in the last week of March and down the same four hundred again three weeks later.

Eleven people wrote or called. Nine clocks came in, and two more in October from householders who had kept the bill behind the tea caddy since the spring. When he sat down in November he had something the first man did not, and it was not the money. It was a figure. Eight hundred bills down those doors had brought eleven enquiries, between one and two in every hundred, and nine of them had turned into work. He knew what four pounds bought, and could now afford to try the hill and see whether the villas were better or worse. The first clockmaker had given up on advertising.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A trial too small to have produced ten replies even when it is working perfectly cannot tell you anything at all when it produces none. It has not failed. It has been too small to speak, and you have mistaken a silence for a sentence.

Begin with the arithmetic, which is not difficult and is almost never done. A bill through a door, when it is doing well, is answered by one or two households in every hundred. Not ten. One or two. So two hundred bills, working perfectly, promise two replies, perhaps four if the offer is strong. Two is a number so small that ordinary luck moves it about at will: the same bill through the same doors gives four one year and none the next, for the same reason that a man who sows a handful of seed in a corner learns nothing whatever about his seed.

So the first clockmaker did not buy four answers for his four pounds. He bought four shrugs and read all four as answers, which is the expensive part. One of them was wrong in a way that would cost him for years, since the canal cottages were his best ground and he had struck them off on the strength of nothing. A false conclusion is dearer than no conclusion, because a man who knows nothing will look again, and a man who thinks he knows will not.

Understand next why dividing feels prudent, since the feeling is the whole trap. Spreading does protect you from losing the lot in the wrong place. What nobody notices it cannot do is tell you which place was wrong. You have been careful with the money and reckless with the knowledge, and the knowledge was the only thing you were buying. It is the instinct that spreads a one-man trade over six ways of being seen at once, each given too little to show anything.

Then the remedy, which is not more money but less ground. If your purse will not buy a readable trial of the whole town, it will often buy one of a quarter of it, and a trial you can read is worth four you cannot. Narrow until the numbers can speak, and go twice down one street rather than once down two, since the second passing lifts the reply and costs nothing but shoe leather. And before you accept a nil as real, satisfy yourself the bill was put into a human hand at all.

Two cautions. This is not an argument for large advertising, and a man who reads it as leave to spend more than he has will deserve what follows: the cure for an unreadable trial is a smaller piece of ground, not a bigger purse. And a readable answer is still an answer about one thing only, those words at those doors in that month. A good result does not license the county, and a poor one condemns that bill rather than every bill you will print.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. How many replies could your last trial have given you at its very best? Take the number of people it reached, take one in a hundred of that, and look at the figure. If it is under ten you were never going to learn anything, and must stop quoting the result as though you had.
2. What is the smallest ground you could cover twice? Name the district or the register, count the households, and see whether your money will go down those doors twice rather than twice as many once.
3. On what date will you count? Write it in the book before the first bill goes out, four weeks after the last one, and refuse yourself an opinion until then. A man who counts on the Friday has made his trial smaller in time, which is as fatal as making it smaller in paper.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of the two knew, by Michaelmas, what to do the following March?

The second, and he knew it because he had refused to be careful. Both spent four pounds and both got some trade out of it. Only one bought a figure he could use again, and he bought it by sending the whole of his money down one set of doors twice over, where the arithmetic was large enough to answer him.

The verse:

The first man split his eight hundred
and four times came to nought;
the second sent his down one street
and bought the fact he sought.

Until next time. Go and take the number of people your last advertising actually reached, divide it by a hundred, and see whether you ever had an answer at all.

P.S. Write the rate down the moment you have it and keep it in the same book year after year. Eight hundred bills, eleven enquiries, nine clocks. A trade that knows its own ordinary rate can read a small trial after all, because it knows what the figure ought to have been.

Also in the archive: The Chandler's Two Jars, The Blue Bills and Sixty-One at the Stall.