Half an Inch a Year

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town two men wore away the very thing they worked with, and only one of them charged for it.

Two grinders in one town, the same wheel turned off the same mill stream.
Both ground the same shears at the same fourpence a dozen.
Both stones were cut from the same quarry in the same month of the same year.
One of them, every Saturday, put something by out of the week's fourpences.
Same stone, same price, same seven years of wearing, and only one was still grinding in the eighth.
Which of the two had been charging the proper price all along?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two grinders in the town I have never named. Each had a shed below the mill with a sandstone wheel three feet across, running in a trough of water off the mill shaft. Between them they ground the edge tools of the parish. A stone hisses rather than screams when set right, and the grit comes off as a paste that dries grey on a man's forearms.

The first grinder kept a ruled book, and on its first page was a sum he had done before he ever named a price. A new stone was four pounds ten at the quarry and eleven shillings more to hang true on the spindle. His own lost half an inch of diameter a year at the rate he worked, and below two feet it was no use to him. So he had seven years of stone, written out as a sum per week. It came off the takings on a Saturday into a tin on a high shelf, before the rent.

The second grinder was the better man at the wheel. But his prices were set in his first year, by the feel of that year, and the feel of a first year is the feel of a shed in which the dearest thing standing in it is already paid for. His stone was bought. The matter was closed. For six years he had more in his pocket on a Saturday night, and took it to mean he was doing rather better.

In the seventh year his wheel was small. A small wheel makes a man press harder, pressing harder heats an edge, and a heated edge goes soft. He had shears come back that would not hold, then a razor a barber would not put on a customer's face. He ground on for five months anyway, because a new stone meant five pounds he had not got. When the old one went past use he borrowed the five in the next street at a rate that would make you wince, and found besides that the quarry which cut it had closed and the nearest good grit came twenty miles further. The butchers had meanwhile taken to sending their knives to the next town.

Mark it, because the lesson depends on it: he made one arithmetical error in his first year and then worked honestly for six years inside it.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Every price must carry a share of the tool it is wearing out, reckoned on what the next one will cost rather than on what the last one did. A stone is not a thing you own. It is money in a slower form, and every dozen shears takes a little of it away for good.

The paid-for tool is the most expensive illusion in trade. It makes a wrong price look right for as long as it takes a man to arrange his life around the surplus. The stone sends in no bill each quarter. It gets smaller while he gets used to the money, and the reckoning arrives all at once, on a date chosen by the stone rather than by him.

Notice that what you paid has nothing to do with it. It is a dead fact, of interest to the taxman and nobody else. The cost of today's work is what it takes to do today's work again next year. If good grit now comes twenty miles further off, your price was wrong from the morning the near quarry shut, and your costs rose without a word said to you. The same holds for the van, the ladders and the kiln. The program paid for by the month at least names its cost; the thing bought outright lies to you quietly for years.

You will be told that your books handle this under depreciation. So they do, after a fashion, at the figure you paid and on a schedule set by law rather than by your stone, which answers what your profit was and not what you must charge this week. You will also be told that borrowing when the time comes amounts to the same thing. It does not. Borrowing at a moment of your choosing is a tool; borrowing at a moment of the stone's choosing is a tax on not having thought about it, at the rate a hurried man is offered. It is the same arithmetic as the days in the year that nobody pays you for, and it belongs inside a price for the same reason.

The method is one I have urged on you before: measure your own trade instead of listening to the going rate. Write out the three dearest things you own. Against each, the cost of the next one, today, with carriage and fitting. Against that, its working life in years or in jobs. Divide, and add it in. Then make the money leave the account. A sum that sits in your price but not in a separate place has not been set aside; it has merely been spent later than usual, on something pleasant.

Two cautions. You must not load one job with a whole machine. Spread it across the work the machine will honestly do in its life, and if the figure per job then makes your price unsellable, the machine is wrong for your trade and ought to be hired. The second is subtler. Sometimes the honest cost of the next one is nothing, because you would not buy it again, and a tool you keep only because you once paid for it is charging customers for a decision you have already regretted.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What would the next one cost today? Not what it cost you. Ask the supplier for a current figure on your three dearest items.
2. How much work is left in it? Years, miles, firings, jobs, whatever the thing is honestly measured in. Write down a guess rather than nothing, since a written guess can be corrected and a feeling cannot be.
3. Where does that money go when a customer pays it? If it goes into the same account as everything else, you are not setting it aside. You are deferring the spending of it.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of the two had been charging the proper price all along?

The first, and the proof is that he was charging it in his second year, when his stone was fat and new and the tin on the shelf looked a fussy habit. The other man's price was never right. It was right-looking for six years, which is long enough to mistake for the same thing.

The verse:

The wheel that sharpens half the town
grows smaller as it turns,
so put the next stone in the price
of every edge it earns.

Until next time. Go and find out what the dearest tool you own would cost you to buy again this week.

P.S. A second hand tool wears at the same rate as a new one. Its cheapness is a discount on somebody else's wearing and not on yours, so the sum you put by is still governed by the price of the next machine. Which gives you a signal most trades never watch: the year to look hard at your prices is not the year your machine dies, it is the year the machine you must eventually buy got dearer.

Also in the archive: Eleven Small Wages, Nine Shillings a Chair and The Man He Could Not Afford.