Nine Pounds and Then Nothing

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two chair makers were asked up to the same farmhouse in the same October to price the same twelve chairs for a new parlour, and both walked home with nine pounds in their heads.

Two chair makers, the same ash for the backs, the same elm for the seats, the same twelve chairs.
The same nine pounds reckoned on the same walk home, down to the shilling.
One named his figure, and went on talking while the farmer's wife thought about it.
One named his figure, and let the kitchen clock be heard.
Neither man was dishonest, neither was a fool, and the chairs would have been the same chairs.
Why was one of them paid eight pounds five, and the other nine pounds and the next order?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two chair makers in the town I've never named, one with a shop behind the corn merchant's and one in a lean-to at the top of the lane. Both worked the same way: ash cleft green and steamed for the bows, elm for the seats because elm will not split under an adze, the legs turned on a pole lathe. Both asked fifteen shillings a chair, which for twelve chairs is nine pounds. The farmhouse wanted twelve for a new table, three of them with arms, and the farmer's wife had both men up on separate afternoons to ask what it would be for the twelve.

The first chair maker told her. Nine pounds, he said, for the twelve, three with arms. And then, because she did not answer at once, he kept going. It was a deal of money for chairs, he said, he knew that. Of course the splats needn't be fretted, that being the slow part. By the time she had finished stirring the pot on the range he was down to eight pounds five, and she said that would do very well.

The second chair maker told her the same figure. Nine pounds for the twelve, three with arms, delivered after Michaelmas. Then he put his hat on his knee and said nothing at all.

What followed was long enough to be uncomfortable. The clock on the dresser was heard. The dog under the table shifted and settled. She was doing her own arithmetic, which was not the arithmetic either man would have done for her: nine pounds against thirty years of sitting, and against her sister who paid seven pounds for six and regretted it. Then she asked whether the seats were elm the whole way through. He said they were, adzed out solid. She said then we shall have them.

He was paid nine pounds at the delivery, and in January she sent him to her brother-in-law for a settle, saying he was a man who told you the price.

Be fair to the first man. His chairs were as sound and his fretwork better, and what he did was not greed or weakness but kindness and nerves in the usual proportion. The quiet after his figure did not sound to him like a woman doing a sum. It sounded like a refusal being got ready, and he headed it off the way a man puts out a hand to break a fall that is not happening.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Name your figure, then stop: the next voice should be the customer's. Not yours softening it, not yours explaining it, not yours wondering aloud whether there is a cheaper way about it. The number, a full stop, and the quiet.

The first reason this works is that a price lands in a head that must weigh it against four or five things at once, none of which you know about. That weighing is work, it is done in silence, and it cannot be done while somebody is talking. Interrupt a person mid-sum and they do not take it up where they left off. They put it down and say they will think it over, and the thinking over never happens.

The second reason is that nearly all a customer learns about whether your price is a real price, they learn from what you do in the ten seconds after you say it. Speech in that gap is heard as apology, apology implies there is room, and a buyer shown there is room is obliged to go looking for it. The first man did not merely give away fifteen shillings. He taught a customer that his figures are opening positions, which she will know for as long as she buys chairs.

The third reason is the plainest. Nobody can talk you down from a price you have not reopened yourself. A customer asking for a reduction is asking a question, and questions can be answered, as dealt with elsewhere, at the handshake. A concession offered into a silence answers an objection nobody made, earns no goodwill, and commonly buys a sale you already had. Note what the first man got for his fifteen shillings: a yes he would have had anyway, and plainer chairs than the house wanted.

Two cautions. First, the quiet is not a place to keep things back. Everything needed to weigh the figure goes before the figure: the work, what it includes, when it will be done, what is to be paid and when. Silence covering something unsaid is concealment rather than confidence, and it comes out later at four times the price. Second, silence has a length, and it is ten seconds rather than a minute. Nothing is won by making a woman uneasy in her own kitchen. The moment she speaks, answer her plainly, and if she says yes, do not start selling again, which has a letter to itself.

Three questions, and you will know the answers by Friday if you listen:

1. What are the last words you say before your figure? If they run "so it works out at about", you are apologising before you reach the number. Say the sum plainly, as a fact about the world.
2. Of the last three reductions you made, how many were asked for? If you cannot remember being asked, you were not, and the money went for nothing. That is not generosity but the cost of your own discomfort.
3. What always follows the price when you say it out loud? Everybody has one thing: a justification, a joke, a remark about the weather, a soft word about how it is a lot of money. Whatever yours is, you do it every time, and the difference between nine pounds and eight pounds five is what it collects.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why was one of them paid eight pounds five, and the other nine pounds and the next order?

Because nobody asked the first man for eight pounds five. He proposed it himself, into a quiet he could not sit still in, and was taken up on it, as any sensible householder would. The second man let the quiet do the one thing quiet does, which is to leave the decision with the person whose decision it is. And the January order went to him because a customer who pays the price she was told has something simple to say about you.

The verse:

One named his nine pounds, then talked until it was eight,
One named his nine pounds, then listened to the clock.
The same ash, the same elm, the same twelve chairs to make,
But one was paid his figure, and one was paid his doubt.

Until next time. Go and say your next price out loud with a full stop at the end of it, and count ten before you add a single word.

P.S. The rule holds on paper, and is broken there oftener. The total should be the last figure on the page, with nothing under it but the date you can start and your name. A paragraph after the total is talking into the pause in ink, read twice by somebody hunting for the sentence that says you would rather have the work than the money.

Also in the archive: When They Say It Is Too Expensive, The Fourth Lever and The Pencil in the Margin.