Nine Shillings a Chair

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town there were two men who recovered furniture, both as honest as the day, and the whole difference between them was how many times a householder had to hear a figure.

Two upholsterers in the town I have never named, the same horsehair and the same curved needles.
Both worked clean, both worked well, and neither ever took a penny he had not earned.
Both fetched the chairs, found the webbing perished, and put in new.
One named his price for the chair, and the rest of it at the door on the Friday.
One named his price for the whole of it, the fetching and the webbing and the carrying back.
Same hair, same needles, same honest arithmetic. Whose cart went out a second time?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Both men worked in a back shop with a bench down one wall and a barrel of hair at the end of it, and both were sent for by the same sort of household: three dining chairs gone soft in the seat, the hair settled into hollows, a lady who wanted them right before the winter visiting began. Both left the outer cloth to her own choosing and charged it alike by the yard, so leave the cloth out of the reckoning.

The first upholsterer looked at the chairs in her parlour and said nine shillings a chair. She thought that very fair and said so, and told her husband that evening that the chairs would be twenty-seven shillings. The cart came on the Monday and took them away.

On the Friday they came back, and so did the bill. Nine shillings a chair, as promised, twenty-seven. Fetching and returning, two and six each way, five shillings. New webbing and a fresh laying of hair, one and ninepence a chair, five and threepence. Calico beneath the cover, eightpence a chair, two shillings. Thirty-nine and threepence, every line of it true, and not one of the four a thing she could have refused and still had chairs fit to sit on.

She paid it, and did not argue. Each item was plainly a real article a man must buy and a real hour a man must work, and she could hardly say her chairs ought to have no webbing in them. But she had carried twenty-seven shillings about in her head for a week and had said it out loud to her husband, and she had now to go back into that room with a figure half again as large. The sofa in the window wanted doing as well. She did not send for him in the spring, and when her sister asked who had done the chairs she gave the name and said nothing else, which is the worst thing a contented customer can do.

The second upholsterer looked at the same sort of chairs and said thirteen shillings a chair, fetched from your door and brought back to it, webbing, hair and calico all found by me, and nothing further to pay but the cloth you pick. Thirty-nine shillings. She thought it a great deal of money for three chairs and said she would think about it. She did, for eleven days, and talked it over at home where talking is done. Then she sent word to come on the Monday.

The bill on the Friday said thirty-nine shillings, which she had known since the first day. Threepence less, as it happens, than the first man's bill for the identical work. The sofa went in before Whitsun and the sister's chairs after harvest.

Be fair to the first man. He was no cheat. He itemised because he had once been accused of charging for webbing that had not wanted replacing, and had resolved never again to take money for an article he had not put into a chair. About one seat in ten came to him sound, and that household paid one and ninepence less than it would have paid his rival. He was the more accurate of the two men by a distance. Accuracy was not the thing he was being judged on.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Everything your customer cannot refuse belongs inside the figure you first name, and only what he may truly decline belongs beside it. The test is not whether a charge is fair. All four of the first man's charges were fair. The test is whether the man could have said no to it and still had the thing he came to you for. If he could not, it was never an extra. It was a part of your price that you had decided not to mention yet.

The reason this costs you so much lies in what a first figure actually is. You believe you have priced one component. Your customer has heard a promise about the size of the whole business, and has gone home and repeated it to the person he must answer to. Every sum arriving afterwards is therefore not weighed against the market, nor against the worth of a chair fit to sit in. It is weighed against the promise, and whatever is measured against a promise comes out as a correction to it. Twenty-seven becoming thirty-nine is not a bill. It is twelve shillings of being wrong in front of her husband, and she will pay the twelve shillings and keep the feeling.

Notice too how many occasions of doubt the first man made out of one job. Four lines on a bill are four moments in which a customer must decide whether she is being taken advantage of, and she decides alone, after the work is done, when refusing is no longer open to her. I have argued before that a price broken into parts invites the customer to take it apart, and this is the same trouble arriving later and worse. The second man's figure was argued with once, in the right week, by a woman still deciding whether to buy at all. That is the only safe hour for an argument about money.

The sorting of the one from the other is plain counting, and your own invoices will do it for you. Take the last ten and find the charge that appears on nine. If you add cartage every time, cartage is not a service but a cost of your trade, and its average belongs in your figure. What of the tenth seat, where an inclusive price charges for something that was not needed? Let that household have it off the bill unasked. A reduction nobody requested buys more in a parish than exactness ever did, and it lets you say the sentence your rival never once got to say: it wanted less than I expected, so you owe me less than I said.

Two cautions. The first is that an inclusive price is not a vague one. A figure with nothing written under it merely moves the quarrel to what was covered. Name the whole, then name its parts in a single line, fetched, rewebbed, stuffed, calicoed and returned, so the customer knows which sentence he is buying. The second is that a genuine surprise is another animal, and none of this is a licence to swallow real unforeseen work in silence. When the frame itself is broken under the cover, that is news and must be told as news, before the work goes on rather than on the bill afterwards. I have written elsewhere about how to tell a customer the cost has risen, and the whole of it rests on the rise being something you could not have known. Nine times in ten is something you knew.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Which charge appears on nine of my last ten invoices? That is not an extra. It is a part of your price standing outside in the cold, and it costs you the second visit from every customer it surprises.
2. What figure does my customer repeat at home? That number is the promise you have made, whether you meant to make it or not. Decide it on purpose.
3. Which addition do I most often waive to keep the peace? A charge you are forever letting go is one you have already judged to be part of the work. Put it in the price and stop giving it away.

The Answer to the Riddle

The same hair, the same needles, the same perished webbing and the same thirty-nine shillings at the end of the week. Whose cart went out a second time?

The second man's. By threepence he was the dearer of the two only in the telling. He sold one figure, on the day she could still refuse it, to a woman who then had eleven days to make her peace with it at her own fireside. The first sold a small figure and then sent a larger one into a house where it could only land as a correction. He collected his money, and lost the sofa, the sister, and the sentence she might have said in the market.

The verse:

Your price is a promise the hour it leaves your mouth,
And all that follows after it is heard as a repair.
So gather every penny that the man could never dodge,
And tell him the whole of it at once, and let him take it home.

Until next time. Go and look through your last ten invoices for the charge that sits on nine of them, and put it inside your price before Friday.

P.S. Where the final bill cannot match the figure you named to the penny, write the difference on the invoice with its reason beside it in one short line, even when the difference is in the customer's favour. An unexplained two shillings costs far more in doubt than two shillings is worth, and a customer left to work out your arithmetic for himself arrives at the least flattering answer available to him.

Also in the archive: While You're Here, To the Waterline and The Christening Cup.