Once in the Window

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where two fishmongers began the same Friday cart in the same week of May and only one valley ever heard of it.

Two fishmongers in one town, the same boats, the same ice house, the same herring on the same wet slab.
Both began a Friday cart to the four villages up the valley in the same week of May.
One wrote a notice, a good one, put it in his window and waited to see what the Fridays would bring.
One told the same news nine times before July, and never twice in the same way or by the same door.
By August one cart went up half loaded and came home half loaded, and the other was spoken for by Wednesday.
Why did a piece of news that was equally true in both shops reach only one of them any custom?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two fishmongers, in a town I have never named. Sawdust on the boards, a slab washed down so often the slate had gone soft at the edges, and in the back a brick ice house that smelled of cold straw. Both bought off the same two boats. Both knew to the shilling what a basket of mackerel was worth by eleven in the morning. Neither was a fool.

In the second week of May they each worked out the same thing. The four villages up the valley, three to seven miles off, had no fishmonger and no intention of walking down to get one. A cart, a tarpaulin, a load of ice and a Friday morning would put good fish in forty or fifty kitchens that had been making do with salt and tins.

The first man wrote a notice about it, and I will say plainly it was the better notice of the two. It named the four villages, it named the hour, it promised the fish on ice and not in a sack, and it ended with a line about Friday dinner that a man might be proud of. He had it printed on good paper, put it in his window on the Tuesday, and went back to work.

Over the following week perhaps sixty people stood in front of that window. Some read it. Of those, a dozen were valley people, and four of the dozen already had a Friday arrangement they were content with. The cart went up on the first Friday and sold eleven shillings, and on the second it sold nine. By the fourth Friday he had concluded something about the valley, which was that the valley did not want fish, and he stopped the cart in the middle of June. He said so at the ice house, and the other man said nothing much.

Because the second man had done something duller. He had taken the same news, no better than his rival's, and arranged to say it nine times between the middle of May and the end of July. He said it in his window, like the first man. He said it to everyone who came to the counter, in one sentence, while he was wrapping, which cost him nothing. He wrote it on the paper his fish went home in, so it was read at a kitchen table by somebody who had not been in the shop at all. He sent a card up with the carrier to the inn in each village, to be pinned where men stand waiting, and paid the smith at the top village in whiting for keeping a dozen more on his bench. In June a second notice went in the window with a new particular on it, the hour the cart would reach each lane end, which is the thing a woman actually needs to know. In July he wrote again to say there would be crab while the crab lasted. And every time anybody up the valley bought off the cart, he asked who else in that lane might want stopping for.

Nine tellings, one piece of news. By August his Friday was spoken for by the Wednesday, and the following spring he put a second cart on. Be fair to the first man. He was not lazier and he did not think less of the valley. He had simply believed that he had told the town, when what he had done was tell whoever happened to walk past one window in one week in May.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A thing you have said once has been heard only by the people who happened to be listening in the days you said it, which in any trade is a small fraction of the people you meant to tell, so the same piece of news must go out several times, by different doors, for as long as it stays true. The first man did not get a verdict from the valley. He got a verdict from eight households, and read it as the valley.

The reason is arithmetic before it is anything else. You imagine your customers as a room that goes quiet when you stand up to speak. They are a street walking past on their own business. On the Tuesday your notice went up, most of the people it was written for were doing something else, somewhere else, and the quality of the notice alters none of that. The test of a telling is not whether it was good, but how many of the people you meant to reach were in a position to receive it, and one telling, however well made, is nearly always a minority of them.

Then there is the matter of when. News is only acted upon when it lands in the same week as a want. The woman who hears in May that there is fish on Fridays, and who likes her present arrangement, has not rejected you. She has filed nothing, because there was nothing to file. In the middle of July her sister comes to stay and she wants better than a tin, and in that week your news is worth a great deal to her. Repeating is how you come to be there in a week you cannot identify in advance, which is the same engine as the long flat run of a campaign that only looks like failure, working over weeks rather than years.

A third claim is made for repetition, that familiarity itself warms people to you, and I will not lean on it. Those who have measured it argue about it, the effect looks modest, and some of what is credited to it is probably plain trust in a thing that has been about long enough to be seen twice. Take it as a bonus if it comes. Coverage and coincidence are reason enough, and neither is a matter of opinion. Notice too that the second man's nine tellings were not nine naggings of one ear. The counter, the wrapping paper, the inn wall and the smith's bench reached largely different people. Repeating across doors buys new listeners rather than sore ones.

Two cautions. First, repeating is not sending the same words until somebody gives in. Every one of the second man's tellings carried a fresh particular: the villages, then the hours at the lane ends, then the crab. That way the person who has heard it twice learns something and the person who has never heard it is told the whole thing. Keep each telling to one errand as well, since a message that asks three things of a reader gets none of them done. Second, do not repeat past the life of the news, and do not let one announcement eat everything else you say. A Friday cart is worth nine tellings over ten weeks and none at all a year later, and a shop with one subject for twelve months has stopped being a correspondent and become an advertisement.

Three questions, and the first of them takes a sheet of paper:

1. What have you announced once? Write down every piece of news you have given out in the last six months, and beside each the number of times it went out. Most trades find two or three good things on that list that were said a single time and then quietly concluded to be unwanted.
2. How many doors have you got? Name every way the same person could hear from you: the window, the counter, the thing your work goes home in, the list you write to, the page, the other trade that serves your customers, the person who recommended you last. Then mark how many of those doors your last announcement went through. If the answer is one, you have found your afternoon.
3. How long will this news stay true? If the Friday cart runs until Michaelmas, you have ten weeks of a true thing to say, and the tellings belong in the diary now, with a different particular against each. News with no schedule against it gets told once, by whoever remembers it, in whatever week they happen to.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why did a piece of news that was equally true in both shops reach only one of them any custom?

Because one told it once and the other told it nine times by nine doors. The first had the better notice and the worse arithmetic. He put a good thing in front of a fraction of the people it was meant for, in one week out of the ten in which it would have been welcome, and then took the answer from that fraction as the answer from the whole valley. The valley never refused him. It never heard him.

The verse:

You said it once, and said it well, and thought the town was told,
But most of them were elsewhere then, with other things in hand.
The want comes round in its own week and seldom asks for you,
So say it twice, and say it thrice, by doors on either hand.

Until next time. Go and take the one piece of news you have told only once, and tell it again today by a door you have not used.

P.S. Your own ear is the worst instrument in the shop for judging how often to say a thing. You have lived with the news since the morning you had the idea, you have said it aloud to your family, your supplier and yourself, and by the fourth telling you are heartily sick of it. That weariness is evidence about you and none at all about your customers. On the day you can hardly bear to mention the Friday cart again, half the valley has not yet heard of it once. So write the tellings into the diary at the start, while the news still interests you, and keep the appointments after it has stopped.

Also in the archive: Yours Until Tuesday, Crossing the Square and The Notice Before the Soap.