Short Time at the Mill

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, in the winter the mill went on short time, two tailors kept shop at either end of the same street.

Two tailors, the same cloth, the same shears, the same shopboard,
The same price for a coat, the same patience at a buttonhole.
The year the looms stood three days in five, both saw their takings halve.
One put his handbills away until trade should come back.
One went on speaking every week, and spent a good deal less on it.
Which of them was cheaper to be heard that year, and which paid for it after?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two tailors in the town I've never named, and their work, in the old chorus, was equally good. Both cut by eye and finished by hand, and both could turn a coat so the worn side went in and the good side came out looking new.

Then the mill went on short time. Three days in five, the hooter and then nothing, and men in the street at eleven in the morning with their hands in their pockets. Within two months both tailors had seen their takings halve.

The man at the bridge end did the arithmetic any sensible person does. He had rent, a stock of cloth bought at last year's price, and one line in his ledger that could be struck out by Friday without a customer knowing. So he cancelled his twelve inches in the county paper, stopped the market-day handbills and the notes he sent to the names in his book, and waited for the town to have money again. This is not a foolish man. This is the commonest man in trade.

The man at the top of the street reached a different place from the same arithmetic. He could not spend what he had been spending, so he stopped pretending he could. Twelve inches became four lines. The handbills went onto cheaper paper and round the market on his own lad's legs. And on Sunday evenings, the shop shut and the gas down, he wrote eleven letters by hand to names in his book, offering not a new overcoat but a coat turned, a lining renewed, a good black made over for a son who had grown into it.

His takings fell too. Nobody escaped that winter. But they fell by a third rather than a half, and for eighteen months he was the one tailor the town heard from.

When the looms came back to full time the difference showed at once. The orders for new coats, held back a year and a half and released in a rush, went to the man who had been in front of people throughout. His rival restarted his twelve inches that spring and found two things waiting. The paper had raised its rate. And the ears he had left were not empty, they were full of somebody else.

Be fair to him. He cut the only cost in a trade that a customer cannot see being cut, which is why it goes first and why it is the dearest item on the list. It took three years to buy back a place he gave up in eight weeks.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

The price of being heard is set by how many others are speaking, so the year your rivals fall silent is the cheapest year you will ever be offered for taking a place in your customers' minds. Attention is not priced like cloth, by what it costs to make, but like a seat at a crowded auction, by how many hands are in the air. In a good year your voice is one of nine and you pay the nine-voice rate. In a bad year it is one of three, and the same shilling does three times the work. The room emptied, that is all.

Behind that sits the slower mechanism, which is memory. Being known is a stock, not a wage. It builds too gradually to be felt going on and runs down too gradually to be felt going off, which is what makes it so easy to spend in a hard month. Stop for four weeks and you lose almost nothing. Stop for a year and you meet the asymmetry of it: being forgotten is free, being remembered again is charged at the full rate. The flat and thankless stretch in why the flat part is the price, not the failure works the same way from the other end.

Then there is the customer, who has not stopped buying. He buys less, later and with more thought, and a man thinking harder is readier to move. Habit holds custom in place, and habit is thinnest when every purchase is weighed. A quiet street is a street of customers quietly in motion, many attached to suppliers who have just gone silent on them. Whoever is still speaking collects them.

Two cautions. First, going on speaking is not going on spending, and the one thing worse than being forgotten is advertising your way into arrears. Keep the ceiling from the number that sets the limit on everything you can do in front of you and bring your means under it. A lean year is for means that cost hours instead of pounds: the letter to your own book, the doorstep, the customer you have not spoken to since March. Second, the fact of speaking should not change, but the words must. The householder on short time does not want to hear about a new winter overcoat, and telling him anyway marks you as a man who has not looked out of his window.

Three questions, before a hard quarter finds you deciding in a hurry:

1. If your takings fell by a third next month, what would you stop first? Write the list now, while you are calm enough to be honest, and mark whether a customer would notice each item within the month. What nobody notices is not therefore free. It is the thing whose bill arrives late.
2. Which of your means cost money, and which cost hours? Put them in two columns. If the money column is the only one with anything in it, you do not have marketing, you have a subscription, and it lapses in the first bad quarter.
3. Who has gone quiet lately? Look at the three or four you compete with and count who has stopped writing, stopped appearing, stopped being mentioned. Their silence is worth more than any clever sentence you could write, and it will not stay open.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of them was cheaper to be heard that year, and which paid for it after?

The man at the top of the street was heard more cheaply than at any time in his life, on a quarter of the previous year's outlay, because half the voices in the town had stopped. His rival saved real money when real money was scarce, then paid twice: at the paper's new rate, and in the years it took to get back in front of people who had learned, in his absence, to think of somebody else. He was not outspent. He was outlasted.

The verse:

One folded up his handbills till the looms should run again,
One spoke a little smaller every week the mill stood still.
The silence cost him nothing that a ledger ever showed,
And all of it fell due the year the town had money back.

Until next time. Go and write the list of what you would cut if takings fell by a third, and mark the one thing you will not cut whatever the year does.

P.S. One further thing about a lean year. Whoever sells you the space is having the same year you are, and an empty column earns him nothing. That is the week to ask for a better rate, a longer run at the old price, or a better place on the page, and to ask plainly. The tailor at the top of the street had his four lines at the front of the paper for the price of four at the back, because he was the only man asking in a year when nobody asked.

Also in the archive: The Quiet Month, The Year the Tide Came In and The Half Hour in October.