Sixty-One at the Stall

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town a man could tell you to the penny what his advertising cost him and had no notion whatever of what it bought him. The cost was a bill on a spike. The rest he knew by the feeling of the thing, which is to say he did not know it.

Two churn makers in the old town, the same seasoned oak and the same iron hoops.
Both spent five pounds in the year on being found, in the same three places.
Both wrote down every soul who asked them the price of a churn.
One ended the year with sixty-one names off a market stall and gave up the other two places.
The other gave up the stall and kept them. Neither man had miscounted.
Same trade, same five pounds, the same sixty-one names. What had the second man written down as well?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

The trade is churns, a trade of oak staves and cold flagged floors. A plunge churn at nine shillings for a cottage with two cows. A barrel churn on a cradle at two pounds fifteen for a dairy that sells butter by the firkin. A churn that weeps at the chine will sour a dairy's name in a hot July.

Both men spent five pounds in the year on being found, in the same three places. Three pounds went on a pitch at the Thursday butter market, between a cheese factor and a man selling bonnets. Two pounds went on a standing notice in the farming column of the county paper. Ten shillings went on cards left in two village ironmongers' windows, behind the scythe stones.

The first churn maker kept an honest tally. Every person who stopped at the stall and asked the price went into his book, sixty-one of them by the year's end. From the paper he had eleven letters. From the cards, four, one of them a boy asking for somebody else. At Martinmas he did the only arithmetic those figures invited, gave up the paper and the cards, and put the whole five pounds on the market.

The second churn maker ruled his day book differently. Against each name he put where it had come from, and left two columns more, filled in only when the thing was settled. Did it become a churn. What did the churn pay, after the oak and the hoops and the day.

Of the sixty-one who asked at the stall, nine bought, and eight of the nine took the nine-shilling plunge churn. Six of the eight asked what he could do on the price in front of a crowd, and twice he took sixpence off rather than be seen to be dear. Three pounds and two days a week had paid him, oak and time out, something under four pounds.

Of the eleven who wrote in off the paper, seven bought, five of them a barrel churn at two pounds fifteen, and not one mentioned the price. Two pounds had bought him better than nineteen. Of the four from the ironmongers' windows, three bought, and one was a creamery nine miles out that took three churns inside the year and had him back twice a year to re-hoop them. Ten shillings.

Be fair to the first man. He counted carefully and honestly, and the stall was the pleasantest two days of his week. But he gave up the two places that were keeping his family and doubled the one that filled his afternoons with conversation, on a true number.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

An enquiry is not a result, and the place that sends you the most of them is frequently the dearest thing you buy. The rest of this letter is the argument for two more columns in your book.

Begin with why the sixty-one were different people from the eleven. What a man must spend in order to ask you a question decides who asks it. At the stall the question cost nothing. A woman with no churn money and no intention of buying one this side of Michaelmas can ask the price while her butter is weighed, and takes the free question because it is there. The man who read the eleven lines in the farming column had to find a pen, spend a stamp and wait four days, which nobody does idly. The friction you dislike in a channel is also the sieve.

Then there is who stands where. The butter market holds the whole town, cottagers and children and men who came for the bonnets. The farming column holds men with a dairy and a reason to be reading about dairies. You do not buy attention when you buy a place. You buy a crowd, and the price per head says nothing about which crowd.

Worse than either, the number you can count easily becomes the number you steer by. Enquiries are countable on the day and feel like weather turning. Jobs and money are slow and want a column filled in weeks later. So a man manages the asking rather than the earning, and in time shapes the trade to produce asking. That is how a churn maker comes to take sixpence off a nine-shilling churn. The cure is a way of knowing where a reply came from without asking the customer, and the discipline of carrying that line to the money.

Carry it a year further. The creamery was worth its ten shillings of card in the first spring and far more by the third, and a tally closed at Christmas shows you the first churn only. The money a place sends you in the second year belongs to that place, and until it is written beside the ten shillings you cannot know what you are entitled to spend to be found there again.

Two cautions. Small numbers tell lies with a straight face. Four enquiries and three sales is a hint, not a proof, and a thin place deserves a year. And do not convict a patient place of a crime it has not committed. Date each enquiry by the week it arrived rather than the week the money came in, or a notice that works slowly on men who buy a churn every nine years will show as a failure.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Where did my last forty enquiries come from, and which became work? Forty is enough to instruct and few enough for one evening. The place, the job, the money.
2. What is a customer from each place worth by the end of the second year? Add the repeat work and the people they sent. A place is dear or cheap only for what it delivers.
3. Which place am I keeping because it is busy and pleasant? There is usually one. Keep it knowingly, never out of the money that belongs to the quiet place that pays.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same trade, same five pounds, the same sixty-one names. What had the second man written down as well?

Two more columns. Whether the enquiry became a churn, and what the churn paid with the oak and the hoops and the day out of it. The first man knew which place produced the most questions. The second knew which produced the most butter money. Only one of those facts will pay a wage.

The verse:

A question is cheap, and the cheap ones come thick,
and thick is a comfort to see.
But carry the line to the churn and the coin,
for the asking was never the fee.

Until next time. Go and take your last forty enquiries, write beside each where it came from and what it turned into, and total the money by place, not by head.

P.S. There is a second use for the knowledge, and almost nobody takes it. Once you know which place sends the dear enquiries, answer those first. Most trades do the reverse. The man at the stall is answered in a breath because he is standing there, and the letter that cost its writer a stamp lies on the bench until Friday.

Also in the archive: The Blue Bills, The Follower Count and One Pot in Seven.