The Card Already Written

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, in the spring when the new streets on the hill were finished, eighty households wanted milk at the door and two dairymen went up for the round.

Two dairymen, the same grass and the same fourpence,
The same eighty doors, and a third man already calling at them.
Both went up, both were thought sound, both left a card.
One said: send word when you are ready to change.
One left the hard sentence ready written on the back.
Whose milk stood on the step by Michaelmas?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two dairymen in the town I've never named, both with sound beasts, both charging fourpence the quart because that was the price. The new streets on the hill held eighty households, and every one already took milk from an older dairy across the water. Nothing was wrong with that dairy. The milk was good, the cart came at six, and the man who drove it had served some of those families in the streets they lived in before.

The first dairyman worked the hill door by door. He spoke of his herd and his hours, left a card at every house, and finished as a reasonable man finishes: when you are ready to change, send word, and I shall start you the Monday after. Nobody was rude to him, a great many thought him a decent sort, and two changed.

Consider one of the seventy-eight who did not. She decided by the Thursday that his milk was the better, and then did nothing at all for two years. Not from doubt. She had to learn what she owed the present dairy, and what would happen on the morning between the two arrangements. And she had to say a sentence out loud, at her own door, before breakfast, to a man standing there with a full churn, about whom she had no complaint at all. So the old cart came each morning, and the matter waited for a quiet minute, which is a decision made without anybody noticing it made.

The first dairyman concluded that it must be the money, took a farthing off the quart, and moved nobody, having answered nothing in the way.

The second dairyman went up a fortnight later with the same milk and price. The difference had been done the evening before at his kitchen table, where he worked out not why a household ought to come to him, but what it would cost them to leave the other man, and then set about paying that cost himself.

He had a line printed on the back of his card, which a householder might tear off and hand over with the can: no more milk after Saturday, thank you, the account to be settled in the usual way. She need not make the little speech at all. He asked for no notice and gave none, and said so at the door: if you find me wanting, send me that same card and I shall take it without a sulk. He wrote each householder's standing arrangement in his book, jug on the sill by half past five, so that nothing about her mornings altered but the man. And he came at six, because six was the hour the hill was used to.

By Michaelmas he had the greater part of the hill. Three households went back inside the month. He took his card back without argument, and two of the three were with him again before the year was out, which is how it goes when leaving is easy in both directions. Be fair to the first dairyman: his milk was as good and his card the handsomer. He had simply asked eighty people to do a small difficult thing on his behalf, in their own doorways.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A customer who already buys what you sell is not weighing your work against your rival's, he is weighing it against the trouble of leaving. That trouble is a real charge, and it falls on him rather than on you, which is why it never appears in your reckoning. You have priced the milk. You have not priced the morning she must stand at her door and say the sentence.

The charge has three parts and none of them is money. The first is the awkward sentence, and it is usually the largest, since few people enjoy telling a man they are done with him. The second is the unknown of the changeover: who does what, on which day, and what happens in the gap between one arrangement ending and the next beginning. The third is the absence of a way back, for he is not comparing your best morning with his present supplier's best. He is imagining your worst, and asking what he does then.

Each has its remedy, and not one of them is a discount. Write the sentence for him, so that he passes on a message rather than delivers a verdict. Do the changeover yourself, and say what happens on which day. Make the way out cheap and visible before he asks.

He will not tell you any of this. Asked why he stays, he will say he is happy enough, or, if pressed, something about price, which is the answer always available to a man unwilling to confess to a reluctance he is faintly ashamed of. That is the ordinary difficulty of asking a customer why. It is the willing buyer who never begins because the first step was made too large, save that the obstacle sits in another doorway, which is why so few trades go and look at it.

Two cautions. First, never run down the man they are leaving. Your customer chose him once, and every word against him says he was a poor judge, which he will resist by defending the choice, and you will have argued him back into the arrangement you meant to end. Say instead that the other man is sound and that these things change. Second, do not pay this charge with money. Buy the switch with a lower figure and you have taught him that the way to be worth keeping is to be ready to leave.

Three questions, before you go up anybody's hill:

1. What must your customer end before he can begin with you? Name it exactly: a notice period, a standing order, a face he sees every week. If you cannot say what it is, you do not know what you are competing against.
2. Who writes the awkward sentence? If the answer is the customer, you have handed the hardest part of your own selling to a stranger and asked him to do it unpaid.
3. What is the way out of your arrangement, and have you said it aloud? If your terms of leaving cannot be put in one line, nobody will risk the joining.

The Answer to the Riddle

Whose milk stood on the step by Michaelmas?

The second dairyman's, and not because he was the better judge of a cow. Both asked the hill to change dairies. One asked the householders to carry out the change themselves, which meant an awkward morning, an unknown fortnight and no road back. The other carried it for them and left them nothing to do but say yes. A customer will part with fourpence sooner than with his comfort.

The verse:

The same grass, the same price, the same eighty doors,
The same good milk standing cold in the pail.
One asked them to do their own leaving, and waited,
One did the leaving for them, and took the vale.

Until next time. Go and write the sentence your customer must say to be rid of his present supplier, and put it where he can find it without asking.

P.S. Turn it round before bed. Some part of your own book stays with you because leaving would be a nuisance. A customer kept by awkwardness is kept only until somebody removes it, and that somebody comes up the hill in the spring with a card already written.

Also in the archive: The Wall Has Moved, March, Two Years, the Extension and I Might Have a Go Myself.