The Card in the Lid

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two grocers kept shop within a hundred yards of one another, and both sold the same mustard out of the same yellow tins.

Two grocers, the same mustard, the same mill, the same yellow tin,
The same price by the ounce and the same scoop in the same scales.
One spent the winter on the far bank after names he had not got.
One spent it printing a card the size of a playing card.
By Easter one served ninety households and one sixty.
Which of them sold the more mustard, and what was it he had added?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two grocers in the town I've never named, a hundred yards apart, and their goods, in the old chorus, were equally good. The mustard came from one mill in one sort of yellow tin. Each had something over sixty households in his book, and both knew, without having put it into words, that a tin lasted a house half a year. Bought near Michaelmas, bought again near Easter. Mustard was for beef. It came down on a Sunday when there was a joint on the table and went back up that evening, and that was the whole of its life.

The grocer by the churchyard drew the sensible conclusion. If each house bought twice a year and he wanted to sell more, he needed more houses. So he spent the winter on the far bank, two afternoons a week, knocking and leaving his card and standing in the wind explaining that his scales were honest. It is slow work. A household that already has a grocer has little reason to want another. By May he had thirty new names, at the cost of forty afternoons and a pair of boots.

The grocer by the weighbridge began by asking. For a fortnight he put the same question to every woman who came in for a tin: what else do you do with it. The answers came slowly and then all at once. One put a spoonful in the water when she boiled a ham. One worked it into cheese before it went under the grill. One made a dressing for cold mutton that her mother had made before her. Then he had a card printed, the size of a playing card, seven lines and a heading saying what they were for, and put one under the lid of every tin he sold.

The tins began coming back at Christmas instead of Easter, and then oftener than that. By the following Michaelmas a household on his book was buying four times a year. Sixty households at four tins is two hundred and forty. Ninety at two is a hundred and eighty. He had not gained a customer. He had gained occasions.

Be fair to the man on the far bank. He did the thing trade respects. More names is not a wrong ambition, only a dear one, and it left him a difficulty he had not foreseen. His thirty new households were also going to buy twice a year. He had widened a shallow vessel.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Every customer arrives with one occasion in mind, and that single occasion, rather than their means or their goodwill, sets the ceiling on everything they will ever spend with you. The householder was not short of money for mustard. She had one hook to hang it on, and one hook holds one coat. The second grocer's winter went on putting six more hooks on a wall he already owned.

The mechanism underneath is not appetite but prompting. People do not buy a thing when they need it. They buy it when it occurs to them, and what occurs to them is governed by the occasion before them. The woman boiling a ham has a want she has no notion of, because nothing has joined the ham to the cupboard. Join the two once and you have handed her a use she will find for herself whenever the occasion comes round, and it comes round without you.

Then there is the arithmetic, which most trades work in one direction only. What you sell in a year is the number of customers multiplied by the number of times each has cause to come to you, and nearly every hour and pound a small business spends goes into the first figure. The second is cheaper by a long way, wanting no introduction, no argument about quality and no boots. That is the seam worked in the fortune in the customer you already have, opened at a different end. There is a slower gain besides. A customer who uses you for one thing hangs by a single thread. One who finds you useful on four occasions must replace four habits to leave you.

Two cautions. First, the occasion must be true and must serve the customer rather than the ledger. If the ham is no better for the spoonful, you have spent good credit teaching somebody to waste your goods. You want occasions that leave the household better off and empty the tin as a consequence. Second, do not confuse this with telling people what else you sell, a separate job dealt with in the customers who do not know half of what you sell. This is narrower. It is telling a customer what the thing already in their cupboard is for.

Three questions, and the first will take an evening with your own book:

1. How often does a customer of yours have cause to want you, and where did that number come from? Count it rather than feel it. Take thirty names, count what each bought last year, and divide. Nearly everyone guesses high, and the gap between the figure you assumed and the figure on the page is the opportunity.
2. What is the one occasion everybody thinks you are for? Every trade has one, generally whichever was easiest to advertise ten years ago. Write it down, then write three others you privately know you are good for and have never said aloud. Those three are your winter's work.
3. Where would the telling have to sit to be read at the moment it is wanted? Under the lid, in the parcel, on the invoice, in a note sent a fortnight after the work when the next occasion is beginning to be felt. A true thing said at the wrong moment is indistinguishable from an advertisement. The same thing at the right moment is a kindness, and it is acted upon.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of them sold the more mustard, and what was it he had added?

The grocer by the weighbridge sold the more, by a third, with thirty fewer households and not an afternoon spent on the far bank. What he added was not customers, not goods, and not strictly speaking persuasion. He added occasions, seven of them on a card costing less than the string round his parcels. His rival added thirty names, each of which will buy twice a year, the very rate he was unhappy with. One widened his trade and the other deepened it, and deep is cheaper.

The verse:

One walked the far bank all the winter for a hundred doors,
One turned a lid and told the sixty what the tin would do.
The doors were dear to knock upon and slow to open twice,
The card cost half a farthing and it sold the tin again.

Until next time. Go and ask the next three customers what else they use you for, and write down the answer you did not expect.

P.S. The seven lines on that card were not the grocer's invention. He did not sit in the back room thinking up uses for mustard. He asked the people already using it and wrote their words down rather than improving them. A use you invent has to be believed. A use your customers already put to work has only to be passed along, and it arrives with the authority of a thing the woman next door has done for years.

Also in the archive: How Are the Hens Laying?, The Second Rung and The Questions He Gave Away.