The Forty Names in January

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two seedsmen sent out the same printed list in the same January, and only one of them put his customers into it.

Two seedsmen in one town, the same seed and the same prices.
Both wrote out a list each January for the same forty gardens.
One list named the seed, and the cost of it, and nothing else.
One list named the growers, and what each of them had got.
By the third year the second man's forty would order nowhere else.
Which of them was selling seed, and which something harder to leave?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two seedsmen, in a town I have never named. Both kept a narrow shop with a wall of little drawers behind the counter, both weighed onion seed on the same brass scale into the same blue paper, and both knew which of the local soils wanted liming. The first was probably the better gardener. Neither was a fool nor a rogue, which is the only sort of story worth telling. Between them they supplied some forty gardens: a row of cottages along the water, the vicarage, and three allotments behind the brewery.

The first seedsman printed a list each January, the varieties in order with the prices beside them, and a boy carried it round the doors. Any man who brought a question to the counter got a careful answer, often a better one than he would have got across the road. Whether the crop came to anything, the seedsman mostly never learned.

The second did something small and, at the time, faintly awkward. In his second spring he began asking every customer who came in for packets what the last lot had done, and wrote the answers in a ruled book: the rod behind the lock house that gave heavier onions the year it was limed, the vicarage celery drowned in a wet June and sown a fortnight later to better effect. In January he printed his list as before, and on the back of it nineteen lines of what his own customers had got, each grower named and asked beforehand for leave. At the foot he set a date: the second Saturday in August, scales out in the yard, anybody on the sheet to bring in his heaviest and have it weighed.

The first August, four men came, two of them allotment holders already friends. It was not much of an afternoon. The next year nineteen came, with a great deal of standing about disputing soot and lime, and the whitewashed board by the door filled before four o'clock. Nothing was given away beyond the sight of your own weight written up in a hand that was not yours, and it cost him an afternoon, a pot of whitewash and the trouble of asking his question all spring.

By the third year his forty had stopped reading anybody else's list. Not out of gratitude. A man who had bought across the road would have to appear in that yard in August with another man's seed to account for, in front of growers whose weights stood on the board beside his own. His rival lost nobody through poor seed. He became, by degrees, the shop you went to when you had not been to the other one.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A customer is held by your work, a member is held by the other members, and the second grip is one you could not have bought at any price. The whole difference between those two shops is that one introduced his customers to one another, on paper, for the cost of a question asked across a counter.

Consider what that back page does. It sets a man's name against a result, and a name against a result is a small reputation, which he will thereafter maintain. He orders again partly because he would like something to report. It also moves the comparison he is making. A gardener reading a column of prices compares seedsmen, and the cheaper packet wins its share. A gardener reading the back page compares himself with the man at the lock house, and your trade has stepped out of a contest it was losing into one it is not a party to. It is the machinery of a true count of what your neighbours already do, with one difference. The neighbours are named, and they can be spoken to.

Then the part that no goodwill of yours can arrange. You cannot ask a customer for loyalty. Loyalty requested is a debt claimed, and a debt claimed is resented. The other thirty-nine never have to ask. They apply no pressure, and they hold him in place more firmly than you could, simply by existing in a company he would rather not be caught leaving. A trade with customers earns each of them again every season. A trade with members has thirty-nine people doing a share of the asking without knowing it.

Now the objection, because this idea is sold badly. Most of what a small trade builds and calls a community is a mailing list in better clothes. Everything is addressed to the centre and returns to the centre, the members never once address each other, and the proprietor does the work of a town square on his own. The test is unkind. If you went quiet for a month, would anything still happen between these people. The second condition is the one the advice books leave out altogether: belonging binds only where what you sell touches something people are judged on. Gardens, trades, animals, craft, anything a man practises and can be better or worse at. Nobody wishes to belong to a society of people who buy drainpipes.

Two cautions. The first is that a group which can talk to itself will also compare your prices, your delays and your two worst jobs of the year, with you out of the room. That board was a judgement on his seed as much as an advertisement for it, and he could hang it only because the seed stood being discussed. You trade away some control for a much stronger hold. The second caution concerns the boundary. A membership open to everyone is not one, but draw the line round the activity and never round the spend. A circle entered by buying the most is a card with marks on it and behaves like one, holding people exactly as long as the arithmetic holds. The men in that yard were admitted for growing things, not for the size of their accounts.

Three questions, and the first costs you a sheet of paper:

1. Which of my customers already know one another's names, and did I have anything to do with it? Write out the ten or twelve who would recognise each other's work. If they are connected at all it is by accident, and you have been standing in the middle of a thing you never used.
2. What do my customers know between them that I could put in front of all of them, with their names on it? Not my advice, theirs. The question is only ever what did you do and what came of it, asked thirty times and written down over a year.
3. If I said nothing for a month, would any of these people have a reason to speak to each other? Where the answer is no, the remedy is an occasion and a date rather than more words from me. One hour, one place, one thing to look at, and no discount near it.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of them was selling seed, and which something harder to leave?

The first was selling seed, well and honestly, to forty people each alone with the decision every January. The second was selling membership of a thing that happened in a yard in August and on the back of a sheet of paper in January, and the seed went along with it. Leaving the first man cost a customer a walk across the road. Leaving the second meant leaving thirty-nine men whose names stood beside his own, and no packet of onion seed was ever cheap enough to be worth that.

The verse:

A man alone may change his mind
For twopence or for none.
But set his name beside his neighbour's,
And the leaving is not done.

Until next time. Go and write down the names of eight customers who would recognise one another's work, and send those eight one short note today that names all eight of them.

P.S. Most of the forty never wrote a line for that back page nor carried anything to the scales. They read it, every word, and ordered their seed in February for eleven years. Know that before you judge the thing by the number joining in, which will always look thin enough to abandon it by. The quiet member is not a failure of the arrangement, he is the greater part of its yield. He needs the others to be visible to him. He has no wish to be visible to them.

Also in the archive: The Owned Audience: Building a List the Platforms Can't Take, The Box of Offcuts and Who Sent You.