The Last Nine Loads

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two tanners filled the same pits with the same bark, and then came a spring when there was not enough bark to go round.

Two tanners in one town, the same pits and the same liquor.
Both bought their oak bark from the same merchant at the same price a load.
Both had always paid him in the end, and neither had ever been refused.
Then came a wet spring, and nine loads of bark where there should have been thirty.
By June one man's pits were full and three of the other's stood empty.
Which, and what had he done in the years when bark was plentiful?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two tanners, in the town I have never named. Each had a yard by the water, pits sunk in clay, and the smell a tanyard gives a street in July which no tanner can any longer detect. Each bought ground oak bark from the same merchant, a careful man with a bark mill and a wharf upriver, and each paid nine shillings a load.

The first tanner was nobody's fool and did nothing wrong. The merchant offered three months' credit, so he paid in the twelfth week, as a man is entitled to do. He weighed every fourth load himself and sent his boy up to argue about those that came in light. He ordered when he needed bark and not before, since money tied up in bark is money not working. There was no fault in it.

The second tanner was duller about it. He paid the bill the week it came, which cost him the use of the money for eleven weeks and he never calculated what. He took the loads as weighed, and when one came in light he mentioned it once and did not send the boy. Every January he walked up and said roughly what the year would want, so the merchant could buy his standing oak in April knowing where some of it was going. And one wet October, when the bark cart lost a wheel at the bottom of the hill, he sent his own horse down for the afternoon. None of it was strategy, and in nine years out of ten it bought him nothing.

Then came the tenth year. The spring was cold and then wet, the sap was late, and the estates that sold the merchant his standing oak had half a crop. By the end of May he had nine loads in his yard where he would ordinarily have had thirty, and five tanners wanting them, two of them strangers who offered eleven shillings.

He did not raise the price. He meant to be selling bark in that parish in fifteen years, and a man who takes eleven shillings in a short spring is remembered for it afterwards. So he stood in his yard with nine loads, the same nine shillings on all of them, and a decision to make that had nothing to do with money. He sent word down to the second tanner before that man had even asked. The first tanner came up on the Thursday with his money in his hand and got one load and an apology.

He found bark forty miles off at twelve and six and paid the carriage on top, and even so ran three pits short through the summer and hurried the liquors in the others. The leather he drew the next year was thinner and some went as second quality. The saddler who had taken his backs for eleven years took half as many and said nothing unkind about it.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

You have a reputation on both sides of your own counter, and in the week a thing runs short, the one behind you is the only one that pays. Both were good customers by the arithmetic. Only one was a good customer to deal with, which is a different thing kept in a different place.

Consider what happened in that yard. A scarce thing had to be divided, and the thing dividing it was not a market nor a ledger. It was a person, with nine loads, five callers and a memory. Price had been taken off the table by his own good sense, so he decided on the only other information he held: what each man had been like to deal with in the years when it did not matter.

The mechanism is the oldest one in trade. A man who has been made easy expects to be made easy again, and feels the want of a return without ever framing it as a debt. Obligation of this sort binds harder than any agreement, which is why even a small favour asked ties two people together more surely than a large one given. Nine years of lifting small costs off another man's week had bought the second tanner a claim on the short spring for almost nothing.

Weigh the other man's case fairly, since most books of business would put it to you. Terms exist to be used, credit taken is working capital, and a man who weighs his loads is not being robbed by inches. All true, and all of it worth to him, in a year, less than one week of three empty pits. The interest on eleven weeks of bark money is pennies. A place at the front of the queue is a season.

Two cautions. The first is that none of this means paying over the odds or never arguing. Settle your price hard, once, at the start, and then be easy inside it. The customer a merchant dreads is not the one who negotiated firmly in January, it is the one who reopens the question on every load. The second is heavier. Goodwill with one merchant is no substitute for a second merchant, and one gate is still one gate. Be served first by two, and the one who fails you is an inconvenience rather than a summer.

Three questions, to be asked in a plentiful year rather than a short one:

1. Who actually decides? In every supply one person allocates when there is not enough: a yard foreman, a clerk, the man who writes the delivery round. Know who it is, and whether they know your name without looking it up.
2. What do I cost the people who supply me? Count it as they would: the chasing, the disputes, the vague orders, the weeks they wait for payment. Then take one of those off their desk this month, and let them notice rather than telling them so.
3. What goes short in my trade, and when? Name the things that run out in a bad year: materials, a subcontractor's weeks, a carrier's space. Your standing in those queues is settled long before the shortage and cannot be improved once it has begun.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which tanner had full pits in June, and what had he done in the plentiful years?

The second, and what he had done was pay on the day, take the weight as given, warn the merchant in January and send his horse down the hill in October. None of it was aimed at the short spring, since he did not know one was coming. The queue was drawn up in the easy years and read out in the hard one.

The verse:

No merchant pins his queue of names
Upon the yard's own wall;
He fixes it in easy years
And reads it when stocks fall.

Until next time. Go and pay the oldest bill on your desk today, and send the man a line to tell him it is paid.

P.S. Nobody ever told the first tanner what had happened. No merchant says such a thing to a paying customer, so he finished the year believing the spring had been bad for everyone, which it had. The day you are moved down a queue is a day on which nothing at all is said to you, which is why your own experience will never teach you this.

Also in the archive: Still in Its Paper, Sent Before Six and The Man at the Turnpike Gate.