The Oil After the Lamp

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two lampwrights kept benches a quarter of a mile apart, and both made the same good lamp for a kitchen table.

Two lampwrights, the same town, the same brass and the same burner,
The same nine shillings of metal and labour in every lamp that left the bench.
One asked eighteen shillings for it and gave no further thought to the oil.
One asked twelve, and came round again on the first Monday of every month.
Both were honest men, and either lamp would burn clean for twenty years.
Why did one of them begin each January with nothing, and the other with ninety kitchens?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two lampwrights in the town I've never named, one at the top of the hill and one at the bottom, each with a bench and a shelf of glass chimneys wrapped in straw. The lamp was the same lamp: a squat reservoir, a flat wick in a brass burner, a chimney that drew the flame up tall and steady, and a thumbscrew to drop the light when the children were abed. Nine shillings of brass, glass and labour went into each, and both men knew it to the penny.

The first lampwright did the plain and reasonable thing. He asked eighteen shillings, nine of work and nine of living, and wrote the figure on a card in the window. He sold the lamp, wrapped it, and that was the end of it. Oil the householder bought at the general shop by the bridge, and a cracked chimney she replaced there too. It had never occurred to him that any of that was his trade.

The second lampwright asked twelve shillings, which his wife thought close to charity. But when he set a lamp on a kitchen table and showed the woman how to trim the wick square so it would not smoke, he asked one question more: whether the first Monday of the month would suit her.

Thereafter, on the first Monday, his lad went round with a handcart: a can of oil, a card of flat wick cut to length, two or three spare chimneys in straw. He charged a penny a gallon above the shop by the bridge, and nobody minded a penny, the bridge being half a mile off in the wet and the lad coming to the door and trimming the wick besides. One and sixpence a month, near enough, of which sixpence was his.

Reckon the year. The first man sold forty lamps at nine shillings of living apiece: eighteen pounds. The second sold ninety, partly because twelve shillings is a figure a woman decides on in the street, and partly because a handcart going round the parish on a fixed Monday is an advertisement that costs nothing and is believed. Ninety at three shillings is thirteen pounds ten, and ninety kitchens at sixpence a month is twenty-seven pounds. Forty pounds ten against eighteen.

And the year is not the half of it. On the first of January the first lampwright had an empty book and forty strangers still to find and persuade from the beginning. The second had ninety kitchens that would want oil within the fortnight whether he put a card in his window or not.

Be fair to the first man. He padded nothing and his lamp was as good, and a thrifty woman who trimmed her own wicks and fetched her own oil paid him less over ten years than her neighbour paid the other. He had simply put his whole living into the one number strangers stop to compare, and nothing into the part of his trade nobody compares.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Put your profit where the buying repeats, not where the buying begins. You are rarely selling one thing, but the first thing and everything that follows it, and where you take your living along that line decides how many customers you get and what each is finally worth. Most trades take it all at the front, by habit rather than decision, and wonder why the front is such hard country.

Why it works is worth saying slowly. The first number is the compared number: the one in the window, the one on the estimate, the one repeated to a husband and carried down the hill to the other man. Every shilling loaded onto it is spent in the one place where you stand beside your rival and are weighed against him. The numbers after are not compared at all, because by then she is not shopping. She is keeping a thing she owns in order, and the man who sold it to her is the obvious man to ask, which is the quiet power of leaving your name where the trouble will be.

The second reason compounds. The expensive part of trade is being chosen, paid for in advertising, in quoting, in the hour spent in a kitchen, and paid once per customer. Every sale after is made without paying it again, so a trade that takes all its profit at the front pays the dearest cost it has, over and over, for one transaction each time.

Two cautions. First, the second price must be told, not sprung. Say what the oil will cost by the year while she is deciding on the lamp. A cheap lamp with an oil she discovers in March is the price kept back wearing brass, and it buys one year and a bad name. Told honestly it is your best argument, the figure being usually smaller than she feared. Second, the repeat must truly be yours to supply, and the first thing must never go below what it costs you. If the oil can be had at the same price on any corner, your living is not there at all.

Three questions, and a sheet of paper will answer them:

1. Which of your prices is bought once, and which is bought again? Write out everything you sell, mark each line once or again, and set last year's profit beside it. Many trades find their whole living in the once column and have never asked whether it belongs there.
2. What does your customer buy three months after you, and from whom? Whatever you fitted, built, taught or sold wants something by the autumn: a consumable, a check, a repair, the next size. If a stranger supplies it, you did the expensive half of his trade for him.
3. What is one customer worth over three years at your present prices? Not the first sale, the three years. Until you know that figure you cannot say what a customer is worth winning, nor what you may fairly spend to win one.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why did one of them begin each January with nothing, and the other with ninety kitchens?

Because one sold a lamp and the other sold the light. One took his living in the figure a stranger stops to compare, and went out in the spring to find forty more strangers. The other took a little at the start and the rest a sixpence at a time from people who had stopped comparing anything, and his trade grew heavier each year by not being lost.

The verse:

One put his living in the figure that a stranger stops to weigh,
One put it in the gallon that is wanted every month.
The brass was the same brass, the burner the same burner,
But one of them sold lamps, and one of them sold light.

Until next time. Go and write your prices out on one sheet, mark each line once or again, and put last year's profit beside each.

P.S. If nothing in your trade is bought twice, the thing to sell second is attendance: a look over the work each spring at a small fixed price, offered on the day you finish and not a day later, while she stands before the thing you made and thinks well of you. It is the one hour in which a future payment is agreed without being weighed.

Also in the archive: The Thirty Who Pay the Rent, How Many Pints Were Drawn and The Ones Who Went Quiet.