The Yard Boot

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where two men made boots on the same street, and only one of them ever sold the cheapest pair on his shelf.

Two bootmakers in one town, the same lasts and the same waxed thread.
Both made three grades of boot, and both charged the same for each grade.
Both told the plain truth about the leather, and neither was the better workman.
One sold his cheapest pair all year round, the other hardly sold it at all.
A carter on the same wages bought two pair from one of them and none from the other.
Which, and what was written on the card above the cheapest pair?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two bootmakers, in a town I have never named. Both worked from the same three patterns, the trade having settled on three long ago. A close-welted boot in best calf, hand sewn, thirty shillings. A middling boot in waxed kip for the road, eighteen. And a stout thing of split hide with a nailed sole, sold for nine, which would keep a man dry in a wet yard and would not take a shine however long you rubbed it.

The first man labelled his shelf the way the trade did. Best. Second quality. Cheap. He was not being unkind. He thought it candour, and would have told you that a customer is owed the truth about what he is buying, which is correct, and which is why he never saw what the labels were doing.

A carter came in one wet February on twenty-two shillings a week, wanting something for the yard. Two women stood at the far counter choosing laces, one of them his neighbour. To get what he had walked in for he had to stand in a shop that smelled of wax and new leather and ask, out loud, for the cheap ones. He heard himself do it. He went out with the eighteen shilling boot, more than he meant to spend and wrong for standing in water, and he was quiet about the shop afterwards in the way men are quiet about a place where they felt small.

The second man had the same three boots, and on his shelf the cards read differently. Sunday boots. Road boots, for the man who walks his miles. And yard boots, for wet standing and a stable floor, nine shillings, nailed, and not meant to be looked at.

The same carter came in and asked for a pair of yard boots. It was not a confession, it was a description of his work. He got the nine shilling pair without once mentioning what he earned, because nobody in that shop had made his money the subject. At Michaelmas he came back for Sunday boots for his daughter's wedding, and the bootmaker had both halves of his custom instead of one awkward half.

Under the Sunday card was a second line, about the welt being made to be resoled twice over, one pair outlasting three of the road boot. A corn merchant's son did not need that line while he was buying. He needed it that evening, when his father asked what sort of man pays thirty shillings for boots.

Be fair to the first man. His leather was good, his labels were accurate, and he had the sense not to flatter anybody. He simply arranged his shelf by the money, as the trade had always done, and never stood on the customer's side of the counter to hear it.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A customer is not only choosing a grade of your work, he is choosing what the choice will say about him to somebody who is not in your shop. He carries that sentence out of the door along with the goods, and he will pay real money to avoid carrying an unflattering one.

Watch what the arrangement of a shelf decides. Where the options are named by the money, the customer is sorted by his purse, and the only question he can answer in front of other people is how much he has got. Where they are named by the job, he is sorted by his work, and the question is where he means to wear them. The second is a pleasure to answer. The first is an examination, and men made to sit examinations either leave or over-spend to pass.

Now you may say this is a soft word for dressing things up, and the objection deserves better than my assurance, so take it on the merits. The test is whether the new name carries more true information than the old one, or less. The word cheap tells the carter one fact he knew already, that it costs nine shillings, and nothing about whether it will do. The words yard boot tell him where it belongs, what it is nailed for, and that nobody expects it to shine. That is not a prettier label, it is a more useful one. If you cannot name your lowest option by its right job without lying, the trouble is not the naming.

The same holds at the top of the shelf. The man who buys your dearest thing goes home to somebody who will ask him why, and if you have given him no sentence he must invent one, and what people invent under questioning is usually an apology. Give him the plain arithmetic, the years, the thing it saves, in words short enough to repeat. That is near neighbour to giving people something to say, and a price is read as a statement long before it is read as a sum, which is the argument of what your price says before you do. Those letters concerned what your figure says about you. This one concerns what it says about him.

None of this asks you to change a price or a product. Go down the list of what you sell, put the job and the man in place of the money, and the bottom of your range often begins to sell to people who were quietly buying nothing.

Two cautions. The account must be true or it is worse than the old label, because the first man who repeats it is made a fool of in front of the exact audience you set out to protect, and he will not forgive that. And this is no device for pushing men up the shelf. The aim is a bottom rung a sensible person can stand on with his head up, not one so shabby he climbs to escape it. If your cheapest option is genuinely unfit, take it off the shelf rather than rename it.

Three questions, and the first can be answered before you put the lamp out:

1. Read your list of options aloud as though you were buying from it. What does each one call the man who takes it? If your words are about your money rather than his job, you have built an examination and called it a choice.
2. Who else sees this purchase, and who will ask about it? A wife, a partner, a foreman, a committee, a neighbour over the fence. They are in the room whether you have noticed or not.
3. What one sentence will the buyer of your dearest option repeat when asked why he spent that much? Write it down. If you cannot do it in a dozen words he certainly cannot, and he will fall back on saying it was the expensive one.

The Answer to the Riddle

One sold his cheapest pair all year round, the other hardly sold it at all. A carter on the same wages bought two pair from one of them and none from the other. Which, and what was written on the card above the cheapest pair?

The second bootmaker. The card did not say cheap. It said yard boots, for wet standing and a stable floor, so that a man could ask for them in a full shop without telling the room what he earned. Same boot, same nine shillings, same split hide. The only thing that changed was what buying it said about the buyer.

The verse:

A man will pay to keep his name
And go without before he will
Stand in a shop of strangers
And ask aloud for the cheap one.

Until next time. Go and rename the cheapest thing you sell after the job it is right for, and write the one sentence the buyer of your dearest thing will say at home tonight.

P.S. The new century has made this worse and not better. Your options now sit in a list on a screen, read alone and at speed, under words the whole trade has agreed on without thinking: Basic, Standard, Premium. Alone is no protection. The man reading it is still imagining the moment he tells somebody which one he picked, and nobody has ever enjoyed saying Basic.

Also in the archive: The Clockmender's Price, The Christening Cup and The Man Who Was Not There.