Twenty Minutes to the Pound

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town the advertising a household kept was the advertising it had a use for, and nothing has changed about that but the paper.

Two butchers in one market square, the same beasts and the same block.
Both charged within a penny of each other all year.
Both spent the same four shillings a month on printing.
One printed his prices every Friday, and they were keen prices.
The other printed one card, once, and it named no bargain at all.
By Christmas the orders went to the second man. On what?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two butchers, in the town I have never named. Both had the shop from their fathers, one at the top of the square and one at the bottom. The same grazier brought them the same beasts, and both hung their meat a fortnight.

The first butcher advertised every week, and advertised well. Four hundred bills on a Friday, the boy out with them by seven, a price on every line and the prices honest. There was nothing wrong with the bill. It was read at the door by a good many women and in the grate by dinner time, because a thing that tells you Friday's prices has nothing to say to you on Tuesday and knows it.

The second butcher did something duller. He had been asked the same question across his counter for nineteen years, by capable women not quite sure: how long does this want in the oven, and how do I know when it is done. So he sat down with the parish schoolmaster one January and made a card of it. Four inches by six, stiff enough to last. Down one side the joints as a household names them, not as the trade does. Across the top the weights, and in the squares the minutes, with a line on standing the meat before it is carved. At the bottom, small, his name, his trade and the side of the square he was on.

No price. No offer. Nothing that expired.

He had six hundred printed, which took his advertising money for three months, and put one in every parcel that left the shop. By the second autumn one sat inside a cupboard door in perhaps three hundred kitchens.

Consider that card on a Sunday morning. A woman with a joint on the table opens the cupboard, and the first thing she reads is the minutes, the second, without reading it, the name of a butcher. She does this fifty times a year, at the moment her mind is on meat, and she comes to the card herself. Nobody paid a printer for the fiftieth reading.

The following December she had eleven of her husband's people to feed, and a rib of beef was wanted that she had no practice with. She did not go round the square comparing. She sent the boy to the name on the card, because it had been right about everything else for two years, and that is the whole of what trust amounts to in a kitchen. She was not alone in it. The second butcher's Christmas book filled with large orders from households he had done nothing for but hand them a card.

The first butcher had the better prices and spent his Decembers wondering why the large orders went up the hill. He would have told you the other man was lucky in his street.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

An advertisement is read once and burned, but a useful thing is kept, and goes on saying your name for as long as it stays useful. You are not buying attention. You are buying shelter, inside the house, at the spot where the want occurs.

Three things are doing the work. The first is repetition, which you otherwise pay for every time. A thing said once has barely been said at all, and the usual way to be said twice is to spend twice. A card in a cupboard is said fifty times for the cost of one, and the money goes out once, in January.

The second is the hour. Advertising arrives when it suits the sender, and must interrupt a person in the middle of something else. A reference is opened at the moment of need, which in trade is the only moment that converts. The householder is not being reminded that she will one day want meat; she is standing over a joint with the oven lit.

The third is the smallest and does the most. She looks for the card. Everything else you print must get in front of somebody who did not ask for it. This is sought out, and believed before your name is reached, because it has been right about the minutes every time.

The card must be useful or the machine stops, and the test is simple: strike your name off it and ask whether a stranger would keep it still. If not, you have made a handbill with a border round it, and it will be thrown out, teaching them something about you. It is also where a reference differs from the gift that is used before bedtime, which earns an address and has done its work. A reference earns a nail on the wall and begins work next year.

Two cautions. Put nothing on it that can go out of date, and no asking of any kind. A price makes it rubbish by March, a calendar of this year by next, and an offer printed on it turns a thing a woman keeps into a thing she is being sold with, which she will feel without saying why. Your name and how to reach you is the whole of your selling, and being read fifty times, it is enough. The second is that an error in a reference is worse than no reference at all. An overstated handbill is forgotten by Tuesday. A table that spoils a joint is taken down and spoken of by name. Have the figures checked before you spend a penny on printing.

Three questions, to find whether you have one of these in you:

1. What have I been asked more than ten times this year? Not the question about price, but the one about how long, how often, how to tell. Write them down for a fortnight, then choose the one with a table in it.
2. Where exactly will it live? The cupboard door, the dashboard, the inside of the meter box. Decide the place first and make the thing to suit it; the wrong size is kept nowhere.
3. Would it survive my name being taken off? If not, you have not made a reference. Start again, and leave the selling to the line at the bottom.

The Answer to the Riddle

By Christmas the orders went to the second man. On what?

On four inches of stiff paper that did a job for the household every Sunday of the year. One man bought attention by the week and had it burned by the week. The other bought a place inside three hundred cupboard doors, once, and was consulted there at the hour his trade was wanted. Both spent the same money, but one was still spending it two years later and the other had finished.

The verse:

The bill that shouts of Friday's price is ash before the night,
It asks a busy woman for a minute of her sight.
But make a thing she needs to know and set your name beneath,
And every Sunday in the year she comes to you herself.

Until next time. Go and write down every question a customer has asked you twice this year, and mark the one whose answer would fit on a card.

P.S. There is a second gain, unarranged for. A reference gets lent. A neighbour comes in, the oven is on, the card comes out of the cupboard, and your name travels a street without you. So print half again as many as you need, and when a customer asks for another because her sister wants one, give her two.

Also in the archive: The Card in the Lid, Once in the Window and The Free Guide.