MANUFACTURERS. Formerly the distinction between the jobber and the manufacturer was more plainly marked than at present, it being very usual now for wholesale grocers to put up goods under their own brands. This forces the manufacturer to seek the retail trade direct and makes many changes in the mode of doing business, which are well set forth in the following article, written by the late Major Price of New York, who founded the American Grocer, and subsequently The Grocer of that city : " A manufacturing jobber in groceries, as a rule, cannot sell goods bearing his own brand to other manufacturing obbcrs who put up similar goods, nor to any extent to any other jobbers, ex cept at some distance from the point of manufacture. A natural consequence of this condition of things is that the large jobbing grocery houses which are manufacturing or having put under their own names almost every article in the trade, do not and cannot push the sale of goods regularly manufactured by the legitimate manufacturers, and this latter class is compelled to use extraor dinary means to keep their goods in the lists of the other class. Moreover, the legitimate manufacturers are being compelled, by the facts here stated, to themselves seek the general jobbing and retail trade throughout the country in order to compete with the manufacturing jobbers. This state of affairs has been growing more and more serious and threatening to manufacturers for a series of years. We recall the time here in this city when the jobbers and manufacturers were two entirely distinct classes; when the former were content to sell the goods of the manufac turers ; and when the idea of a jobbing house making or putting up its own soap and starch and baking powders and blue and cigars and canned goods and the thousand and one things usually sold to the trade had not entered the fertile brain of would-be monopolists in the grocery line. The right of the jobbing grocers
to do as some of them are doing, is not the question, nor is the policy, perhaps, so far as they themselves are concerned; but the fact is of very serious moment to the legitimate manufacturers.
We appreciate the position of the manufacturers. They natu rally wish all the trade they can get, and do. not desire to offend any leading house. Hence they are put to a very great expense in complying with the requests of the jobbing manufacturers to help them push the sale of their goods by advertising them in house papers. We do not quarrel with them for this as long as they consider it to their interest to do so, but we wish to point out to them that there is a much better course to pursue, and that is to bring themselves into direct contact and competition with the very trade that the leading, jobbing, manufacturing grocery houses control and sell their goods to the general jobbing 4nd best retail trade in the country.
The retail merchants of the country at large are deeply inter ested in this subject. Whether they are to be simply the agents, so to speak, of one house, selling all its goods under its name, and largely confined to what the house chooses to push on them, or whether they are to have the choice of all the best goods made in the country, are questions worthy of their consideration." The policy of the Philadelphia Grocer, and all grocery journals honestly published in the interest of the retailer and not allied to a wholesale house, is to bring the manufacturer directly in con tact with the retail dealer.