5. Jobber has sales job ber provides a ready-made selling organization for the manufacturer's goods. There are approximately 300,000 retailers in the United States dealing in food stuffs. Every one of these retailers is visited fre quently by one or more of the many thousands of job bers' salesmen. If a manufacturer were to abandon the jobber and to attempt to sell a competitive line of groceries to the retail trade solely thru his own sales men, he would need not less than 300 men to cover the country properly. On the other hand, if he used the jobbers' selling forces and confined his own sales activities to keeping the wholesale trade in line, he might get along with as few as thirty salesmen. The enormous difference in selling cost between these two methods of marketing is obvious.
6. Jobber cultivates market job ber can afford to cultivate the market much more in tensively than any except the very largest of manu facturers. A salesman for a manufacturer making only a single article—catsup, for instance—could not afford to call on the small dealers or to go into the small towns, because his sales to each dealer or in each town would not pay his expenses. Compara tively large individual orders are necessary when a manufacturer's goods are sold only by his own sales men to the retail trade. The jobber's salesman, how ever, deals in a hundred or a thousand articles. His sales of catsup to each small dealer may be very small, but the order for catsup is part of an order for many other things, so that the total sale pays a large enough profit to justify the expense of the so licitation. There is no dealer so small that he is not visited frequently by jobbers' salesmen.
7. Storage service.—Retailers who are making the greatest successes are alive to the necessity of keep ing their stocks as small as possible so that the ratio of sales to average stock carried may be high. They wish to purchase frequently and in small quantities. In some lines the perishable nature of the goods adds another inducement for small and frequent purchases. These considerations suggest the necessity for many centrally located warehouses to get goods quickly and conveniently to retailer4. If the manufacturer sold direct to the retailer he would have to maintain such warehouses himself. By dealing thru jobbers be is saved this expense. The warehousing function is one of the most important and expensive that the jobber performs.
Another possible saving to the manufacturer thru use of the jobber is in shipping charges. The manu
facturer who ships direct only to the jobber can ef fect the savings usually resulting from the exclusive handling of relatively large shipments. The routing and packing charges for a few large orders are often much less than similar charges for many smaller or ders.
8. Service in carrying accounts.—The jobber frees the manufacturer from the problem of retail credits.
Taking our illustration again from the grocery field, we find, that the manufacturer with a complete national distribution, if he dealt direct with retail ers would have to carry the accounts of considerably more than a quarter of a million dealers. The -ex pense of bookkeeping, of the adjustment of credit relations, of collecting, and the losses from bad debts would necessarily be very great. On the other hand, the manufacturer of a grocery specialty who dealt only with jobbers would have not over 2,500 accounts; it would be comparatively easy to obtain credit in formation on each customer; and clerical and other similar items of expense could be cut to a compara tively low minimum.
9. Drop who sell thru jobbers do not always make use of all these forms of the jobber's service. For instance, the practice of making "drop shipments" frees the jobber from the actual handling of the goods.. "Drop ship ments" are made direct from the factory to the re tailers, on orders taken either by the jobber's or the manufacturer's salesmen; the shipments, however, are billed by the manufacturer to the jobber; the jobber takes all the responsibility for collection; and the financial arrangements between jobber and manu facturer are exactly the same as they would be if the goods were first shipped to the jobber and then reshipped by him to the retailer.
Many manufacturers, while relying on jobbers for the bulk of their business, also send their own sales men to call on retailers. If the manufacturer's pol icy is to protect the jobber by giving him his profit on all goods sold to his customers, the. manufacturer's salesmen are chiefly trade missionaries, employed pri marily to talk the manufacturer's goods to the retail ers and to aid the jobbers' salesmen in taking or ders. If these manufacturer's salesmen themselves take orders from retailers, the retailer is asked to name the jobber thru whom the order is to go; the salesman sends the order to the jobber named; the jobber gets his regular profit on it, and the order is filled either from the jobber's stock or from the fac tory direct.