5. Selling specialties.—As the definitions would indicate, the bulk of the expenditures of the country's households are for staples. Many households and individuals, however, have a surplus left after they have satisfied their requirements for staple goods. With the advance of prosperity, this surplus grows larger.
The sellers of specialties compete keenly for this surplus. The competition, in the case of the goods themselves, is not only between two similar special ties, such as two different makes of player-pianos, but between different kinds of specialties as well; if the surplus is spent for an automobile, consideration of the player-piano will be put off for a year. Be cause of this double competition and because of the necessity of creating' a compelling desire and making a strong close in each individual case, the specialty salesman must be of a high type and earns a corre spondingly large remuneration.
6. Specialties become staples.—A great many of the staples of today were the specialties of yesterday. Adam Smith says that in 1775 both men and women in England wore shoes; in Scotland, only men wore them; and in France, neither men nor women wore them. In England, then, shoes were a staple com modity; in Scotland, they were staple among men, but a specialty among women; and in France, they were a specialty for both men and women. That is, there existed no demand for them among the women of Scotland, or among the men or women of France. The people had to be educated to their use; a fairly general desire for shoes had to be created. Even such common articles as tooth-brushes, soap and un derclothing have not always been staples, and they are staples today only in the more civilized countries. Their introduction in some foreign parts is only be ginning.
There may be some who will maintain that goods are not manufactured before there is a demand for them, but are produced only in response to a very definite need. Those who have studied the history of selling, however, realize that the demand has to be manufactured just as surely as do the goods. For a long time railroad men laughed at Westinghouse and his air-brakes with which he proposed to stop trains with wind. A Boston mob destroyed the first sewing machine on the ground that it would throw the people out of work. It took a long campaign of education
to convince people that Edison's electric lights were safe, practical, and better than gas. The struggle of the telephone for recognition is still fresh in the minds of men of this generation. No business man can now imagine how he could get along witbout a telephone, but it took real salesmanship to convince him in the early days that there was any advantage connected with it. It is said that one of the first Chicago firms to install telephones subsequently had them removed because the frequent phone calls from customers dis turbed the clerks.
The process by which a specialty becomes staple goes on continually. In the next few years we may expect to see the vacuum cleaner just as common as the sewing machine is today. The low-price auto mobile, too, bids fair to become a staple product. The milestones of civilization are marked by the con version of specialties into staples thru the educating work of salesmen and of advertising. The degrees of civilization in two countries may be compared by noting to what extent things that have become staples in the one are still specialties in the other.
7. Branded staples.—In the classification which we are now discussing, that is marked by the nature of the product sold, there is a third class of commodity to be considered, the branded staple. The branded staple may be defined as a staple commodity, put up in a standard package, under a distinctive brand name, usually sold at a standard price, carrying a guarantee of quality and in many cases widely adver tised. Not so many years ago the corner grocer bought his oatmeal and other cereals in bulk and scooped them from a bin under his counter for his customers. Today he hands the customer a package. Formerly he bought his crackers by the barrel. To day the National Biscuit Company and the Loose Wiles Biscuit Company have largely wiped out the sale of crackers in bulk and instituted the sale of crackers in sealed packages. Flour, too, was for merly weighed out from the grocer's bin. Today it is handed to the customer in the bags in which the grocer receives it, branded with the maker's name.