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How Shall We Save The Lumber Industry?

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Compensation Costs

Compensation Costs

By Jack Dionne

This follows right along behind the leading editorial in the last issue.

There are many subjects of interest and importance before the American lumber in,dustry today, but only ONE of them is of outstanding, paramount importance, and that is-"He!v are we going to save this great lumber industry and get it on a consistent and dependable paying basis?"

That's really the only one of tremendous import.

Last issue we drove home the fact that no possible automatic demand can take care of the possible mill supply of the country. The fact that a world of Southern mills have cut and gone in the last tew years, doesn't dter that fact at all. There is an elasticity to lumber production in this country today capable of swamping any demand, just so. long as the industry follows its time dishonored system of increasing the production every time the demand improves.

And it would be a sin and a shame if we should conti4ue to tear down the great forests of the West as we are doing at present, and sell the product at starvation pric6s, as is being done, not only giving the Western producers nothing for their trees, but throttling down the price ofall other woods by competitive process to a less than true value level. But that is what is being done, year after year, and the end isnotyet in sight.

Is it possible that after a full generation of trials and tribulations such as no other basic industry ever knew-and most of which were entirely unnecessary-there is not enough intelligence in this great industry today to put this industry on its feet, and keep it there ?

Last year the softwood manufacturers sold and shipped more lumber than they cut; and yet at the end of the year their market was disorganized, and their price was abominable. This year will be no better unless better thinking is followed by better activity in this industry. The man whose demand is greater than his supply, yet who, in the face of such a situation cuts his price below a ieasonable level, is in strange dondition indeed.

And inTHIS condition this great SHELTER industry finds itself.

The trouble is, of course, that it is the o4ly great basic industry in which the VALUE of the product is related in no possible manner to the selling PRICE. Strange -almost inexplicable-yet entirely true. The man who makes a price on his product in this industry, considers competition entirely, and value not at all. He does so today, and afways has.

And yet, all thatthis industry needs to bring it out of this sillyrut, and into the light of general prosperity, isfor each man engaged in the business to adopt the policy followed by practically all other men in all other lines of business, that is, begin basing his PRICE on his COST and on NOTHING ELSE.

If every man in the lumber business would forget for a few weeks that he had competitors, and would stop selling anything, to anybody, at any time, for less than cost plus a reasonable profit, the industry would automatically becorne prosperous, and would 'stay that way as long as that theory prevailed, regardless of conditions.

I wonder if we couldn't get every lumberman in the country to enter into an agreement with himself to try that for a while?

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