Speaking Optimistically

By Jach Dionne

The lumber industry, at its peak, produced ten or eleven bitlion feet more lumber in a single year than it wiU produce in the year 1928-AND CONSUMED IT.

And yet, there are a whole lot more people in the country today than there were then; we have learned a great deal more about the uses of lumber than we knew then; lumber can be converted into thousands of useful and attractive and desirable things today that we knew nothing of then; and the public is instinctively just as kindly in its attitude toward lumber as it ever was.

Then, pray tell me if you can, why shouldn't we have a gleat lumber market, and a prosperous lumber year in 1928?

There is only one possible answer, which is, lumber is being so completely outsold by other commodities that it falls far short of its easily possible mark, and ranks far below its genuinely normal condition.

And that this IS the reason and that there is no other, istoo plainly a fact to be worth while debating.

"WeARE going forward-we HAVE progressed in our merchandising," lumbermen often say to me.

True.-by comparison with our own past history.

But-compared with innumerable other industries-totally UNTRUE. Bythat latter comparison lumber merchandising has been going backwards rather than forwards. We are NOT h'eeping up with our competition for public dollars.We are NOT making the appeal to public interest that serves to separate the public from itscash. We are NOT making it attractive and easy to buy those things that lumber will create when translated into FUNCTIONS.

We are still too prone to sell two by fours, and boards, and flooring and shingles, while the public wants new and attractive and interesting and different BUILDINGS and BUILDING FUNCTIONS.

The soda pop man has arranged to put his ice cold and assorted drinks into thousands of places where the public may reach it; but lumber things are being sold in the same old places in the same old way.

Lumber merchandising has got to improve. The other day a man who owns a string of retail yards said to me: "\l[/e have put in a line of paints, and the paint company sends a man to each of my yards, and he calls on the custdmers with my salesmen, and helps them sell lots of paint." I{e wondered if it wouldn't pay the lumber industry to do likewise.

The difference between a rut and a grave is the depth. The lumber rut is getting too deep.