Vagabond Editorials

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It's the one that replies, when you pick up your phone and say-"I want to talk long distance to New !e1["-"fleld the phone please"-3nd in a few moments you are talking to New York. And the voices, with the special power attached, go booming across the continent clearer and plainer than a local call. No wonder everyone is using the long distance phone for their business.

)f*'F

What a change from the days when the man who had much long distance talking to do had to hire a special clerk to handle it, so difficult was the operation. The greatest improvement f can think of in any line of business in recent years is long distance phoning. Just hugely improved service. In this case the word SERVICE has a tremendous meaning. Any maker or seller of a publicly used thing that puts in such improvement as the telephone people have done, will get the same sort of results. It's automatic. Some thinking man dug upthat idea of ten thousand per cent improved service. And it is just such thinking that all industries need. And those that have it, prosper.

It has been truly ,"*"JO"J irir.,-eraUte times in recent years by observers of business things, that the word "service" has been over.-worked to a degree that has almost made a mockery of it. But you will never over-work or over-do REAL service. And there will never be a time and never be conditions anywhere that will fail to put a direct cash premium on genuine service. Never ! But how many times you hear. and see that precious word used by a man who can't tell you to save his life just what this thing is that he is bragging about. The telephone company CAN. And lots df other people who are doing something definite and genuine and desirable-CAN.

A bulletin issued by w:,.l.rluror & Company, famous retail lumber merchants of Waco, Texas, says: ,,The mortality tales of Dunn and Bradstreet are grim reminders of the rigors of business endeavor. Last year 19,703 business firms failed with liabilities of over 628,000,000 dollars. The lumber industry of yesterday paid large dividends to its pioneers, and the retail building materials business of tomorrow and today will pay just as well to you and the others who will be the leaders, if you keep in step with progress. The battle of business, inexorable yet beneficent, provides progress and variety which is life. And out of the turmoil emerge the victors. Men, clear eyed, alert, resourceful, they wi4 that all of us may live more fully. It is the law. The world steps aside tolet the man pass who can see a year ahead."

Speaking of business being slow, a wholesale lumber friend of mine in an eastern city writes me that he furnishes the Pondosa Pine lumber for a large casket factory, and that the casket business is so bad that the factory has held up its latest orders. Only about three dollars worth of Pine goes into a cheap casket. "What" asks my friend, "is the answer in this case ? Are people too hard up to even die?" They say the doctors everywhere claim their business is as rotten as the lumber business. Are people too hard up to get sick? Just what is the answer?

Printer's Ink tells " ,Ju ,l"a *"aory about meeting mail order competition. A lumber dealer was having a lot of trouble with his mail order competition, so he got a nephew towrite his most serious mail order competitor for their catalogue of homes. He wanted to find out just how they made their sales, what they had to offer, etc. The catalogue came. It was followed up by detailed plans, by a financial proffer of assistance, and then bya representative of the mail order house. The next thing the lumber. dealer knew, his nephew had bought a house from the mail order man.