Paint is Undersotd Commodity

At a recent national convention of paint manufacturers, facts and figures were offered to show how tremendously far from the point of saturation is the paint market. As a matter of fact the figures would indicate that the paint industry and this so-called "saturation" rvill probably never be even nearly related.

It was estimated that it requires a coat of paint every four years to keep.the average building in good shape, and that only one building out of every four in the whole country gets this necessary coat that often.

This lack of paint for protection brings about deterioration that amounts to a sum estimated at $1,800,000,000 a year, or an amount four times as great as our annual fire losses,

There are some facts worth ruminating.

And they are particularly interesting to the retail lumberman, because the retailer of lumber is a natural medium and point of contact between building owners and paint producers.

This journal has from its inception urged the lumber dealers to be paint dealers, and what is more-paint salesmen. We have yet to meet a lumber dealer who handled paint that was hot an enthusiastic booster for this particular department of his business.

We know a lumberman who in the last couple of years has been acquiring a line of retail yards, getting them singly here and there either by purchase or installation, and he made it his business to select towns where the lumber dealers already there did NOT handle paint. He DID. And he reports with much pleasure that his paint departmeht in every one of his yards is a decidedly paying investment, and lends an interesting side to his business.

If puns were not forbidden weapons it might be declared that a paint department adds color to a retail lumber business.

The material man is just naturally the right man to handle the paint, and sell it with the material to be painted.

There is one definite thing that the lumber dealer should make certain of in handling paint, however, and that is that at any cost he should refuse to gamble with the question of quality. and should install a paint line absolutely and utterly above question. There are plenty that are NOT, and a ferv bad paint jobs would do a dealer a lot of harm. There is plenty of good paint to be had, however, and there is no scientific schooling needed to make the intelligent lumber dealer a paint merchant.

Let us hope that 1925 n'ill see a large increase in the number of lumber dealer paint merchants. It would help the building business, and it would help the retiil lumber business, and at the same time would give the public an added service.

And the public is learning more and more every day to respect, appreciate, and DEMAND service.