Wholesale and Jobbing Trade.
Tacoma has a large and steadily increasing jobbing trade. Seventeen individual firms and corporations are engaged in the export trade in grain. There are sixty-three concerns engaged in the manufacture or sale of lumber, many of the number being large wholesalers. There are a number of importing houses which handle Oriental goods, fire-brick, cement, grain bags and other foreign products for which there is a local demand.
Wholesale houses are established at Tacoma which supply the trade in groceries and provisions, produce, cereals, flour and feed, meats, fish, wines and liquors, confectionery, tobacco and cigars, dry goods and notions, furs, boots and shoes, drugs, paints and oils, hardware, building materials and contractors’ supplies, belting and hose, machinery and mill supplies, plumbers’ supplies, wool, paper, furniture, and coal. There are numerous commission houses and manufacturers’ agents. The West Coast Grocery Company, of Tacoma, has the largest trade in Alaska of any grocery house in the Northwest. The first and only exclusively wholesale house established on Puget Sound in the trade in dry goods and notions was located and opened at Tacoma in January, 1903, after a careful canvass of the merits of other cities. This was quickly followed by the establishment of a wholesale notion house, also handling dry goods. The largest wholesale furniture house in the Pacific Northwest is at Tacoma. One hundred and forty-four wholesale and jobbing houses handled a trade amounting to $26,839,000 in 1903. Two hundred and eighty-six new business houses were opened in Tacoma during 1903, while only three were closed. These figures were furnished by the mercantile agencies.