This now is a buyer’s world where formerly it was the seller’s. Business no longer sits in Asiatic dignity waiting for its customers; it must up and seek them. The buyer is pursued.
As I write, the strains of a Liszt rhapsody float through my window. They come from a farmer’s cottage a little way down the road. Yesterday a motor-truck stopped at his house and unloaded a self-playing piano. I saw it and noticed that it got slightly damaged squeezing through the tiny doorway.
What does this mean? First, it means that the day before yesterday a salesman from the city went through this road selling self-playing pianos for a nominal cash sum down and the balance on monthly instalments. He sold one there, another in the next house but one, and a third further on. How many he sold to the end of the road I do not know.
But what does it mean that the city sends a man through a country road in southern New Jersey to sell pianos in this beguiling manner to people who cannot afford them? Those who bought them I know were all in debt for other things bought on the instalment plan. It means there is a necessity to sell this industrial product. It is the necessity of a factory that has overtaken the normal demand for self-playing pianos and must force the sale of its surplus. It is the necessity of all who work in that factory and live thereby. It is the necessity of industry in general, governed as it is by a principle it did not invent.
The principle is that the divisible product of the machine is cheap in proportion to the quantity. Remember that principle. We shall meet it again.
As with player-pianos and radio-sets in my country road, so with all manner of artificial things, with the whole divisible product of the machine, in every road, every street, every market of the world. How to produce enough is no longer any problem at all. How to sell what is increasingly produced—that is the problem. Evidence thereof is the commonest thing we see. It is painted in the landscape. It illuminates the cities at night. It is in our marginal vision when we read. There is no lifting one’s eyes to heaven, no casting them down in shame, no seeing whatever without seeing it.
Each day a forest is cut down and consumed for wood-pulp to make the paper on which producers advertize their wares. The use of advertizing is to stimulate in people a sense of wanting. Selling is a high profession to which men are trained in special schools. To exchange goods for money over a counter, to higgle with the individual buyer—that is not selling. Clerks and peddlers do that. Selling is to create new ways of wanting, new habits of comfort and luxury, new customs of having. This is done by agitating the mass-imagination with the suggestive power of advertizing. Business reserves its most dazzling rewards for one who can think of a way to make thousands, millions, whole races of people want that thing to-day which they knew not the lack of yesterday.
Why is this so? Because there is never enough wanting.
And why is there never enough wanting? Because the divisible product of the machine tends to increase faster than wanting.
What advertizing cannot accomplish governments may undertake. There are backward, inert, idle races that do not want much. They are content to do with little. It becomes therefore the diplomatic and military business of the powerful industrial governments to change the ways of such races. They must be brought forward, modernized, electrified, taught how to want more. Why? In order that they shall be able to consume their quota of the machine’s divisible product. Plenty shall be put upon them.