CHAPTER XXII
STIGLER PREPARES ANOTHER BLOW
When I told Fellows about my trading stamp idea, he suggested that I think over the question once more, before taking them up, and he asked if he could be present at the interview when the Garter trading stamp man came around.
It was hard to tell what to do. I thought trading stamps were a good thing; but Fellows of the Flaxon Advertising Agency apparently didn't like them, and Barlow didn't either. When I talked it over with Betty, first she said, "Don't touch them at all," then she said, "I don't know, try them!" Finally she said she didn't know what to think of them. The decision was, after all, up to me and no one seemed to know much about them.
Well, I agreed to think it over again, and when Bulder, the Garter trading stamp man, came, I put him off until the next day. Fellows was going to be there when he came, and I thought I'll let those two have it out and put my money on the winner.
Stigler was up to a new dodge.
Until the first of the month there had been a small men's furnishing store next door to me. Well, Dorman, who ran the store, had ended by running it to the wall. Poor fellow, he'd been in that location for over forty years, and at the time was a man of nearly seventy. He never had done much business, at least not since my knowledge of him, and, towards the last, the place had been getting seedier and seedier each month, and finally he had had to give it up. He told the Mater—he knew her quite well—that he never had made over $20.00 a week in the store, and, after paying up all his debts, he had less than half the money he had originally put into the business.
"I'd have been much better off clerking for some one else," he had told the Mater, "for I would have saved a little money. As it is, here I am, three score and ten, and, if I live two years more, I'll have to go to the poorhouse, I suppose."
Old Dorman had made me think pretty seriously when he got out. I was wondering how many more small storekeepers were in Dorman's position; how many of them had bungled along from year to year, making a bare existence; I hoped I could do better than that! It had made me feel the need of not only keeping up-to-date, but up-to-to-morrow in business ideas. I remembered what Barker, the big hardware man in Boston, had said to me when I asked him why there were so many little stores, after he had mentioned that there were a lot of little stores which were not represented in the association.
"The reason," he returned, with a sad shake of his head, "is that the men who run them are little. They wear blinkers all their lives. Their outlook is extremely narrow. They never grasp what is going on around them. They don't keep up to date in their ideas and methods of doing business. They never grow, but remain little all their lives."