"My proposition to Mr. Black is that he tries the stamps for a year, and if he does not find"—and here he tapped the table impressively with his fingers—"if he does not find that they have actually increased his business, why then we will call the deal off. We will risk—gladly risk—all the heavy expenditures of working with Mr. Black. We will risk the lost prestige to ourselves of having a dealer give up our splendid offer; and I do this, Mr. Fellows, because I know from past experience—not from mere theories—that Garter stamps will mean an increased profit to Mr. Black."
"Would you supply any other line of business in this town, Mr. Bulder?" asked Fellows quietly.
"Certainly, my young friend. Because by doing so it would help Mr. Black. Don't you see that, if one hardware man, and one druggist, and one dry goods store, and so on, had our stamps, all those merchants would be in a class by themselves? It would make them the leading merchants in the town, for people would trade with them so that they could collect the Garter stamps."
"I see," returned Fellows quietly. "And the man who gets stamps here from Mr. Black would be able to buy, let us say, a hat or some china ornaments through you people, which would, incidentally, deprive the local men's furnishing store or china store of the sale of those articles. And, of course, that same man might get trading stamps from other stores, and with those stamps he could buy a pocketknife through you people, and thus take the sale of that pocketknife away from Mr. Black."
Bulder waved the question aside as though not worth bothering with. "My dear man," he asserted, "the people who get things for those trading stamps get things they would not buy otherwise. That is surely a very trivial contention."
Fellows looked at me and said:
"Black, I have no reason to take any more of yours or Mr. Bulder's valuable time, as I see nothing else to say except that I strongly advise against the adoption of this or any other trading stamp or profit-sharing scheme which you do not control yourself. Of course, a few merchants in a town can get together and run this trading stamp system, whereby your stamps are accepted for cash in other stores and other stores' stamps are accepted for cash in your own, and by that system there might possibly be some benefit in the trading stamps. But I believe that any merchant who uses trading stamps—and I do not refer to your excellent company, Mr. Bulder—is merely building up business for some outside organization. He is merely diverting some of his own profits into the pockets of the trading stamp concerns, which do not really build up any business at all; because, if the stamps prove successful for one merchant, it will not be long before other merchants take them up and then every one is giving profits to the trading stamp concerns without any of them getting any real benefit from it. I believe the use of trading stamps is more or less an admission of inability to think up plans of getting business for oneself."
Bulder smiled. He was once again the acme of courtesy.
"That argument of yours sounds excellent, Mr. Fellows," he said suavely. "Excellent! But why not apply it to your business? Why not say that if one merchant advertises, all merchants will advertise and thus the benefits of advertising are nullified?"
Fellows was once again beaten down, I thought. He was plainly stumped for a few seconds. Then he replied: