While he was talking, I had been looking at Roger, and comparing him to the old Roger Burns I had known a year or so ago. He had grown bigger—not in size, you understand, but he was a bigger man—he had a personality which he never had had before. He had more confidence in himself, and I attributed this to the fact that he was sure of what he was about. He knew exactly what was expected of him—he had been trained thoroughly to do it, and that had given him a confidence which I was sure will make for his success in Farmdale. Frankly, I felt that, as a competitor, he was going to be a much keener one than Stigler ever had been.
"The New England Hardware Company," continued Roger, "has money enough to open as many stores as it wishes; but it can open stores only as quickly as it can get men. So the first thing it seeks is a man who is likely to make a good manager, then it looks for a location in which to place him."
"Is that how all chain-store organizations do?" I asked.
"No," replied Roger. "Some of them look around for towns where the merchants are not on to their jobs. That's the way some of the big drug store chains in particular operate. They go around to the towns where the existing drug-store proprietors are dead, and don't know it, and where there is practically no competition for them, and that's where they open the store.
"My people go at it a little differently. Where possible, however, they try to open a store with a manager who is known in the location."
"Do they ever buy existing stores and make them part of the chain?"
"No, although some chain organizations do that."
"How do they pick out the towns to locate in?"
"When they look for a town in which to locate a store, they want to know a lot of facts about it. They want to know, for example, whether the town covers a large area or not. They find out if the houses are scattered, or if the dwellings are concentrated in a small area. They like a town that is a trading center for neighboring towns, because they can draw from all these neighboring towns as well as from their own local trade. If it's a manufacturing town, they want to know whether the factories make such goods as will tend to make the labor problem steady. For instance, they wouldn't want to locate in a town which was always having labor troubles, or where there were periods where the factories have to close down because they manufacture seasonal goods. In other words, they want a town which has a regular, steady trade all the year.
"A good residential town, of course, is splendid for them. When they go to a manufacturing town they pick out, wherever possible, a town which has a diversified line of manufactories, instead of one which is devoted to one line of industry. You see, that helps to avoid slack times, because if one line is slack the other is inclined to be busy. See my point?