So we decided to charge two dollars a day for the rent of the vacuum cleaners.
Charlie Martin suggested that we ought to get up an ad. for the sweeper service. I thought that Fellows ought to do it, but Charlie was so insistent that I told him to go ahead with it.
Jimmy gave us an idea which I thought was pretty good. "Say, Boss," he said, "couldn't we sell baseball goods?"
"Barlow has always handled those," I said, "and—and—" I trailed off to nothing, because I realized that, because Barlow handled these, it was no reason why I should not, and, if I stopped handling everything he did, I would have very few goods in the store. I had had to give up the idea of farm implements, because of the big hold he had on that business, and the amount of money it required to carry the necessary stock.
"I'm captain of the Little Tigers," broke in Jimmie, "and if yer put in baseball goods, why I can get all our gang to buy from here—and, say, I know a couple o' kids that would like to go and see the captains of the other kids' teams around here—especially if you were to give a little rake off."
We all laughed—except Larsen. "That's one of the best suggestions Jimmie ever give us," he said, "Let his pals sell for a commission. They get business we never get."
Here Martin broke in, "I know a house in Boston that would supply us with all the catalogs we wanted, and we could sell from catalog if necessary, and they would give us a substantial discount for any orders we sent them."
"Write to them, Charlie," I said, "and see what they'll do."
What a tremendous lot of different lines there are which a retail store can handle—even if only for a brief season each year—and make some profit out of them! But you sure do have to keep on the jump to think of them all. I know my store would never have been handling the number of lines that we had then, if it hadn't been for the Monday meetings. These meetings seemed to tone up all of us, and, once we had gone on record to do something, we seemed to strive hard to live up to it, so that we wouldn't let the other fellows have the laugh on us, which they certainly would if we had fallen down. It was at that meeting that I suggested a motto. It was this:
"Eternal humping is the price of Success."