The sale of dry fruit is unpopular among the costermongers. Despite their utmost pains, they cannot give to figs, or raisins, or currants, which may be old and stale, anything of the bloom and plumpness of good fruit, and the price of good fruit is too high for them. Moreover, if the fruit be a “damaged lot,” it is almost always discoloured, and the blemish cannot be removed.
It is impossible to give the average price of dry fruit to the costermonger. The quality and the “harvest” affect the price materially in the regular trade.
The rule which I am informed the costermonger, who sometimes “works” a barrow of dried fruit, observes, is this: he will aim at cent. per cent., and, to accomplish it, “slang” weights are not unfrequently used. The stale fruit is sold by the grocers, and the damaged fruit by the warehouses to the costers, at from a half, but much more frequently a fourth to a twentieth of its prime cost. The principal street-purchasers are boys.
A dry-fruit seller gave me the following account:—By “half profits” he meant cent. per cent., or, in other words, that the money he received for his stock was half of it cost price and half profit.
“I sell dry fruit, sir, in February and March, because I must be doing something, and green fruit’s not my money then. It’s a poor trade. I’ve sold figs at 1d. a pound,—no, sir, not slang the time I mean—and I could hardly make 1s. a day at it, though it was half profits. Our customers look at them quite particler. ‘Let’s see the other side of them figs,’ the boys’ll say, and then they’ll out with—‘I say, master, d’you see any green about me?’ Dates I can hardly get off at all, no!—not if they was as cheap as potatoes, or cheaper. I’ve been asked by women if dates was good in dumplings? I’ve sometimes said ‘yes,’ though I knew nothing at all about them. They’re foreign. I can’t say where they’re grown. Almonds and raisins goes off best with us. I don’t sell them by weight, but makes them up in ha’penny or penny lots. There’s two things, you see, and one helps off the other. Raisins is dry grapes, I’ve heard. I’ve sold grapes before they was dried, at 1d. and 2d. the pound. I didn’t do no good in any of ’em; 1s. a day on ’em was the topper, for all the half profits. I’ll not touch ’em again if I aint forced.”
There are a few costers who sell tolerable dry fruit, but not to any extent.
The old couple I have alluded to stand all the year round at the corner of a street running into a great city thoroughfare. They are supplied with their fruit, I am told, through the friendliness of a grocer who charges no profit, and sometimes makes a sacrifice for their benefit. As I was told that this old couple would not like inquiries to be made of them, I at once desisted.
There are sometimes twenty costermongers selling nothing but dry fruit, but more frequently only ten, and sometimes only five; while, perhaps, from 300 to 400 sell a few figs, &c., with other things, such as late apples, the dry fruit being then used “just as a fill up.”
According to the returns before given, the gross quantity of dry fruit disposed of yearly in the streets of London may be stated as follows:
| 7,000 | lbs. of | shell almonds, |
| 37,800 | „ | raisins, |
| 24,300 | „ | figs, |
| 4,200 | „ | prunes. |