In the more densely populated region with a twice or thrice a week, or even daily service, the huckster egg becomes the finest farm grown egg in the market.
The second step in the usual scheme of egg marketing is the sale of eggs collected by the small storekeeper to the produce man or shipper.
The Produce Buyer.
Throughout the Mississippi Valley there are wholesale produce houses at all important railroad junctions. A typical house will ship the produce of one to three counties. These houses, once a week or oftener, send out postal card quotations. These quotations read so much per case, and are usually case count, with a reservation, however, of the privilege to reject or charge loss on goods that are utterly bad. Each grocery receives quotations from one to a dozen such houses, and perhaps also from commission firms in the nearest city. The highest of these quotations gets the shipment.
The buyer repacks the eggs and usually candles them, the strictness of the grading depending upon the intended destination. The loss in candling is generally kept account of, but is seldom charged back to the shipper. The egg man wants volume of business, and if he antagonizes a shipper by charging up his loss, the usual result will be the loss of trade. So the buyer estimates his probable loss and lowers his price enough to cover it.
By loss off, or "rots out," is meant the subtraction of the bad eggs from the number to be paid for. Buying on a candled or graded basis, usually not only means rots cut, but that a variation of the price is made for two or more grades of merchantable eggs.
Much discussion prevails among the western egg buyers as to whether eggs should be bought loss off or case count. Loss off buying seems to be more desirable and just, but in practice is fraught with difficulties.
If the loss off buyer feels he is losing business, he may instruct his candler to grade more closely, which means he will pay less. Whether done with honest or dishonest intention, the buyer thus sets the price to be paid after he has the goods in his own hands, and this is an obviously difficult commercial system.
Where the buyer in one case changes the grading basis to protect himself, there are probably ten cases where the eggs really deserve the loss charged; but the tenth chance gives the seller an opportunity to nurse his loss with the belief that he has been robbed by the buyer. Such an uncertain feeling is disagreeable, and the results are that where one or two competing egg dealers buys loss off, and the other case count, the case count man will get most of the business.
The case count method being the path of least resistance, the loss off system can only succeed where there is some factor that overcomes the disinclination of a shipper to let the other man set the price. This factor may be: 1st—An exceptional reputation of a particular firm for honesty and fair dealing. 2d—Exceptional opportunities for selling fancy goods, enabling the loss off buyer to pay much higher rates for good stuff. 3d—A condition that prevails in the South in the summer, where the losses are so heavy that the dealers will not take the risk involved in case count buying. 4th—Some sort of a monopoly.