“Give ’em time, Boss. It’s only a month, and in the slack period at that. But I’ll tell you one thing. If you’re going to change the entire advertising policy, you’ll have to change your advertising manager, for Perley don’t know anything different from the news-selling and rebate game.”
“Perley’s fired.”
“So far, so good. Who ’ve you got to take his place?”
“Nobody, yet. Could you manage it, Andy?”
“Temporarily, I might. But I’m going to have my hands too full re-making the old sheet on the news side to give much time to advertising, in the next year or so.”
“Temporarily will do. I’m going to get the principal merchants together and talk it out with them. And I want to show ’em a change in the advertising managership that’ll convince ’em the change of policy is real.”
“Ay-ah,” assented Galpin. “It sounds like the rumble of distant thunder to me.”
“Not at all. All I want is a decent, living rate for the paper. Every merchant expects a living profit on his merchandise. Why should n’t a newspaper get the same?”
“Logical. Perfectly logical. But can you get ’em to see it that way?” Andrew Galpin paused and then delivered himself of a characteristic bit of shrewdness. “The average storekeeper regards advertising outlay as a sort of accepted blackmail which he pays under protest; he don’t know exactly why, and he don’t know exactly for what. If you made him reason it out, he’d probably say that he don’t believe it pays, but everybody does it. Of course, he don’t know whether it pays or not. Nobody does, really.”
“Then why does he do it?”