Transportation and Miscellaneous Group
Of the 16 members of this group, seven were established in business at the time of the re-visit. Grants were given to 12 men to start as teamsters or draymen. Ten of the 12 men bought teams, but only four were still in business in 1908. The price of hay was high, and work at wages easy to obtain; the two men who made no start became wage-earners. One man who was given money to acquire a messenger service, had been successful. Of the three remaining grantees of this group, one started a chicken farm which was running with fair success; another, a cleaning and dyeing establishment which was successful; and the third, a venture of the last named kind which had failed in the first month. This last proprietor after his failure had left the city.
In considering the relatively small number of successes among the members of this group, it must be remembered that the number of cases is too small for the data to be truly representative.
Personal and Domestic Service Group
Just as a small manufacturing enterprise is the avenue through which skilled artisans seek by becoming small proprietors to reach independence, so rooming and boarding houses, barber shops, restaurants, laundries, and the like are the roads along which individuals of a less skilled class travel to reach the same end. The cheap rooming houses of today are often run by the charwomen of yesterday; the better grade houses, by widowed housewives of somewhat higher station; the barber shops, by erstwhile barber’s helpers; and the small restaurants and lunch counters, by one-time cooks. Competition is extreme because persons accustomed to small earnings are constantly entering these fields with their little hoard of savings, ready to be satisfied with very moderate returns. In the long run, business ability tells in this as in all other lines of enterprise, but to this class adequacy of equipment and suitable location are of relatively more importance than in other forms of enterprise previously discussed.
In a city changing as rapidly as San Francisco changed for the first three years after the fire, the wisest could not tell with certainty how long a certain locality would remain desirable for his purposes. Some persons, in order to avoid prohibitive rents, signed leases for one or two years, which held them in poor locations after their better judgment told them they should move to keep near their shifting patrons. Under such circumstances two or three hundred dollars in the bank, or even less, might mean the difference between success and failure.
Where competition is close it makes a very great difference whether the equipment is owned outright or whether considerable monthly cash instalments must be paid. It is true that in ordinary times clever persons can fit up rooming houses and rent all the rooms at a fair profit. But ordinarily the small house at best offers a woman nothing more than an opportunity to be her own employer at very moderate wages; her fate depending, at each recurring crisis, on a cash reserve sufficient to carry her over a dull period, or to enable her to win in an endurance test with a nearby competitor. Rooming houses are spoken of specifically because more than three-fourths of the grants for personal service enterprises were given for this purpose.
As has been shown by [Table 60], of 249 applicants visited in 1908 who had been given aid for personal and domestic service and for whom data have been tabulated, 168, or almost 68 per cent, were still in business at the time of the re-visit.
In this group the tendency of committeemen, already commented on, to make grants about uniform in amount is clearly seen. In fact, 105, or more than two-fifths of the 249 cases discussed in this section, received grants that were $200, and less than $300. It was understood that many of the enterprises required a considerably larger capital, but the business committee had the theory that given a sum of $200 or $250 any normally enterprising person could “raise” the rest. Many applicants did so, but not all. By sub-dividing the 245 cases in which the amount of capital is known into three groups we are able to see the respective parts played by the relief grant and the applicants’ other resources. The figures are given in [Table 61].
TABLE 61.—BUSINESS STATUS AT THE TIME OF THE RE-VISIT OF APPLICANTS RECEIVING BUSINESS REHABILITATION FOR PERSONAL AND DOMESTIC SERVICE, BY SIZE OF GRANTS AND AMOUNT OF CAPITAL[165]