America and the world will continue to demand more and more meat and other products from livestock. Agriculture will not successfully continue without the production of meat animals. So the future reveals no reason why Armour and Company should not continue the policy of re-investing their earnings in the business that gives the most direct and substantial support to the basic industry of animal husbandry.
The packer must, with utmost carefulness, balance his daily purchases against his daily sales.
Aspects of Big Business Explained
THE simple recital of an ordinary day’s doings of Armour and Company’s beef department will make plain a number of things that may appear mysterious to a casual observer. Each day, at the opening of the market, the manager of the beef department must carefully weigh the possibilities of his sales and shipments of beef carcasses against the receipts of cattle of the quality demanded by his trade. And he must buy accordingly.
The prevailing idea that, because of cold storage facilities at the packing centers, unlimited numbers of cattle of all grades and qualities can be absorbed and slaughtered, is wrong. For even though cold storage capacity were unlimited, beef cannot be held. Each day’s kill must find room in chill and storage rooms by the shipment of about an equal number of carcasses out of storage to Armour’s branch houses located in all parts of the country.
These branch houses must, in turn, dispose of each shipment promptly to make room for new arrivals. Each branch manager receives a memorandum of the cost of the beef, and of course is expected to sell it at a profit. But he must sell it within a very limited time, even if he cannot show a profit.
Local conditions determine this. He may meet with unforeseen competition in the kind of meats he has ordered, or the demand for meats may have fallen off for one or a dozen of reasons, or for no discoverable reason at all. These known and unknown influences on the demand govern his market and he has to accept the situation, depending on evening up the score under more favorable conditions.