The rate on this incomparable product in carloads from Minneapolis to New York is 25 cents per hundred pounds.
That is 12½ cents per fifty-pound sack.
This flour is sold to the consumer in New York at approximately $1.85 per fifty-pound sack (or it was when this was written).
An increase of 10 per cent in freight rates would add but one and one-quarter cents to the price of a fifty-pound sack, or a little less than two one-hundredths of one cent per pound.
The freight rate on a fifty-pound sack of flour from Minneapolis to Chicago is five cents per sack. An increase of 10 per cent in rates would add only five mills per sack between these points, or one one-hundredth of one cent per pound.
LESSON IX.
Freight Rates and Dressed Beef.
The reason cattle are butchered and carried to the consumer as dressed beef rather than driven to market on foot or hauled as live stock, is that the freight charge is less and the beef arrives in better condition.
Little children in New York and Boston appreciate this, if the wise grown-ups of the West sometimes seem to doubt it.