If you live within a hundred and fifty miles of a city, if you possess ordinary common sense and have the ability to write a readable and understandable letter, you may, from September to April of each year, when other farmers and their wives are consuming instead of producing, earn from fifty to a hundred and fifty dollars net profit each month. You may do this by fattening and dressing chickens for city folks, and by supplying regularly fresh country sausage, hams, lard and eggs.
This is not an idle theory. Last September I began with one customer; today—this was written the end of March—I have nearly 500 customers to whom I am supplying farm products by parcel post.
Instead of selling my chickens to the huckster or to the local poultry house for twelve cents a pound, I am selling them to the consumer in the city for twenty cents a pound, live weight, plus the cost of boxing and postage. Not only that, I am buying chickens from my neighbors at a premium of one to two cents over the huckster's prices, "milk feeding" them, and selling them to my city customers at a profit of six to seven cents a pound.
I buy young hogs from my neighbors at market prices and make them into extra good country sausage that nets me twenty-five cents a pound in the city, and into hams for which I get twenty-five cents a pound, delivered. The only pork product on which I do not make an excellent profit is lard. I get fifteen cents a pound for it, delivered to the city customer, and it costs me almost that much to render and pack it.
At this writing storekeepers and egg buyers in my county are paying the farmer seventeen cents for his eggs. I am getting twenty-five cents a dozen for eggs in thirty-dozen eases and twenty-nine cents a dozen in two-dozen boxes. My prices to the city man are based upon the Water Street, Chicago, quotation for "firsts," which, at this writing, is nineteen cents. If this price goes up I go up; if it goes down I go down.
I got my customers by newspaper advertising—almost exclusively. It is a comforting belief that one satisfied customer will get you another, and that that customer will get you another, and so on, but it has not so worked out in my experience. Out of all my customers less than twelve have become customers through the influence of friends.
My experience has taught me another thing: That direct advertising does not pay. By direct advertising I mean the mailing of letters and circulars to a list of names in the hope of selling something to persons whose names are on that list.
I tried it three times—once to a list of names I bought from a dealer in such lists; once to a list that I myself compiled from the society columns of two Chicago dailies; and once to a classified list that I secured from a directory.
The results in these cases were about the same. The net cost of each new customer that I secured by circulars and letters was $2.19. The net cost of each new customer that I secured by newspaper advertising was fifty-four cents.
Not every city newspaper will get such results. In my case I selected that paper in Chicago which in my judgment went into the greatest number of prosperous homes, and whose pages were kept clean of quack and swindling advertisements. I used only the Sunday issues, because I believe the Sunday issues are most thoroughly read.