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| DITA AANA QQ TAAL —— MAA VOL. 46 CLEVELAND AUGUST, 1916 NEW YORK No. 8 Foreign Owned Vessels Now Being Built in This Country Will. Have Cumulative Effect in Expanding Our Foreign Commerce HE proprietor of the cross-roads store, with its the fact that they are known. Phrased in that manner, I motley assortment of garden seed, oils, calico it seems platitudinous, but it cannot be too vigorously and mail, owes what business success he has impressed on the minds of American merchants. A largely to his intimate acquaintance with the personal wide gap apparently severs the country dealer with affairs of his bucolic clientele. A request for an his neighborly concern in baby’s teething from the extension of time on an account does not necessitate country-wide operator whose trade slogan is familiar a conference with a ‘representative of the Credit to hundreds of thousands. The gap in reality is Men’s Association, but instead simmers down to a talk nonexistent, they both attract business because their with the customer over the condition of the corn in reputation, their location and their goods are well the north field. . known. In extenso, the village and small town merchant What relation or parallelism exists between their rarely is forced to rack a reluctant memory before methods and those which the American, groping for recalling the name of the purchaser who has just foreign trade, must pursue? SI wo KSSH RX ¥®@OS Ag entered the store. In the city of six or more digits, : a this intimate personal touch is lost, but is supplanted ie Shs = Yards Are Helping : by that intangible asset called good will. The head For example, consider the results that the incursion of a successful firm may never know. the names of Of American ship builders into the foreign market 99 per cent of his customers, while these in turn may will have. it 1s €asy, of course, to believe that never grow to distinguish between the proprietor and American ship yards having begun to turn out. boats the head floorwalker. Nevertheless, the store succeeds for foreign owners will continue to do so. The high ~ through the circle of satisfied patrons that it accumu- quality of American products and workmanship are lates, a circle that grows partially from itself. becoming familiar, now that mounting production We are all familiar with the names of scores of Costs in Europe have enabled these to be demonstrated. firms whose activities are encompassed only by the But the ship in reality is only a small part of the gain. nation’s boundaries. By far the greater bulk of their Ihe hundred and one items of equipment entering customers have never seen a representative of the into the finished boat will bear American labels. A firm, nor the main office or plant. But through the firm in St. Paul is now making deck winches for momentum of a spreading circle of friends, these boats building for Norway. Possibly the Norse own- national firms have become household names as fam- ¢rs never heard of St. Paul. Certainly they never ‘iar as the little tobacco store on the corner where heard of this firm. The owners, if satisfied with the the street cars stop. boat and its equipment, will merely follow the entirely human practice of talking about it. The circle of Afraid of the Water friends to whom they show the boat and its auxiliary When we reach the borders of these United States, apparatus, will repeat the tale and so the groundwork this progressive advance in the scope of American will be laid for an expanding trade in the American business activities, halts abruptly—as if the sight of goods. the blue expanses of ocean stretching toward foreign The vista is enchanting. Every foreign order filled lands produced the same mental reactions felt by a by an American firm, particularly if it is the first Hottentot when confronted by a tub of ice-cold water. one and is for purely commercial purposes, is as Analytic ability of a high order is not required important as that difficult first sale for which the to reveal what is the cornerstone of success of the commercial traveler works so hard. The sale removes cross-roads store, the village emporium, the city the American from the class of an English-speaking establishment or the nationally known house. Their merchant in a purely foreign neighborhood. It gives prosperity can be traced to a common origin—that is, him a friend in court. 265