The Harvester World: Volume 6, number 3, March 1915

              The Builders' Club
Where the Business Goes

" Before the days of advertising in farm pa¬ pers, it was a good deal easier to buy a retail stock for a country store than it is today." The genial owner of a large general store had just turned away a cream separator salesman whose argu¬ ments I should not have been able to resist. "You have to hand it to the farm paper advertisers and the mail order houses for one thing," he continued. "They have educated these farmers to a knowledge of more things to ask for and to buy than any farmer knew of fifteen or twenty ye.ars ago. At that time we storekeepers would have considered it a nuisance to have farmers coming iu and asking us for things we didn't have. Now we know that those very questions are the things that help us most to get and keep the farmer trade.
"Take this cream separator business, for example. A few years ago there were less than a dozen separators in this whole country, and they were owned by the few richest farmers, who all had dairy herds. Then, next thing we knew, the farm papers were carrying cream separator advertisements telling the farmers about the savings a cream separator made. Then I found that the mail order catalogues were featuring cream se|)a- rators, giving them as much as three and four big pages with colored cuts and all. It was at this time that I got my eyes opened to my present methods of doing business with farmers, and, curiously enough, it was a cream separator experience that shook me wide awake. If you care to hear about it, I'll tell you how it hap¬ pened.
"There are three farmers living a little way out of town who have always been pretty good customers of mine. They worked together better than most farmers did at that time, and what one found out he generally told the others. They each had a few cows, not more than five or six apiece, and nobody had ever figured them as cream separator prospects ; in fact, none of us knew very much about separators at this time except that, as I said before, a few of our wealthiest farmers owned them. We all rather looked on the separator as a luxury which none but the rich could afford.
"One of my three farmer friends happened to be in the store one day, and he let drop a casual remark about his cream separator.    For a minute I was  too
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surjirised to realize all that remark meant. Then I was curious. What was this farmer doing with a cream separator? He only had five cows and very little money. Why did he buy a cream separator ? How could he afford it ? Where did he buy it ? Right away I wanted to know all about it.
" When I got his story in full, it gave me a sure enough jolt. One of the three, an old country Swede, read a cream separator advertisement in a farm paper. Something in the ad hit him just right, and having heard that such a machine was being extensively used in Sweden, he sat right down and wrote not only to one but to three cream separator advertisers. One of them happened to be a mail order house. The next mail brought him a cream separator catalogue from this house. The catalogue was an elaborate eight-page affair with big, colored plates of the machine, and a number of pictures that showed in glowing colors how much money a farmer could save by investing in one of their cream separators. That catalogue sure told the vvhole story. It gave the jirice of the separators. It included an order blank. It left nothing unsaid. There could be no misunderstanding it.
"That catalogue and the letter and enclosures that came with it sold Ed Johnson a creain separator. He was all for filling in that order blank, attaching the money order, and having the cream separator delivered to him at once. But he finally decided that that would be hardly fair to his two neighbors, who usually dis¬ cussed things with him, so he decided to get their o|nnion before he bought. While the three were talking it over, and when all three had decided to buy separa¬ tors, here came two other catalogues and letters from two other adver¬ tiser s that Ed had written to. Both told all about their sepa¬ rators, but nei¬ ther told where a prospect could even see, let alone buy one, except that both of them referred to 'your local dealer.'
"As Ed told me this story, I remembered dimly one of these farmers A  LUXURY