fool can pay what he is asked; it takes a clever man to pay what the other fellow is asked, or less.

VII

The secret price must go, because

It is opposed to the "rapid fire" business methods of to-day.

It is a cloak for fraud, deceit, and unfair discrimination.
It fosters distrust between seller and buyer.

It is of no advantage to either seller or buyer.

VIII

When the proposition is laid down that "the fixed price is the mark of the illegal combination—suppressed competition"—it is so generally true that it might be left without comment, but it is not invariably true.

Under the old competition, with its secret prices, cuts, rebates, etc., etc., when a buyer is suddenly confronted by more or less uniform prices, cessation of rebates, discounts, etc., he knows that competition has been suppressed in some manner and he looks for the combination; nine times out of ten where the change in terms is sudden the combination exists.

But where conditions in any given trade or industry improve gradually as the natural result of the adoption of franker and more straightforward methods prices tend to become uniform without concerted action.

Price storms, like wind storms, tend to subside-but

also to blow up again. Violent fluctuations are abnormal ss. and destructive. If subjected to no outside influences prices varit in every industry seek and find their levels. Prices are not

"fixed" in the active sense of the verb, but they become stable as the result of normal conditions.

In rare instances they may become and remain for a time so stable they bear all the ear-marks of being "fixed," but they are not; there has been no agreement, no combination.

Where prices are stable, in a normal sense, it is nearly always in those industries where each competitor knows what others ask and each refrains instinctively from cutting because he knows if one cuts all will; the industry has probably been through more than one disastrous trade war and is ever on the brink of another.

"Fixed" prices in this sense-stable-are due to the extent to which the open price prevails.

The more open the price the stronger the tendency toward stability and that, too, without combination. The open quotations-prices-of stock exchanges support our theory.

But, while many long established industries-especially those controlled by a few conservative and well managed companies have worked toward more or less openness and frankness in quoting prices and gained corresponding advantages in the way of greater stability in prices, the condition is not one of any degree of permanence; it rests on no well defined policy; its sole basis is fear of a trade war, a fear that is apt to yield to the pressure of "hard times.”

IX

The open price policy of the new competition is a policy that demands concerted action for its adoption and promotion.

It has taken the retail trade a century to grow into the one-price-plainly-marked policy. Even now its advantages

are not fully recognized. The policy was not worked out as a great economic step. Merchants adopt it or not, as they please, and to-day the general impression is that the matter is wholly a question for the individual dealer to decide for himself if he thinks it pays he uses it, otherwise he sticks to the secret price-an irrational mode of doing business.

Enough has been said to show that the issue between the secret price and the open is both economic and ethical. The secret price is wasteful and wrong, the open price is saving and right.

That being true, the adoption of the open price should not be left entirely to the whim of the dealer. There are two large classes as vitally interested in his action as he is himself-other dealers and all his and their customers.

i

The dealer or manufacturer who asserts his right to quote secretly such prices as he pleases asserts his right to demoralize a trade as he pleases; that right does not exist; he is a trade anarchist.

In even the retail trade it would be possible to promote the systematic adoption of the open price policy by concerted action; customers should insist upon it; dealers should form associations to develop it; eventually the law should aid it.

The growth of large establishments, the almost infinite number of sales by salesgirls and salesmen to whom it would be impossible to give any discretion regarding prices -these are the conditions that have brought about the use of the one-price system in the retail trade. The big merchants could not conduct their business on any other basis. The little have followed because compelled.

To a certain extent the same forces are operating in the manufacturing world. Establishments are becoming so large, salesmen so numerous, that more or less fixed rules regarding prices and discounts must be adopted, otherwise agents and salesmen quote in opposition to one another. It

requires no little ingenuity on the part of the management of a large corporation to keep its own agents in line; if a price is changed all must be notified.

But, while there is a certain tendency toward more open prices, the tendency is so feeble and confined within such narrow limitations that little progress will be made without concerted action.

The advantages of the open price policy, as a policy, as a definite economic method, must be recognized and its systematic adoption urged.

X

The interest of the public must be aroused to the ethical significance of the step, to its rightness, its fairness. Manufacturers and contractors must be convinced of its economic significance, its value as a labor-saving device, its natural influence upon stability of prices.

In retail trade the open price may prevail to a certain degree by the mere marking of goods in plain figures, but in the manufacturing, and especially the contracting, world, where orders and contracts are for products to be made and work to be done, no system of marking prices can be utilized; an entirely different method must be adopted if prices are to be open.

Coöperation in the form of open price associations is

necessary.

CHAPTER X

OPEN-PRICE ASSOCIATION

I

In these days of uncertainty regarding the law it is not uncommon to hear men say,

"We have a little association, but we never talk about prices."

"Then why do you meet?"

"Oh, just to lunch and talk over things generally."
"You don't agree upon prices?"

"No, sir!"

"You meet for the fun of the thing?"

"That's about it."

"Some of you travel a thousand miles once a month just for the pleasure of lunching together?"

"Um-m-, well, you might put it that way."

Such child-like pretenses deceive no one, and no self-respecting lawyer would permit clients to make such futile

statements to a court.

II

It is almost as common to hear men say, "We have an association, but we don't agree upon prices."

"What do you do?"

"Why, I get up and say, 'My price is so and so'; and the others get up and say their prices are so and so."