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Merchants The Salesman Meets
by
“‘What do you take me for?’ I ‘phoned back.
“I’m very glad to have a chance, sir, to give you a dose of your own medicine. You can’t run any such a sandy as this on me,’ and I hung up the ‘phone on him without giving him the satisfaction of talking it out any further. To be sure, I would not go down stairs to look him up.
“Well, that must have pleased the old man’s clerk,” said one of the boys.
“Sure it did. He touched the button and made me have a two-bit straight cigar on him.”
“You got even with him all right,” said one of my hat friends who was in the party; but let me tell you how a merchant down in Arkansas once fixed me and my house.”
“Old Benzine?” said the shoeman.
“Sure; that’s the fellow. How did you hear about it?”
“Well, my house got it the same way yours did.”
“Ah, that fellow was a smooth one,” continued the hat man. “He had burned out so often that he had been nicknamed Benzine, but still he had plenty of money and though my house knew he was tricky, they let him work them. I didn’t know anything about the old man’s reputation when I called on him. He had recently come down into Arkansas–this was when I traveled down there–and opened up a new store in one of my old towns. I didn’t have a good customer in the town and in shopping about fell in on Benzine.
“He kicked hard about looking at my goods when I asked him to do so. He knew how to play his game all right. He knew that I would bring all sorts of persuasions to bear upon him to get him started over to my sample room, and just about the time he thought I was going to quit he said, ‘Vell, I look but I vont gif you an orter.’ Of course that was all I wished for. When a man on the road can get a merchant to say he will look at his goods, he knows that the merchant wishes to buy from somebody in his line and he feels that he has ninety-nine chances in a hundred of selling him.
“That afternoon Old Benzine came over and he was mean. He tore up the stuff and said it was too high priced, and everything of that kind. He haggled over terms and started to walk out several times. He made his bluff good with me and I thought he was ‘giltedge.’ Finally, though, I sold him about a thousand dollars. The old man had worked me all right. Now he began to put the hooks into the house.
“The same day that my order reached the house came a letter from Benzine stating that he had looked over his copy and he wished they would cut off half of several items on the bill. Ah, he was shrewd, that old guy. He was working for credit. He knew that if he wrote to have part of his order cut off, the credit man would think he was good. My house couldn’t ship the bill to him quickly enough, and they wrote asking him to let the whole bill stand. He was shrewd enough to tell them no, that he didn’t wish to get any more goods than he could pay for. That sent his stock with the house a sailing. But the old chap wasn’t done with them yet.
“About six weeks before the time for discounting he wrote in and said that as his trade had been very good indeed they could ship additional dozens on all the items that he had cut down to half-dozens, and in this way he ran his bill to over $1,300.”
“Well, you got a good one out of him that season, all right.”
“Yes–where the chicken got the ax. As soon as Old Benzine had run in all the goods he could, he did the shipping act. He left a lot of empty boxes on his shelves but shipped nearly all of his stock to some of his relatives, and then in came the coal-oil can once more.”