Your Money's Worth
by . New York: The Macmillan Co. 1927. 12mo. x+267 pp. $2.00.
THIS is a confusing book. What you take away from it will depend upon your own humor and prejudices. If you have bought a shirt at a fire sale, only to have it fall into shreds on your back, you will instantly agree with Mr. Chase and Mr. Schlink that we are staggering under ‘an enormous burden of adulteration, bad workmanship, misrepresentation, sharp practice, and even downright bodily danger.’ If, on the other hand, you have been buying good merchandise at fair prices from Marshall Field or Macy’s or any other good merchant, you will wonder what put these authors into such a terrible stew.
Stew it is. They want to make our flesh creep. Consider, for instance, their views on the floorwax business. To make ‘Homemade Floor Wax No. 1,’ they say, you take ¼ pounds beeswax, I pound paraffin, ¼ pint linseed oil, and 1¼ pints turpentine. You melt these things and stir vigorously, using hot water, not flame, to avoid the risk of igniting the turpentine.
‘This mixture will cost around 25 cents a pound,’ say the authors. ‘ When you compare this outlay with a wax of completely unknown quality, produced under the economies of mass production, but selling under a proprietary name for 80 cents a pound...'
Now I am willing to promise that if I had the beeswax and other things, if I could find a double boiler never again to be used for cooking, a stirrer, and a can with a cover for the finished product, I could make some elegant wax. By so doing I should save 55 cents and help to put a piratical floor-wax man out of business. The trouble is that I should also be putting myself out of business, for in far less time than it takes to make wax I can write a book review that will sell for much more than 55 cents.
Consider again. ‘There is no need,’ I quote to my wife, ‘to buy any of the prepared insect-spray materials now on the market at $4 a gallon up, if you are willing to invest 50 cents in half a pound of pyrethrum flowers and a gallon of kerosene . . . adding a little cheap perfume like oil of sassafras.’
‘Oh, goody! Let’s do it!’ answers my* wife. Or does she? Those who have wives know how much the prospect of messing in the pantry with kerosene and sassafras will appeal to them; and we may as well admit that, if any valuable liquid is going to be made in our pantries, it will not be insecticide.
So I am content to work at my trade and let the floor-wax man and the silver-polish king work at theirs — even though I know now that a fine silver polish consists of ‘whiting and ammonia mixed to a thin paste and kept tightly stoppered.’
Mr. Chase and Mr. Schlink see clearly that cottage industry cannot compete with mass production, although they overlook the human factors which I have mentioned. They do not object to large-scale manufactures — what they want is large-scale testing of the finished products, so that we Alices will not be bamboozled in our Wonderland. They are terribly afraid of patent medicines; suddenly, after a discussion of adulteration. ranging from beeswax altar candles to rabbit, sheared and dyed and labeled seal, they invoke the ghosts of Lydia Pinkham and Doctor Munyon. They urge us to love, honor, and cherish the Bureau of Standards and the other governmental and private agencies that stand between us and ruin. They predict still better things in store for us, with scientists analyzing all our stuff before we buy it, and standardization waving a wand of security over our heads.
And that will be nice for people who have no confidence in their own ability to tell good wares from bad. But before the millennium comes most of us will continue to buy as before, learning by experience to patronize first-rate stores. Some consumers even say that we are living in halcyon days, when we are all grossly overpaid. Instead of worrying about how to reduce the costs of distribution, perhaps we should set about increasing them for the common good. Many of us live on one another’s wastes.
HARFORD POWEL. JR.