further angle."
Flowers said, "Admittedly, soap is just a beginning. Among other things,it's given us a mailing list of satisfied customers. Consumers who canthen be approached for future purchases."
* * * * *
Frank Tracy relaxed in his chair, reached for pipe and tobacco and letthe other go on. But his eyes had narrowed, coldly.
Flowers wrapped himself up in his subject. "Mr. Tracy, you probably haveno idea of the extent to which the citizens of Greater America are beingvictimized. Let me use but one example." He came quickly to his feet,crossed to a small toilet which opened off the office and returned witha power-pack electric shaver which he handed to Tracy.
Tracy looked at it, put it back on the desk and nodded. "It's the brandI have," he said agreeably.
"Yes, and millions of others. What did you pay for it?"
Frank Tracy allowed himself a slight smirk. "As a matter of fact, I gotmine through a discount outfit, only twenty-five dollars."
"_Only_ twenty-five dollars, eh, when the retail price is supposedlythirty-five?" Flowers was triumphant. "A great bargain, eh? Well, letme give you a rundown, Mr. Tracy."
He took a quick breath. "True, they're advertised to retail atthirty-five dollars. And stores that sell them at that rate make aprofit of fifty per cent. The regional supply house, before them, knocksdown from forty to sixty per cent, on the wholesale price. Then thetrade name distributor makes at least fifty per cent on the sales to theregional supply houses."
"Trade name distributor?" Tracy said, as though ignorant of what theother was talking about. "You mean the manufacturer?"
"No, sir. That razor you just looked at bears a trade name of a companythat owns no factory of its own. It buys the razors from a largeelectrical appliances manufacturing complex which turns out severalother name brand electric razors as well. The trade name company doesnothing except market the product. Its budget, by the way, calls for anexpenditure of six dollars on every razor for national advertising."
"Well, what are you getting at?" Tracy said impatiently.
Frederic Flowers had reached his punch line. "All right, we've tracedthe razor all the way back to the manufacturing complex which made it.Mr. Tracy, that razor you bought at a discount bargain for twenty-fivedollars cost thirty-eight cents to produce."
Tracy pretended to be dumfounded. "I don't believe it."
"It can be proven."
Frank Tracy thought about it for a while. "Well, even if true, so what?"
"It's a crime, that's so-what," Flowers blurted indignantly. "And that'swhere Freer Enterprises comes in. Very shortly, we're going to enter themarket with an electric razor retailing for exactly one dollar. No namebrand, no advertising, no nothing except a razor just as good as thoughselling for from twenty-five to fifty dollars."
Tracy scoffed his disbelief. "That's where you're wrong. No electricrazor manufacturer would sell to you. They'd be cutting their ownthroats."
The Freer Enterprises official shook his head, in scorn. "That's where_you're_ wrong. The same electric appliance manufacturer who producedthat razor there will make a similar one, slightly different inappearance, for the same price for us. They don't care what happens totheir product once they make their profit from it. Business is business.We'll be at least as good a customer as any of the others have everbeen. Eventually, better, since we'll be getting electric razors intothe hands of people who never felt they could afford one before."
He shook a finger at Tracy. "Manufacturers have been doing this for along time. I imagine it was the old mail-order houses that started it.They'd get in touch with a manufacturer of, say, typewriters, oroutboard motors, or whatever, and order tens of thousands of these, notan iota different from the manufacturer's standard product except forthe nameplate. They'd then sell these for as little as half the ordinaryretail price."
Tracy seemed to think it over for a long moment. Eventually he said,"Even then you're not going to break any records making money. Yourdistribution costs might be pared to the bone, but you still have some.There'll be darn little profit left on each razor you sell."
Flowers was triumphant again. "We're not going to stop at razors, onceunder way. How about automobiles? Have you any idea of the disparitybetween the cost of production of a car and what they retail for?"
"Well, no."
"Here's an example. As far back as about 1930 a barge companytransporting some brand-new cars across Lake Erie from Detroit had anaccident and lost a couple of hundred. The auto manufacturers sued,trying to get the retail price of each car. Instead, the court awardedthem the cost of manufacture. You know what it came to, labor,materials, depreciation on machinery--everything? Seventy-five dollarsper car. And that was around 1930. Since then, automation has swept theindustry and manufacturing costs per unit have dropped drastically."
The Freer Enterprises executive was now in full voice. "But even that'snot the ultimate. After all, cars were selling for as cheaply as $425then. Let's take some items such as aspirin. You can, of course, buysmall neatly packaged tins of twelve for twenty-five cents butsupposedly more intelligent buyers will buy bottles for forty or fiftycents. If the druggist puts out a special for fifteen cents a bottle itwill largely be refused since the advertising conditioned customerdoesn't want an inferior product. Actually, of course, aspirin isaspirin and you can buy it, in one hundred pound lots in polyethylenefilm bags, at about fourteen cents a pound, or in carload lots under thechemical name of acetylsalicylic acid, for eleven cents a pound. And anybig chemical corporation will sell you U.S.P. grade Milk of Magnesia atabout six dollars a ton. Its chemical name, of course, is magnesiumhydroxide, or Mg(OH){2}, and you'd have one thousand quarts in that ton.Buying it beautifully packaged and fully advertised, you'd pay up to adollar twenty-five a pint in the druggist section of a modernultra-market."
* * *
Tracy had heard enough. He said crisply, "All right, Mr. Flowers, ofFreer Enterprises, now let me ask you something: Do you consider thiscountry prosperous?"
Flowers blinked. Of a sudden, the man across from him seemed to havechanged character, added considerable dynamic to his make-up. Heflustered, "Yes, I suppose so. But it could be considerably moreprosperous if--"
Tracy was sneering. "If consumer prices were brought down drastically,eh? Mr. Flowers, you're incredibly naive when it comes to moderneconomics. Do you realize that one of the most significant developments,economically speaking, took place in the 1950s; something perhaps moresignificant than the development of atomic power?"
Flowers blinked again, mesmerized by the other's new domineeringpersonality. "I ... I don't know what you're talking about."
"The majority of employees in the United States turned from blue collarsto white."
Flowers looked pained. "I don't--"
"No, of course you don't or you wouldn't be participating in asubversive attack upon our economy, which, if successful, would lead tothe collapse of Western prosperity and eventually to the success of theSoviet Complex."
Mr. Flowers gobbled a bit, then gulped.
"I'll spell it out for you," Tracy pursued. "In the early days ofcapitalism, back when Marx and Engels were writing such works as_Capital_, the overwhelming majority of the working class were employeddirectly in production. For a long time it was quite accurate when thepolitical cartoonists depicted a working man as wearing overalls andcarrying a hammer or wrench. In short, employees who got their handsdirty, outnumbered those who didn't.
"But with the coming of increased mechanization and eventuallyautomation and the second industrial revolution, more and more employeeswent into sales, the so-called service industries, advertising andentertainment which has become largely a branch of advertising,distribution, and, above all, government which in this bureaucratic ageis largely a matter of regulation of business and propertyrelationships. As automation continued, fewer and fewer of our peoplewere needed to produce all the commodities that the country couldassimilate under
our present socio-economic system. And I need onlypoint out that the average American _still_ enjoys more material thingsthan any other nation, though admittedly the European countries, and Idon't exclude the Soviet Complex, are coming up fast."
Flowers said indignantly, "But what's this charge that I'm participatingin a subversive--"
"Mr. Flowers," Tracy overrode him, "let's not descend to pure maize inour denials of the obvious. If this outfit of yours, Freer Enterprises,was successful in its fondest dreams, what would happen?"
"Why, the consumers