I got my customers by newspaper advertising--almost exclusively. It is a comforting belief that one satisfied customer will get you another, and that that customer will get you another, and so on, but it has not so worked out in my experience. Out of all my customers less than twelve have become customers through the influence of friends.
My experience has taught me another thing: That direct advertising does not pay. By direct advertising I mean the mailing of letters and circulars to a list of names in the hope of selling something to persons whose names are on that list.
I tried it three times--once to a list of names I bought from a dealer in such lists; once to a list that I myself compiled from the society columns of two Chicago dailies; and once to a cla.s.sified list that I secured from a directory.
The results in these cases were about the same. The net cost of each new customer that I secured by circulars and letters was $2.19. The net cost of each new customer that I secured by newspaper advertising was fifty-four cents.
Not every city newspaper will get such results. In my case I selected that paper in Chicago which in my judgment went into the greatest number of prosperous homes, and whose pages were kept clean of quack and swindling advertis.e.m.e.nts. I used only the Sunday issues, because I believe the Sunday issues are most thoroughly read.
The farmer will want to use, and properly so, the cla.s.sified columns of the paper for his advertising. But he should patronize only that paper whose columns provide a cla.s.sification especially for farm and food products.
I spent twelve dollars for advertising in one clean Chicago daily with a good circulation, and got three orders. The trouble was that my advertis.e.m.e.nt went into a column headed "Business Personals," along with a lot of manicure and ma.s.sage advertising.
He on the farm who proposes to compete with the shipper, commission man and retailer for the city man"s trade should devote his efforts to producing food of a better quality than the city man is accustomed to get via the shipper-commission-man-retailer route. Wherefore I proposed to give the city man the fattest, tenderest, juiciest, cleanest, freshest chicken he could get--and charge him a profitable price in so doing.
When I wrote my advertis.e.m.e.nts I did not stint myself for s.p.a.ce. An advertis.e.m.e.nt that tells no reason why the reader should buy from the advertiser is, in my opinion, a poor advertis.e.m.e.nt. Therefore, I told my story in full to the readers of the Sunday paper, although it cost me six cents a word to do it. Here is a sample of my advertising:
I send young, milk-fed chickens, ready for the cook, direct to you from the farm. These chickens are fattened in wire-bottomed, sanitary coops, thus insuring absolute cleanliness, on a ration of meal, middlings and milk. The chicken you get from me is fresh; it is killed AFTER your order is received; is dressed, drawn, cooled out for 24 hours in dry air, wrapped in waxed paper and delivered to you on the morning of the third day after your order is mailed; it is fat, tender and sweet. The ordinary chicken that is fattened on unspeakable filth in the farmer"s barnyard, and finds its way to your table via the huckster-shipper-commission-man-retailer route cannot compare with one of mine. Send me your check--no stamps--for $1.15 and I will send you a five-pound--live-weight--roasting chicken for a sample. If it does not please you I"ll give your money back. Add 62 cents to that check and I"ll mail you in a separate box a two-pound package of the most delicious fresh-ground sausage meat you ever ate. Made from the selected meats of young hogs only; not highly seasoned. These sausage cakes make a breakfast fit for a President. Money back if you don"t like them.
A. L. SARRAN.
Notice that I told why the reader should buy one of my chickens rather than a chicken of whose antecedents he knew nothing. That it paid to spend six cents a word to tell him so is proved by the fact that this particular advertis.e.m.e.nt brought me, in four days, twenty-three orders, each accompanied by a check. I repeated my advertis.e.m.e.nts in Sunday issues, stopping only when I had as many customers as I could take care of.
Getting a customer and keeping him are two different propositions. A customer"s first order is sent because of the representation made in the advertis.e.m.e.nt that he read. His second and his subsequent orders depend upon how you satisfy him and continue to satisfy him.
My rule is to select, weigh, dress, draw, handle, wrap and box the chicken with the same scrupulous care that I would exercise if the customer were actually present and watching me.
I have another rule: The customer is always right. If he complains I satisfy him, immediately and cheerfully. It is better to lose a chicken than to lose a customer.
I am now about to make a statement with which many of my readers will not agree. It is more than true; it is so important that the success of a mail-order business in dressed chickens depends upon a realization of it. It is this: _A majority of farmers and their wives do not know what const.i.tutes a fat chicken._
I make this statement because of the experience I have had with country folks in buying their chickens for my feeding coops. If they really consider to be fat the chickens which they have a.s.sured me were fat, then they do not know fat chickens. A chicken can be fat to a degree without being so fat as he can or should be made for the purpose of marketing.
There is a flavor about a well-fattened, milk-fed chicken that no other chicken has. Every interstice of his flesh is juicy and oily. No part of him is tough, stringy muscle, as is the case if he is "farm-fattened"
while being allowed to range where he will.
If you think your chicken is a fat one, pick it up and rub the ball of your thumb across its backbone about an inch behind the base of the wings. If the backbone is felt clearly and distinctly the chicken is not fat.
I fatten my chickens in coops the floors of which are made of heavy wire having one-inch mesh; underneath the wire is a droppings pan, which is emptied every day. My coops are built in tiers and long sections. I have ninety of them, each one accommodating nine chickens. I have enough portable feeding coops with wire bottoms and droppings pans underneath to enable me to feed, in all, about one thousand chickens at one time.
Chickens should be fed from ten to fourteen days in the coops. I give no feed whatever to the chicken the first day he is in the coop, but I keep a supply of sour milk in the trough for him. I feed my chickens three times a day.
At seven A.M. I give them a fairly thick batter of meal, middlings or oat flour, about half and half, and sour milk. I feed them only what they will clean up in the course of half an hour. At noon I feed them again only what they will clean up in half an hour. This feed is the same as the morning feed except that it is thinner. About four o"clock I give them a trough full of the same feed, but so thick it will barely pour out from the bucket into the trough.
The next morning the troughs are emptied--if anything remains in them--into the big kettle where the feed is mixed for the morning feeding. The idea is this: More fat and flesh are made at night than in the daytime; therefore see that no chicken goes to bed with an empty crop.
About the eighth to tenth day force the feeding--see to it that the chicken gets all it will eat three times a day.
By keeping an accurate account of the costs of meal, milk, and so on, I find that I can put a pound of fat on a coop-fed chicken for seven cents. When one considers that this same pound brings twenty cents, and that milk feeding in coops raises the per pound value of the chicken from twelve to twenty cents, one must admit that feeding chickens is more profitable than feeding cattle.
Do not feed your chicken anything for twenty-four hours before killing it. Do not worry about loss in weight. The only weight it will lose will be the weight of the feed in its crop and gizzard, and the offal in its intestines--and you are going to lose that anyway when you dress and draw it. If you will keep the bird off feed for twenty-four hours you will find that it will draw much more easily and cleanly.
Hang the chicken up by the feet and kill it by bleeding it away back in the mouth. Let it bleed to death. Grasp the chicken"s head in your left hand, the back of its head against the palm of your hand. Do not hold it by the neck, but grasp it by the bony part of its head and jaws. Reach into the throat with a three-inch, narrow, sharp knife and cut toward the top and front of the head.
You will sever the big cross vein that connects the two "jugular" veins in the neck, and the blood will pour out of the mouth. If you know how to dry-pick you will not need to be told anything by me; if you do not know it will do you no good to have me tell you, because I do not believe a person can learn to dry-pick chickens by following printed instructions. At any rate, I could not. I never learned until I hired a professional picker to come out from town to teach me.
So far as I can judge, it makes no difference to the consumer in the city whether the chicken is scalded or dry-picked. There is this to be said for the scalded chicken--that it is a more cleanly picked chicken than the dry-picked one. The pin feathers are more easily removed when the chicken is scalded.
On the other hand, there are those feed-specializing, accurate-to-the-ten-thousandth-part-of-an-inch experts, who say that the dry-picked chicken keeps better than the scalded one. If the weather is warmer than, say, seventy-five degrees, it might; under that, there is no difference.
I do the most of my selling in Chicago, and my place is a hundred and fifty miles south of that city; if a scalded chicken will keep when I am selling it that far away it will keep for almost anyone, because none of you is going to sell many chickens at any point more than a hundred and fifty miles from your place.
There is this caution to be observed in scalding a chicken: Do not have the water too hot. I had trouble on this score, and as a result my chickens were dark and did not present an appetizing appearance. Finally I bought a candy thermometer--one that registered up to 400 degrees. By experimenting I found that 180 degrees was the point at which a chicken scalded to pick the easiest, but that a chicken scalded at 165 degrees presented a better appearance after being picked and cooled. Whichever method you use, observe this rule: Pick your chicken clean.
After my chicken has cooled out enough so the flesh will cut easily, I draw it. I chop off the head close up, draw back the skin of the neck a couple of inches, and then cut off the neck. The flap of skin thus left serves to cover the b.l.o.o.d.y and unsightly stub of the neck. Next I open up the chicken from behind and below the vent and pull out the gizzard--if the chicken has been kept off feed for twenty-four hours the empty crop will come with it--intestines and liver. I remove the gall bladder from the liver, open and clean the gizzard, and replace it and the liver in the chicken.
Then I cut a slit across the chicken just back of the keel of the breast bone. I cut the feet off at the knee joint and slip the drumstick through this slit. Then I lay the chicken up to cool out overnight. The next morning it may be wrapped and boxed, and is then ready for mailing.
Wrapping and boxing must not be slighted. The clean, sanitary appearance of the chicken when it is unpacked in the kitchen of your customer goes a long way toward prejudicing that customer in your favor. I buy thirty pounds of waxed paper, twenty-four by thirty-six inches, and have the paper house cut it in two. This gives me 1000 sheets, each eighteen by twenty-four inches, for the price of a ream of the full size--at this time about five dollars, or a half cent a sheet.
Each chicken is wrapped in one sheet of this waxed paper, and is then packed in a corrugated paper box made especially for sending chickens by parcel post.
I buy three sizes of these boxes. One size, which costs me four cents each, will hold one four-pound chicken when dressed and drawn. The next size, costing five cents each, will hold two very small chickens, or one large chicken. The third size, costing six cents each, will hold two large chickens, three medium-sized ones, or four small ones.
Do not use makeshifts, such as old shoe boxes. In the first place, your shipment is not properly protected by such a box; in the second place, your postmaster is likely to refuse to accept it for mailing, as he would be justified in doing; and in the third place, your customer receives his chicken in a box that has been used for he wonders what, and has been in he wonders what places.
It is for this reason that I never ask a customer to return a box to me.
I do not want to use a box a second time. If I were a city man, getting my chickens by mail, I should want them sent to me in a brand-new box, made for the special purpose of sending chickens by mail--and I"d want them in no other box. Then I"d feel sure of them.
The cost of shipping by parcel post is low. I live ten miles from my county seat, and the postage required to send a five-pound, live-weight chicken, dressed and boxed, from my place to town is eight cents. The postage required to send that same five-pound chicken from here to Chicago, one hundred and fifty miles, is eight cents. The express company charges twenty-six cents for the same service, and does not deliver so quickly.
But parcel-post delivery was not always so admirably done in Chicago.
When I began shipping up there last September it was no uncommon thing for my packages to be so delayed that many chickens would spoil.
I recall the "straw that broke the camel"s back." I mailed twenty-six chickens one day--and in due course I received thirteen letters, each advising me of the same mournful event. The chicken had spoiled because of delay in delivery. My wife wanted to quit. I didn"t. I made good the losses to the customers and prepared a label, a copy of which I forwarded to the Third a.s.sistant Postmaster General at Washington, asking his permission to use it, and telling him of the vexatious and expensive delays in delivering my packages in Chicago.
In due time I received the desired permission, and ordered the labels printed. The scheme worked. Every time a package was not delivered on schedule time the customer notified me, and I made complaint to the postmaster at Chicago.
Gradually the service improved until now I have no trouble at all. If I were to ship two packages today to the same address in Chicago, sending one by parcel post and the other by express, I believe the parcel-post package would be delivered first. At any rate, it has been done for me.
The weakness in the parcel-post delivery lies in the fact that perishable products--such as dressed chickens--cannot be handled in warm weather. I think that if the Post Office Department would cut some of its red tape and permit the shipment of air-tight packages in air-tight conveyors this particular problem could be solved.
You will, of course, have more or less correspondence with your customers. By all means use your own letterheads, but do not let your printer embellish them with cuts of roosters, chickens, pigs, or the like. Not that we are ashamed of them; far be it from such. You do not, however, need to have a sheet of paper littered up with pictures of imaginary animals in order to convince your customer that you are selling the meats of that animal. I like a plainly printed letterhead that carries my name, my address and my business. That"s all.
By all means keep books on your farm-to-table venture, if you undertake it. Set down on one side of the page what you pay for boxes, labels, postage, and so on, including what you pay yourself for chickens at your huckster"s prices. On the other side of the page set down what your city customer pays you. Add up the pages, do a simple sum in subtraction, and you will know just how much you have made.
If I kept only twenty-five hens I should sell my eggs and my chickens direct to the city consumer. When the farmer learns to sell direct instead of letting the huckster, the poultry house, the commission man, the dresser and the retailer stand between him and the consumer, then poultry raising will become really profitable.
There are too many folks who sell their eggs and "take it out in trade."