George considered himself lucky to have the little room over the Shepperton garage. He was also glad that his visit had overlapped that of Mr. David Merrit, and that Mr. Merrit had been allowed to enjoy undisturbed the greater comfort of the Shepperton guest room, for Mr. Merrit had filled him with a pleasant glow at their first meeting. He was a ruddy, plump, well-kept man of forty-five or so, always ready with a joke and immensely agreeable, with pockets bulging with savoury cigars which he handed out to people on the slightest provocation. Randy had spoken of him as “the Company’s man,” and, although George did not know what the duties of a “Company’s man” were, Mr. Merrit made them seem very pleasant.
George knew, of course, that Mr. Merrit was Randy’s boss, and he learned that Mr. Merrit was in the habit of coming to town every two or three months. He would arrive like a benevolent, pink-cheeked Santa Claus, making his jolly little jokes, passing out his fat cigars, putting his arm round people’s shoulders, and, in general, making everyone feel good. As he said himself:
“I’ve got to turn up now and then just to see that the boys are behaving themselves, and not taking in any wooden nickels.”
Here he winked at George in such a comical way that all of them had to grin. Then he gave George a big cigar.
His functions seemed to be ambassadorial. He was always taking Randy and the salesmen of the Company out to lunch or dinner, and, save for brief visits to the office, he seemed to spend most of his time inaugurating an era of good feeling and high living. He would go around town and meet everybody, slapping people on the back and calling them by their first names, and for a week after he had left the business men of Libya Hill would still be smoking his cigars. When he came to town he always stayed “out of the house”, and one knew that Margaret would prepare her best meals for him, and that there would be some good drinks. Mr. Merrit supplied the drinks himself, for he always brought along a plentiful store of expensive beverages. George could see at their first meeting that he was the kind of man who exudes an aura of good fellowship, and that was why it was so pleasant to have Mr. Merrit staying in the house.
Mr. Merrit was not only a nice fellow. He was also “with the Company”, and George soon realised that “the Company” was a vital and mysterious force in all their lives. Randy had gone with it as soon as he left college. He had been sent to the main office, up North somewhere, and had been put through a course of training. Then he had come back South and had worked his way up from salesman to district agent — an important member of the sales organisation.
“The Company”, “district agent”, “the sales organisation”— mysterious titles all of them, but most comforting. During the week George was in Libya Hill with Randy and Margaret, Mr. Merrit was usually on hand at meal times, and at night he would sit out on the front porch with them and carry on in his jolly way, joking and laughing and giving them all a good time. Sometimes he would talk shop with Randy, telling stories about the Company and about his own experiences in the organisation, and before long George began to pick up a pretty good idea of what it was all about.
The Federal Weight, Scales, and Computing Company was a far-flung empire which had a superficial aspect of great complexity, but in its essence it was really beautifully simple. Its heart and soul — indeed, its very life — was its sales organisation.
The entire country was divided into districts, and over each district an agent was appointed. This agent, in turn, employed salesmen to cover the various portions of his district. Each district also had an “office man” to attend to any business that might come up while the agent and his salesmen were away, and a “repair man” whose duty it was to overhaul damaged or broken-down machines. Together, these comprised the agency, and the country was so divided that there was, on the average, an agency for every unit of half a million people in the total population. Thus there were two hundred and sixty or seventy agencies through the nation, and the agents with their salesmen made up a working force of from twelve to fifteen hundred men.
The higher purposes of this industrial empire, which the employees almost never referred to by name, as who should speak of the deity with coarse directness, but always with a just perceptible lowering and huskiness of the voice as “the Company”— these higher purposes were also beautifully simple. They were summed up in the famous utterance of the Great Man himself, Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, who invariably repeated it every year as a peroration to his hour-long address before the assembled members of the sales organisation at their national convention. Standing before them at the close of each year’s session, he would sweep his arm in a gesture of magnificent command towards an enormous map of the United States of America that covered the whole wall behind him, and say:
“There’s your market! Go out and sell them!”
What could be simpler and more beautiful than this? What could more eloquently indicate that mighty sweep of the imagination which has been celebrated in the annals of modern business under the name of “vision”? The words had the spacious scope and austere directness that have characterised the utterances of great leaders in every epoch of man’s history. It is Napoleon speaking to his troops in Egypt: “Soldiers, from the summit of yonder pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you.” It is Captain Perry: “We have met the enemy, and they are ours.” It is Dewey at Manila Bay: “You may fire when ready, Gridley.” It is Grant before Spottsylvania Court House: “I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer.”
So when Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, waved his arm at the wall and said: “There’s your market! Go out and sell them!”— the assembled captains, lieutenants, and privates in the ranks of his sales organisation knew that there were still giants in the earth, and that the age of romance was not dead.
True, there had once been a time when the aspirations of the Company had been more limited. That was when the founder of the institution, the grandfather of Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, had expressed his modest hopes by saying: “I should like to see one of my machines in every store, shop, or business that needs one, and that can afford to pay for one.” But the self-denying restrictions implicit in the founder’s statement had long since become so out of date as to seem utterly mid-Victorian. Mr. David Merrit admitted it himself. Much as he hated to speak ill of any man, and especially the founder of the Company, he had to confess that by the standards of 1929 the old gentleman had lacked vision.
“That’s old stuff now,” said Mr. Merrit, shaking his head and winking at George, as though to take the curse off of his treason to the founder by making a joke of it. “We’ve gone way beyond that!” he exclaimed with pardonable pride. “Why, if we waited nowadays to sell a machine to someone who needs one, we’d get nowhere.” He was nodding now at Randy, and speaking with the seriousness of deep conviction. “We don’t wait until he needs one. If he says he’s getting along all right without one, we make him buy one anyhow. We make him see the need, don’t we, Randy? In other words, we create the need.”
This, as Mr. Merrit went on to explain, was what is known in more technical phrase as “creative salesmanship” or “creating the market”. And this poetic conception was the inspired work of one man — none other than the present head of the Company, Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, himself. The idea had come to him in a single blinding flash, born full-blown like Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus, and Mr. Merrit still remembered the momentous occasion as vividly as if it had been only yesterday. It was at one of the meetings of the assembled parliaments of the Company that Mr. Appleton, soaring in an impassioned flight of oratory, became so intoxicated with the grandeur of his own vision that he stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence and stood there as one entranced, gazing out dreamily into the unknown vistas of magic Canaan; and when he at last went on again, it was in a voice surcharged with quivering emotion:
“My friends,” he said, “the possibilities of the market, now that we see how to create it, are practically unlimited!” Here he was silent for a moment, and Mr. Merrit said that the Great Man actually paled and seemed to stagger as he tried to speak, and that his voice faltered and sank to an almost inaudible whisper, as if he himself could hardly comprehend the magnitude of his own conception. “My friends”— he muttered thickly, and was seen to clutch the rostrum for support —“my friends — seen properly”— he whispered, and moistened his dry lips —“seen properly — the market we shall create being what it is”— his voice grew stronger, and the clarion words now rang forth —“there is no reason why one of our machines should not be in the possession of every man, woman, and child in the United States!” Then came the grand, familiar gesture to the map: “There’s your market, boys! Go out and sell them!”
Henceforth this vision became the stone on which Mr. Paul S. Appleton, III, erected the magnificent edifice of the true church and living faith which was called “the Company”. And in the service of this vision Mr. Appleton built up an organisation which worked with the beautiful precision of a locomotive piston. Over the salesman was the agent, and over the agent was the district supervisor, and over the district supervisor was the district manager, and over the district manager was the general manager, and over the general manager was — if not God himself, then the next thing to it, for the agents and salesmen referred to him in tones of proper reverence as “P. S. A.”
Mr. Appleton also invented a special Company Heaven known as the Hundred Club. Its membership was headed by P. S. A., and all the ranks of the sales organisation were eligible, down to the humblest salesman. The Hundred Club was a social order, but it was also a good deal more than that. Each agent and salesman had a “quota”— that is to say, a certain amount of business which was assigned to him as the normal average of his district and capacity. A man’s quota differed from another’s according to the size of his territory, its wealth, and his own experience and ability. One man’s quota would be sixty, another’s eighty, another’s ninety or one hundred, and if he was a district agent, his quota would be higher than that of a mere salesman. Each man, however, no matter how small or how large his quota might be, was eligible for membership in the Hundred Club, the only restriction being that he must average one hundred per cent of his quota. If he averaged more — if he got, say, one hundred and twenty per cent of his quota — there were appropriate honours and rewards, not only social but financial as well. One could be either high up or low down in the Hundred Club, for it had almost as many degrees of merit as the Masonic order.
The unit of the quota system was “the point”, and a point was forty dollars’ worth of business. So if a salesman had a quota of eighty, this meant that he had to sell the products of the Federal Weight, Scales, and Computing Company to the amount of at least $3200 every month, or almost $40,000 a year. The rewards were high. A salesman’s commission was from fifteen to twenty per cent of his sales; an agent’s fr............