finishing his lunch, Ted would have liked to take a little walk, but he still didn’t care to get out of sight of that open door, so he merely took a short stroll up the street.
Shortly after one Mr. Woodring did call, long distance, from a nearby town.
“Any messages, Ted?” he asked.
“Just one call. Somebody left a number and wants you to call back.”
Ted gave the number, and Mr. Woodring apparently wrote it down. “Is that all?” he asked, and his voice sounded disappointed.
“Yes, I guess so,” Ted replied, and tried to sound a little more cheerful. “Maybe people don’t know we’ve got a telephone yet.”
“Well, maybe.”
“The premiums arrived, and I’ve made up a window display.”
“Good. How do you like them?”
“Fine. They’re good-quality stuff.”
Mr. Woodring’s voice suddenly became brisk. “I’ll be back before four o’clock then, Ted, unless this appointment delays me. If I should be late, you can just pack up and go home anyway.”
“You didn’t leave me a key,” Ted reminded him.
“Oh, that’s right. I forgot about it. Well, anyway, I’ll be there before closing time. There’s no use putting in any overtime with the little business we’ve got.” His voice sounded rather bitter once more, as though his morning calls hadn’t gone over too well. “Good-by, Ted.”
“Good-by, Mr. Woodring,” and they hung up.
Once more the office was still, the passing traffic hardly disturbing the calm. It looked like a long, dull afternoon ahead. Ted recalled that he had started to glance through the catalogue and been interrupted several times. Well, this time he’d really get at it. Yes, the premiums were attractive, and the bicycle especially got him. He began to wonder how long it would take the average family to earn a premium like that. Maybe it would be so long that the boy in the family would be grown up before he could earn it! He looked to see what the catalogue had to say about it. Thirty books! Then he saw there was an alternative in smaller type. The bicycle could also be obtained for five books plus seventy-five dollars. Wow! It was a wonderful bicycle, of course, but the first way would take an impossibly long time, and the other would take a fairly substantial cash outlay.
How much was each book worth, then? Well, that was very easily figured out. You could work it as an algebra problem:
30x = 5x + 75
25x = 75
x = 3
Or to put it another way:
30 books = 5 books plus $75
subtract 5 books = 5 books
25 books = $75
1 book =$3
Three dollars a book—that sounded about right. Ted remembered that Mr. Woodring had spoken of the plan as representing a 3 per cent saving. Just to make sure he worked it out for a mechanical toaster, and it came out the same. On some of the smaller premiums it wasn’t possible to make such a calculation, because the premiums could be obtained only for stamps. The doll, for example, was listed as five books. That seemed all right to Ted. It looked like a fifteen-dollar doll, as far as he could tell.
That meant that a family would have to spend a hundred dollars in order to fill a book and earn three dollars toward a premium. The bicycle, then, costing thirty books, would mean that a family would have to spend three thousand dollars! That was a good deal to spend in local stores. At that rate, it might take the average family several years to spend enough to earn a bicycle. Well, maybe that was just what the stamp plan was for, to encourage people to keep coming back to the same store over a long period of time.
The bicycle, costing thirty books at three dollars a book, was worth ninety dollars. That was rather high, but Ted decided it might be worth it. It certainly had everything, and it was hard to judge about bike prices. There were so many different models, and the price of foreign models was considerably influenced by the duty on them.
Let’s see. If each book came to three dollars, and represented a hundred dollars in purchases, with a Blue Harvest stamp given for each dime, that meant a book ought to contain a thousand stamps. Just for the fun of it, with time hanging heavy on his hands, Ted decided to count up and see. And count he did. It couldn’t be easily calculated, because some of the pages were partly filled with advertising and dummy stamps. These were printed “free” stamps, which the customer didn’t have to cover.
Ted began to count, writing his figures down on a paper after every few pages so he wouldn’t lose count. He wondered just how accurately he would come out. When he finished, his total should add up to a thousand stamps.
The spaces seemed endless. The books were going to take longer to fill than most people realized, unless they bought some big utilities. At last Ted had his column of figures, and ran down it. First column zero, second column zero—that was all right so far. But the third column—fifteen? No, that couldn’t be right, it was only supposed to be ten. Ted frowned. He added it up again. It still came out fifteen hundred stamps.
Something was wrong here. He started over again. He went through the book carefully once more. This time there could be no doubt. A customer had to paste in fifteen hundred stamps in order to complete his book. Fifteen hundred stamps, at ten cents each, meant that the customer would have to spend a hundred and fifty dollars to fill a book.
But if he spent a hundred and fifty dollars to fill a book worth three dollars, then he was getting only 2 per cent on his money. And Ted remembered very clearly that Mr. Woodring had told Mr. Dobson the plan paid 3 per cent.
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