The Ups and Downs of a Mail Order Aspirant, Described in a Series of Ten Letters
A comic story in ten letters, published in 1908 by The Mail Order News of New York and sold for one dollar.
What it is
A comic story in ten letters, published in 1908 by The Mail Order News of New York and sold for one dollar. Andy Morton, a dry-goods clerk on 9 dollars a week, writes to his father on the farm. He answers an ad promising that many make 3,000 dollars a year, buys a 35 dollar stock catalog outfit, mails 500 catalogs and takes in 1.05 dollars. Each letter reports a new scheme and ends by asking for money. The turn comes when he finds the stock catalog prices nearly double those of the big Chicago houses. He hires an advertising expert, sells a can opener and a potato slicer through agents, and answers every inquiry. With Minnie Burns, a stenographer at a mail order house, he launches infants' outfits at 10, 15 and 25 dollars, found through birth notices and midwives paid 20 percent.
Why read it now
Read it as a warning dressed as a story, and note the publisher: a mail order trade paper whose hero is rescued by an advertising agent and a trade paper that exposes fakes. The lessons still hold. The business-in-a-box seller profits from the buyer, not from the buyer's customers, and Andy's catalog is identical to hundreds of others, so nobody has a reason to choose it. Answering every inquiry and following up is standard practice today. The infants' line is the strongest idea: sell at a life event, reach the buyer through the professional already present, and keep the customer as the child grows. Alan Andreasen's 1984 research on life status changes found that people shift brand preferences more around such moments. What has dated: the figures are fiction, the claim that the 25 dollar outfit outsold the cheaper ones is story, not data, and buying birth records to mail new mothers would run into the consent rules of Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law. Use: list the life or business events that make your product urgent, then name who meets the buyer at that moment and what you would pay them.
Passages worth keeping
Talking about stock catalogs, father, I know now that it is nothing but a snare.
الكتالوج الجاهز الذي يُباع للمبتدئين فخ، لأن المروّج يبيع النسخة نفسها لمئات غيره وبأسعار أعلى من السوق.
I found out the greatest fact for myself that advertising would pull trade.
أول تجربة إعلانية مدروسة أعادت إليه ما أنفقه، فاقتنع بالتجربة لا بالكلام أن الإعلان يجلب البيع.
I was on the point of throwing them away in disgust but Miss Burns advised me to answer them all as some of the best agents at times were the writers of these filthy looking epistles.
لا تحكم على الاستفسار من شكله، فبعض أفضل العملاء يكتبون على ورق رديء، والرد على الجميع يكشفهم.
One good agent pays for all this trouble and expense.
أغلب الوكلاء لا يثبتون، لكن وكيلًا واحدًا جيدًا يغطي تكلفة البحث عن الجميع.
we can always hold a new customer's trade by supplying her with the many little necessities required for a youngster between the ages of 10 minutes to ten years.
قيمة العميلة لا تقف عند الطلب الأول، فحاجات الطفل تتجدد سنوات، ومن يكسبها عند الولادة يبيعها طويلًا.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
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