IF you or I manage to get along with one less pair of shoes a year, that is a small matter and concerns no one but ourselves, but when the practice becomes general a great basic industry is grievously affected. That is exactly what has happened. A year or two ago the shoemakers noticed a falling off in the consumption of men's shoes. The manufacturers got together, appointed the usual committee, and the committee made the usual investigation. It learned that the sale of men's shoes had dropped one third. The average man is now buying two pairs of shoes a year whereas before the war he bought three. The committee was more successful in learning the facts than in finding the remedy, or even the cause. An industry is generally stronger on statistics than on imagination.

Some ingenious theories were advanced. It was felt that the great number of quick and capable repair shops which have sprung up in the past few years was a sort of life-extension institute to shoes that would otherwise sooner have gone the way of all artificial integument. It was even suggested that the spring-bottomed pants so much affected by the younger generation had something to do with it. These flappy trousers covered so much shoe that attention was not called to the need of replacement. But the consensus of opinion was that the arch offender is the motor car, that scapegoat of so many industrial and social dislocations.

The population now rides where formerly it walked, and saves one third of its national shoe bill; but no one figured out and set against such saving the cost of shoes for the flivver.

The slump in men's shoes affects more than the shoemakers. The manufacturers of shoe laces and eyelets, the builders of shoemaking machinery, the tanners of leather, and the growers of cattle, to say nothing of the army of labor, are deeply concerned. It is startling how far a disturbance in one industry reaches, how many others are affected. 'We are members one of another.' It is extremely desirable that a remedy should be found, an argument that will change this dilatory shoebuying habit, an appeal that will induce you and me to add one more pair to the row of shoes in our closets.

These things are not true of women's shoes. Women also ride more and walk less, but through a fortunate whim of fashion fortunate for the shoemakers, at least the present abbreviated skirts continue to make shoes a conspicuous part of a woman's attire, and fashion further says that shoes shall match the costume; so women's shoes are doing quite well, thank you.

But what woman has done to many long-established industries is a tale to make bankers weep and economists tear their hair. Never in the history of mankind has woman undergone so complete a transformation-social, political, moral, and sartorial — as in

the last decade. And as woman is, so to speak, an important fraction of the well-known human race, the manufacturers who cater to her wants and whims have been subjected to the test of the patient man of Uz as messenger followed messenger with stories of disaster. Makers of hairpins, combs, hair nets, corsets, knit underwear, cotton stockings, hose supporters, lingerie, and petticoats have come down to work in the morning only to find that the business they have built up by years of hard work has vanished into thin air overnight.

One of the things woman has thrown overboard, together with most of her apparel, is letter writing. No one now writes those long, rambling, gossipy letters which were one of the graces of a simpler and more leisurely age. While business letters have gone up, social letters have gone down. Business stationery is different from social stationery. The one is a so-called bond paper, a stiffer and crisper paper than the softer style used for social letters. Business advances by leaps and bounds and uses mounting reams of bond paper to carry on its multifarious transactions, but social life is no longer lived on paper. It moves on air, and free air at that, in its balloon tires and in wave lengths in the circumambient ether. The decay of the art of social letter writing has been gradual, but the retrogression has been given a fillip by the modern woman's adaptation to her rapidly moving environment. Time was when a woman gave a 'progressive euchre' and sent out twenty invitations written on her personal note paper, necessitating twenty letters in reply. Now she 'gets on the phone' and arranges a 'bridge' before she hangs up, and two quires of writing paper are deprived of a market; and society sanctions the practice. And the advertising man is asked to think up some

other use for stationery besides writing letters on it.

Some industries seem basic. One would imagine the ice business belonged in that class. There is something about it that suggests the eternal precession of the seasons, the enduring of seed time and harvest. But meanwhile engineers have been experimenting with artificial refrigeration for domestic use, many homes are equipped with electric refrigerators, and the effect on the natural-ice business is marked. A quarter of a million electric refrigerators have been installed in homes in the last four years. General Motors has invested $20,000,000 in factory and equipment and will spend $5,000,000 in advertising this year to tell folks about its own particular variety of cold-making machine. The young salesman who sold me the device which supplies the little cubes of ice in my kitchen told me that he had gotten his selling training as a motor-car salesman. There you have an instance of the way in which business makes one hand wash the other. The process of selling electric refrigerators offers a parallel to that of selling motor cars the cost of each unit, the argument of an apparent luxury that becomes a utility, and the service that must be maintained in the background. That public which in twenty years has become an expert gas-engine mechanic by taking care of its motor car, and in five years an electric engineer through the radio, is being trained to adopt artificial refrigeration with even greater celerity. The ways have been greased by high-power selling and consumer acceptance.

There is a chance that the old-time iceman with his hip rubber boots and gigantic sugar tongs will some day be as extinct as the ragman. But not if he can help it. The iceman is not going to take this extermination of his business

lying down. He is planning to fight back; he has his coöperative advertising, and the nation, or that part of it which reads advertising, will listen for some time to come to a spirited debate regarding the respective advantages of natural and of artificial low temperatures. If the ice companies are wise, they will qualify as distributors of the new utility which threatens their old business, and thus be in a position to swap horses while crossing the stream -as, indeed, some of them have been shrewd enough to do.

II

Here, then, is a new element in business, a new hazard to be added to the customary and established ones which in the past a manufacturer must overcome if he would succeed. He built up his business by faithfully following the accepted precepts,

watched his costs, stimulated his sales, advertised, acquired good will, and looked forward to continued prosperity as long as he did these things. And now this unstable, excitable, fickle public is showing a disposition to change its mind, its habits, and its clothes with such disconcerting suddenness as to leave the shortest possible time for readjustments. It has somewhat the effect of 'deuces wild' in a

Jacquard loom, the typesetting machine, kerosene, the electric light, the motor car, flake breakfast foods, the safety razor, the player piano, all caused upheavals, and were bitterly opposed by those whose businesses were menaced. But those things were slower in developing. They came as single spies, not whole battalions. What makes the present fluid state of business notable is the speed with which things happen what Robert Updegraff has called 'the new American tempo.' He says (in Advertising and Selling):

To-day a new factor the new American tempo changes the whole problem of building a successful business. Materials, machinery, processes, labor, capital, and the competition of other men in the same business are beginning to be almost secondary to it, as an increasing number of business men in widely separated fields are discovering to their sorrow or delight, depending on whether they have missed this tempo or caught it and synchronized their enterprises with it.

The new American tempo is manifesting itself in a number of interesting ways.

First, in the public's disconcerting willingness to turn its back on established institu

tions, products, methods, ideas, as evidenced by the rusting rails of hundreds of abandoned trolley lines; by the difficulty a woman with long hair has experienced for the past two years in finding a hat large enough to fit her head; by the ruthless wiping out of denominational lines and the establishment of broad community' churches; and by the fact that the only thing that saved the great solidly entrenched phonograph industry was the timely introduction of a new and vastly superior machine built on a new principle.

Next, in the public's promptness, amounting almost to aggressiveness, in accepting new products, new methods, institutions, and ideas. Witness radio, balloon tires, the metropolitan tabloid pictorial newspapers, the Chrysler car, the bootlegger, Duco finish, electric refrigeration, pale ginger ale,

National Cash Register stock not to comment on the celerity with which the nation accepted its newly created bad breath!

Someone, who was more of a poet than an astronomer, said God left Saturn incomplete that we might see how worlds are made. The supposition is that in the long result of time those whirling rings would condense into moons. We have the spectacle of at least one great industry which is throwing off whirling rings not yet condensed into moons, which affords us a close-up of the ruthless sabotage of invention hurling its wooden shoe into the machinery of production, and at the same time affords us an opportunity to prophesy. Chemists fooling around with the vast stock of nitrocellulose left over after the war and seeking to find a peaceful use for it discovered a new sort of finish that is not paint or varnish or stain or enamel, but shows symptoms, at least, of one day displacing all of them. This new finish, which has been christened lacquer' by most manufacturers (though it has nothing in common with the Oriental lacquers, and in fact no ingredient that justifies that syllable 'lac'), forms an impervious film very much like celluloid, hardens almost instantly, and, what is even more portentous, can be sprayed on. Indeed, so quickly does it dry that the spray brush was at first the only means of applying it until the chemists found a way of slowing it up so that it might be put on by hand with an ordinary bristle brush.

The possibilities of this invention stagger the imagination. If it is found to answer the purpose of paint and varnish, not only must thousands of factories producing those products be scrapped or reorganized, but a crisis will confront linseed oil plants, flax growers, zinc and lead mines, varnish makers, importers of kauri gums,

turpentine distillers, and a legion of industries whose products are the raw materials of the paint and varnish makers. More than that, a great department of labor is threatened with such a shake-up as annihilated the old-time printer when Mergenthaler made good with his typesetting machine. While the quick-drying lacquers can now be brushed on, the element which opens the doors to speculation is the spray brush. The time required for both applying and drying is one great drawback of the old true and tried finishes. In the building trades especially, where so many structures are erected on borrowed money and every day adds to the interest charges, the speed with which a factory, loft building, or apartment hotel can be decorated and made ready for use the moment the finish is applied will compel contractors and construction companies to watch the developments with a hospitable eye. The painters' union is entrenched and embattled against the spray brush, and will walk out on any job where it is used; but in every automobile factory motor cars regularly finished by applying lacquer with a spray brush, and for years ordinary paint has been put on freight cars by the same easy method. If lacquer is a satisfactory all-purpose finish,

are

and only time can tell that, - the unrelenting urge for speed will put the painter with his bristle brush and his carefully acquired technique in the discard along with the harness maker, the hand compositor, and the blacksmith. Experienced observers say, however, that lacquer is just another addition to the line, and point to the increased sale of paints and varnishes last year after lacquer was introduced.

Nevertheless manufacturers of all sorts of products are experimenting with lacquers and the spray brush. It is being successfully applied to

pianos, always a sensitive job. And its employment in redecorating old buildings savors of Aladdin and his lamp. A hotel bathroom can be completely refinished in an afternoon and used for its legitimate purpose next morning; a floor done one day may be walked on the next. Uncounted housewives, fired with the decorative urge, are using it to rehabilitate shabby pieces of furniture, the ease with which it is applied making small demand on an amateur's skill, and the promptness with which it dries giving a touch of magic to the operation. The fortunes of quick-drying finishes are not bound up with the spray brush; but, coupled with the spray brush, there has been presented in less than two years to the old-line paint and varnish industry a problem which must be solved, and solved right, and soon. Shall it go with the new finishes, or sit tight, or do both? Is this just a new line to add to a long procession of surface treatments, entitled to its place in the sun, but not to the whole industrial earth, or are we at the point of sloughing off another industrial habit, transferring the source of raw materials to another quite different group of industries and the final application of the finishes to a new class of skilled workmen?

Bread making, another staple home industry, for generations the standard test of the ability of the housewife, has suddenly shifted to the chain bakers. Flour millers who spent half a century in making their brands household words find themselves with all this good will thrown back on their hands, of small value in the new market where their flours must now be sold. Fifteen men, the purchasing agents of the great chains, now buy some sixty per cent of the flour, and they buy, not on the reputation of an advertised brand, but by chemical tests and price. The remaining forty per cent is sold to the

small one-shop baker, who is slowly fading out of the picture, and to the grocer to retail to such old-fashioned housewives as still use flour in their kitchens. These percentages are shifting and may not be accurate at this moment, but the point is that the flour market is changing from an old to a new group of buyers, a new Pharaoh which knows not Joseph of the brand advertising, with the result that millers must reorganize their selling, advertising, and manufacturing. Even the grocery trade presents a different physiognomy. The individual grocer is of less importance to the flour jobber's salesmen. The chain grocers are now the large buyers — meaning, as in the case of the bakers, a few individual purchasing agents who are in a position to dictate price, and do. The flour miller has hardly any of his old customers left, and the problem which his advertising agents face is a difficult one. At least one large flour-milling company has adopted good-will advertising: selling the baker to the consumer that is, urging the public to buy baker's bread, in the hope that the baker will be grateful for the help to the extent of using that miller's flour. This is a type of the new problems which changes in habit present to advertising, problems far more difficult than the old ones of selling goods through normal and well-worn channels.