BULK BUYING BY GROUPS IS WRONG Big fleas have little
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fleas, Upon their backs to bite 'ern, Little fleas have lesser fleas, And so ad infinitum.
ON reading S.T.R.'s excellent and timely article, "Bulk Buying by Groups is Fundamentally Wrong," in your issue for August 4, the above lines started running through my head, and I feel that there is a moral in this somewhere.
It is an unfortunate fact that the motor-vehicle distributor is solely responsible for alleming the bread and butter, not to mention the jam, being taken out of his mouth. How many distributors of commercial vehicles can honestly say that they have set themselves out to, give really efficient service to the users of the vehicles they have supplied? Instead of installing modern machinery and adopting efficient methods they were content to carry out repairs in a slipshod manner whilst charging top prices.
As a result the haulier, operating a few machines, was forced to employ one or more mechanics to do the work which was the legitimate right, and duty, of the trader. It is therefore up to every distributor worthy of the name to put his house in order and set out to prove to the user that he can carry 'out efficient overhauls and repairs at a price that win force the user to bring his vehicles to him. The manufacturers can help
in this by insisting that their distributors are in a posi' tion to do this before granting them any franchise.
As a salesman, I view with considerable alarm the possibility of "bulk buying" developing, as develop it will, if the motor trade does not take some concerted action immediately. It is useless for S.T.R., or anybody else, just to point out its fundamental errors, .Hauliers generally have been bitten with the discount bug, be it small or large, and they are blind to the economic aspect, which will inevitably react against them after they -have gone to the expense of setting up an organization which. by its very composition, must be extremely, costly, and, eventually, unremunerative.
I note that S.T.R. is very conservative in his remarks about discounts, special and otherwise. It is common knowledge that manufacturers have, in the past, played into the hands of their buying public. Business at any price might easily have been their motto. Is it too much to expect that, now that the war has done away with these discounts, the motor trade generally should set its house in order and seize the opportunity of starting off with a clean slate by abolishing such discounts? Surely we have never had such a chance of cleaning up the trade and starting afresh. Are 'we going to grasp this opportunity,. which will never come again, or are the bad old days of cut-throat competition, which benefited nobody, merely shelved?
The small haulier, who, after all, is the backbone of the haulage industry, has done unsung wonders in this war. He deserves -well of the world generally, and it is up to the motor trade to see that he gets the best.
Leicester. G. V. B. Cootc.a.