A Marketing Problem One Hundred Years Ago

Extract

The business man has to adapt his business constantly to changing conditions. It must have seemed to the American importer of British goods in the first half of the nineteenth century that there were nothing but changing conditions. Nathan Trotter, of the Philadelphia firm of Nathan Trotter & Co., began doing business as a freight-renting importer of British leathers, woolens, and metal goods in the period before the War of 1812. Those were the days when an importer earned an importer's profit. Supply could not keep pace with demand; shipments came in the spring and in the fall, and payments were correspondingly concentrated. The risk involved, particularly in price changes over so long a time between order and receipt of goods, and the interest on capital invested entitled him to an importer's profit.