Page 227 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

some real estate office to give you desk space for a few dollars a month. You
can pick up enough magazine subscriptions, if you are on your toes, to pay
the rent. Obtain an agency from the American News Company, New York
City, or one of the large subscription agencies such as the Franklin Square
Agency of New York. These companies publish catalogs listing all the
magazines and quoting a dealer’s discount which is usually about 5 per cent.

Returnable Containers Pep Up Sales

G

REAT businesses have been built around a simple merchandising idea—
Uneeda Biscuits, for instance. Before the National Biscuit Company hit upon
the idea of putting up soda crackers in five-cent sealed cartons, people always
bought them sparingly because they were hard to keep crisp. The soda
crackers are probably no better than they were before the sealed package was
introduced but that idea made the business. Today all sorts of things are sold
in air-tight packages.

The same opportunity for clever packaging exists today in such products as
cookies, butter, honey, and various specialties made in home kitchens. If you
know how to bake good cookies, and offer them to a regular list of customers
neatly packed in air-tight cookie tins, which you pick up when the next tin is
delivered, you have a merchandising idea that will greatly simplify marketing
your product. As a matter of fact one woman in Naperville, Illinois, built a
profitable cookie business doing that very thing.

A farmer in Geneva, Wisconsin, had the idea of delivering butter in sealed
three- and five-pound crocks instead of the usual bricks. The crocks were
designed to fit into a small electrical refrigerator, and had a clamp to hold the
cover on tight. In this way the butter was protected from odors that it would
otherwise absorb. The customer made a deposit of twentyfive cents when she
bought the first crock of butter, and the farmer picked up the “empties” very
much as a milkman picks up his milk bottles. These returnable containers
enabled him to increase his “unit of sale.”