Music Trade Review

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THE
VOL. LXIV. No. 6
Published Every Saturday by Edward Lyman Bill, Inc., at 373 4th Ave., New York, Feb. 10,11917
A National Business Program
A
NATIONAL plan to strengthen business—to locate wasteful methods with something like the certainty
of a chemical test and to supply means for correcting them is proposed by A. W. Shaw, the publisher of
^ System in the February number of that magazine. It is perhaps the most elemental program of busi-
^ ness preparedness yet offered.
By way of preface, Mr. Shaw points out that perhaps the greatest danger to our prosperity after the war is
that we may forget there is any danger.
"If there is one thing more likely than any other to defeat us in the world competition after the war," he
says, "it is this: that in the very nature of the case we are now being reminded constantly of the strong points
in our position, while our three greatest foreign competitors are being reminded constantly of the weakness in
theirs.
• "It should help us to remember," he adds, "that the problem of maintaining our proper place in world trade
after the war, and along with it our prosperity, is at bottom just a problem in ordinary efficiency. If we, as
American business men—individually and collectively—can produce and distribute with as little waste of mate-
rials, man-power and opportunity as our foreign competitors, we shall get on comfortably. If we do not, our in-
terests must sooner or later suffer. We may pile up wealth and gold reserves, establish scientific tariffs, ne-
gotiate the best of commercial treaties, carry on the most vigorous foreign trade propaganda, legalize combina-
tions for exporting—we may do a hundred wise accessory things like these, but unless they are backed up by a
business fundamentally as efficient as that of our competitors, they can give us no lasting security.
"Our prosperity may, probably will, keep going for some time after the war ends, whatever further meas-
ures we take or do not take. But that is neither here nor there. The big fact is that success must eventually
belong to the most efficient."
Mr. Shaw then asserts that Germany, France and the United Kingdom, our chief foreign competitors, have
made more rapid gains in efficiency since the war began than we have. The whole tendency in the belligerent
countries has been toward accomplishing the most at the least cost, while in the United States the flood of easy
orders, large profits and high wages have all spelled a tendency in the opposite direction.
Mr. Shaw's plan is offered as a way to offset these gains on the part of the Europeans.
The plan proposes the addition of four closely related new functions in the Department of Commerce, which
would put it into the relation of every-day helpfulness to business men, corresponding roughly to that which the
Department of Agriculture now holds to farmers.
First, Mr. Shaw says, the Department should find out what it costs to do business in the United States—
what every sort of store or factory is costing its owners and the community, what it is making, what its rate
of turnover is, what interest it has to pay, what percentages of its total receipts go into rent, light, heat, buying
expenses and the like.
' *
The United States has never gathered such statistics. The government does not so much as know the total
number of any of the ordinary kinds of stores in the country, to say nothing of their internal economies.
As the Department found out enough such facts to proceed with, it should, as its second new function, deduce
from them sets of reasonably attainable standards for the various items of expense in the various lines of business.
That is, it should determine—by a comparatively simple technical process-—what percentage of their total in-
come concerns of fair efficiency in any given line spend, on the average, for their various characteristic items
of expense—retail grocery stores, say, for deliveries.
These standard percentages would, of course, serve as clews to points of inefficiency for all concerns in that
particular line. They would be the chemical test.
(Continued on page 5)