90 Dozen Eggs Present a Test of Salesmanship

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune 
April 15, 1954


   IT COMES a bit hard to get into the swing of Easter this year.  I am as ready as anyone for spiritual awakening, as ready as anyone to lift mine eyes to loftier horizons.  The Sabbath may even find me in my other shirt.  But in thinking of Easter I become obsessed with the thought of eggs--and I am sick of eggs.
   I have but recently been delivered from the egg business, and during my involvement I ate 'em fried, boiled, deviled, poached, coddled, creamed, over easy, sunny-side up and raw.  Up to then I never considered breakfast worthy of the name unless it included bacon and eggs.  But when you face the prospect of a straight egg diet extending into the fall the cackle-berry loses much of its allure.

   THE BIG scramble had its birth recently in a weekend trip to the south Minnesota countryside taken by my son.  His host suggested that he take a consignment of eggs back to the city and sell them as a means of financing his journey.  He figured that three cases would be adequate.
   They were--adequate in the extreme.  They represented 90 dozen eggs, a trifle to a produce man, I suppose, but a gargantuan gob of omelet to the layman, and my son was overwhelmed at the enormity of the deal.  He had thought that a case of eggs was 12, not 30, dozen.
   As soon as he reached the Minneapolis outskirts he phoned to tell us of our bounty.  His voice was a blend of anxiety and urgency.  He exhorted us to phone relatives, friends and neighbors and tell them we had eggs to sell.

   THIS STRUCK me as a picayune way of going about it.  In our extremity we needed far greater volume than a market made up of kinfolk, friends and neighbors could absorb.  I thought I might contact the Commodity Credit Corp. and perhaps peddle the eggs to the government for the school lunch program.  Another recourse might be to give away a rabbit with every half dozen,.  I knew there always was a demand for bunnies at Eastertide.
   One fleeting thought, which I now confess was impractical and can be attributed only to my understandable frenzy, was to buy a few setting hens and convert the eggs into poultry.  On further reflection, however, I realized the folly of this.  It would take about 90 hens to do the job and would alter my whole way of life.  It would necessitate moving out of the city, where you cannot raise poultry, and establishing a chicken ranch in the hinterland.  I used to be a country boy but my roots in the city now run rather deep.

WHILE I was mulling over the most expeditious means of peddling the hen fruit, my wife was telephoning the alarm to those with whom we are linked by ties of blood--and getting their egg orders.
   I sought to sound her out about the feasibility of seeking advice from the production and marketing administration but she suggested that I skip the dramatics and go out and ring some doorbells.  "This is an emergency," she said, "not a time for dreaming.  Any minute now the bottom may drop out of the market.  Don't you know that it's spring and the hens are starting to lay like mad and that this will depress the price?"
   I did not know about this nor particularly care.  I was willing to leave the hens to their own devices.  The prospect of going from house to house and saying I was working my son's way through college claimed my entire attention.  It appalled me.  I had tried something similar with vacuum cleaners back in my halcyon days and my career as a salesman was studded with mediocrity.

   BUT I WAS spared this bleak mission by the arrival of my son.  He had risen to the crisis sufficiently to already have disposed of one case of eggs to a kindly restaurant keeper and six dozen to someone else.  With the orders my wife had scrounged over the phone, and the generous ration we had allowed for ourselves, we were down to a mere 30 dozen.  They went rapidly, thanks to an assiduous canvass of my office associates and the cooperation of neighbors.
   The whole thing worked out remarkably well, really, and in retrospect I realize that such ventures go a long way toward showing what enterprise can do and proving the merit of the American way.
   The business was not without its heartache, though.  One evening I had to miss both "Strike It Rich" and "This Is Your Life."  I was out on my egg route.


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