BUSINESS GOOD-WILL

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 188, 11 May 1928, Page 3

BUSINESS GOOD-WILL

RETAINING THE CUSTOMER Dominion Special Service. Auckland, May 10. The preservation of good-will between shopkeepers and customers was emphasised by Mr. J. S. Barton, S.M., in an address to the Chamber of Commerce to-day. The good-will of business might suffer serious disintegration because of uneconomic development, as the speaker believed had happened in the case of the tailoring trade. He believed wages in that instance had been forced beyond the economic point. In 1913 every man in the room would have been wearing a tailor-made suit, but to-day almost every one was wearing a ready-made production. The altered demand had been met by the manufacture of a better-class factory suit. That instance illustrated the fairly quick development of a process that would end a business and destroy its good-will because the old customer no longer resorted to the old place. Mr. Barton asserted there must be continual diminution, gradual, perhaps, of that part of a business which the proprietor now regarded as secret. A business man could no longer claim that his books were his own. Soon there would be less secrecy about costing systems, and the right of the buyer to know at least the principle on which that costing was done might have to be recognised. It might be reasonable for a buyer in the near future to refuse to pay the price based on a system which was unknown to him. Business men had come under suspicion as to the manner in which they made their war profits, and some buyers thought that commerce had not yet regained its conscience.