The Waipawa Mail Published Tuesdays, Thursdays, & Saturdays. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1886.

Waipawa Mail, Volume X, Issue 1024, 18 December 1886, Page 2

The Waipawa Mail Published Tuesdays, Thursdays, & Saturdays. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1886.

If the Woollen Factory Companies that manufacture woollen goods in New Zealand desire to prosper and to be supported by tradesmen and retail dealers in the colony, they must work according to commercial principles. At present they seem to drive their trade in a hap hazard kind of way, cither in a wholesale or a retail direction ; they appear to bo able t° supply any market with almost any article from a hundred rolls of tweed down to a singlo suit of clothes, made up and ready to put on. When we were told this, we could hardly credit the statement; indeed it is wonderful that the Woollen Companies receivo any support at all, if that is the heterogeneous kind of way in which they conduct their business.

If the woollen manufacturing industry is to pay, and it ought to most undoubtedly, the managers of the companies must make up their minds who they are going to look upon as their customers ; who they are going to depend upon for support. They must decide whether they are going to deal with the retailers as wholesale traders, or compete with them as rivals in the retail market. In the past, so many failures have resulted from attempts to set Woollen Factories on foot and so little faith in them, ns commercial concerns has been held that thoy have been perhaps justified in pushing business on whichever way they could. Hut now there is a growing feeling that in our Woollen mills a great measure of our future prosperity depends ; in the manufacture of our principle articlo of produce our hopes of extended trade and better prices for wool are built. And it behoves the Woollen Companies to raise themselves to the dignity* of national institutions. To do this, they must restrict themselves entirely to a wholesale trader ; they must quite give up their injudicious praetiso of at once courting the favors of the retail traders and opposing them in the retail trade. And it is possible that the retail traders may have to each them a lesson if they do not adopt better principles of their own accord, by ceasing to give any more orders until recipioeal allowances are made.