I was recently appointed Commercial Agent of my Company, in a new division from that in which I had previously been working. As this was a new town to me, and I was entirely a stranger, I was confronted with a problem of getting acquainted with the business men. I could not afford to take a day or two to go around calling on the various business houses, making myself known, and unless I had some object in view, I would be met with indifference.
One night, after visiting one of the picture houses, I walked down the main street, wondering how to make my debut. My new town had a great many electric signs; more, I am confident, than any other town of its size in the state. I noticed on my night ramble that each sign was lacking a few lamps and some were even shoddy.
For my own information, I took a pencil and pad and walked all over the town, stopping under each sign, and taking the name of the firm, the wording of the sign, and the number of lamps missing. I found that out of forty odd signs, there were in the neighborhood of 398 lamps burned out, or on an average of ten per sign.
As these lamps were five and ten watt, it meant a loss of approximately 2½ KW per hour. As all of our signs burn until midnight and only a small per cent. are on the flat rate, I figured that the loss to our company by these burned out lamps was in the neighborhood of $20.00 a month.
This gave me an idea. The next day I made up a list of the merchants and signs and their lamps, but as we did not sell lamps ourselves, I put the proposition up to one of our local dealers, and he and I made calls on the various business houses. We were warmly received by the merchants and my friend, the dealer, sold better than sixty per cent. of the total lamps that were burned out. This netted him a nice profit and it also increased the revenue of the Power Company. It improved the looks of the signs for the merchants and helped me to get acquainted. I figure that all four of the parties concerned profited greatly from this idea.