"The SalesMan"

Salesmen are a big problem to their bosses, customers, and wives, to credit managers, hotels, and sometimes to each other. Individually and collectively they are cussed and discussed in sales meetings, conventions, behind closed doors, in bathrooms, bar rooms, and under one's breath from many angles, and with much fervor.

They make more noise and more mistakes, create more cheer, correct more errors, adjust more grievances, pacify more belligerence, and waste more time under pressure, all without losing their temper, than any class we know - including ministers. They live in hotels, cabs and tents, on trains, buses, and park benches, eat all kinds of food, drink all kinds of liquid - good and bad - sleep before, during, and after business with no more schedule than the weather bureau, and with no sympathy from the office.

Yet salesmen are a power in society and in the public economy. In many ways they are a tribute unto themselves. They draw and spend more money with less effort, and with less return, than any other group in business. They come at the most inopportune time, under the slightest pretext, stay longer under more opposition, ask more personal questions, make more comments, put up with more inconveniences, and take more for granted under greater resistance than any group or body, including the U.S. Army. They introduce more new goods, dispose of more old goods, load or move more freight cars, unload more ships, build more factories, start more new businesses, and write more debits and credits in our ledgers than all the other people in America. With all their faults, they keep the wheels of commerce turning, and the currents of human emotions running. More cannot be said of any man. Be careful whom you call a salesman, lest you flatter them.

"The Salesman" was sent by a reader and it says a great deal about a particular profession.