received and filled every day; 36,000 men and women are on the
payroll.

It has all been done by mail. Postage stamps bring to the house
every year business in excess of $65,000,000.

One day the head correspondent in an old established wholesale house
in the east had occasion to go through some files of ten and twelve
years before. He was at once struck with the number of names with
which he was not familiar--former customers who were no longer
buying from the house. He put a couple of girls at work making a
list of these old customers and checking them up in the mercantile
directories to see how many were still in business.

Then he sat down and wrote to them, asking as a personal favor that
they write and tell him why they no longer bought of the house;
whether its goods or service had not been satisfactory, whether some
complaint had not been adjusted. There must be a reason, would they
not tell him personally just what it was?

Eighty per cent of the men addressed replied to this personal
appeal; many had complaints that were straightened out; others had
drifted to other houses for no special reason. The majority were
worked back into the "customer" files. Three years later the
accounting department checked up the orders received from these
re-found customers. The gross was over a million dollars. The
business all sprung from one letter.

Yes, there is romance in the postage stamp; there is a latent power
in it that few men realize--a power that will remove commercial