[Accrs] Fwd: Buying a watch in 1880

[Alameda County Central Railroad Society]

So why was Sears pushing Die Hard car batteries for so many years?

On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 5:28 PM, Alameda County Central Railroad Society <
accrs at mail.accrs.org> wrote:

> Message From: Dean & Margaret Lewis  lewis2 at earthlink.net
>
>
>
>
> I found this very interesting.
> Read to the end to get the whole point.
>
> [image: image1.jpeg]
> *Buying a watch in 1880. *
>
> If you were in the market for a watch in 1880, would you know where to get
> one?
> You would go to a store, right?
>
> Well, of course you could do that, but if you wanted one that was cheaper
> and a bit better than most of the store watches, you went to the train
> station!Sound a bit funny?
>
> Well, for about 500 towns across the northern United States , that's where
> the best watches were found.
>
> Why were the best watches found at the train station?
>
> The railroad company wasn't selling the watches, not at all.
> The telegraph operator was.
>
> Most of the time the telegraph operator was located in the railroad
> station because the telegraph lines followed the railroad tracks from town
> to town.
>
> It was usually the shortest distance and the right-of-ways had already
> been secured for the rail line.
>
> Most of the station agents were also skilled telegraph operators and that
> was the primary way that they communicated with the railroad.
>
> They would know when trains left the previous station and when they were
> due at their next station.
>
> And it was the telegraph operator who had the watches.
>
> As a matter of fact, they sold more of them than almost all the stores
> combined for a period of about 9 years.
>
> This was all arranged by "Richard", who was a telegraph operator himself.
> He was on duty in the North Redwood, Minnesota train station one day when a
> load of watches arrived from the East. It was a huge crate of pocket
> watches. No one ever came to claim them.
>
> So Richard sent a telegram to the manufacturer and asked them what they
> wanted to do with the watches.
>
> The manufacturer didn't want to pay the freight back, so they wired
> Richard to see if he could sell them.
>
> So Richard did.
>
> He sent a wire to every agent in the system asking them if they wanted a
> cheap, but good, pocket watch.
>
> He sold the entire case in less than two days and at a handsome profit.
>
> That started it all.
>
> He ordered more watches from the watch company and encouraged the
> telegraph operators to set up a display case in the station offering high
> quality watches for a cheap price to all the travelers.
>
> It worked!
>
> It didn't take long for the word to spread and, before long, people other
> than travelers came to the train station to buy watches.
>
> Richard became so busy that he had to hire a professional watch maker to
> help him with the orders.
>
> That was Alvah.
>
> And the rest is history as they say.
>
> The business took off and soon expanded to many other lines of dry goods.
>
> Richard and Alvah left the train station and moved their company to
> Chicago -- and it's still there.
>
> YES, IT'S A LITTLE KNOWN FACT  that for a while in the 1880's, the biggest
> watch retailer in the country was at the train station.
>
> It all started with a telegraph operator: Richard Sears and his partner
> Alvah Roebuck!
>
> Bet You Didn't Know That!
> OK, Maybe you did; I didn't!
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Accrs mailing list
> Accrs at mail.accrs.org
> https://mail.accrs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/accrs
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.accrs.org/archives/accrs/attachments/20170131/293d7da2/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 25899 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://mail.accrs.org/archives/accrs/attachments/20170131/293d7da2/attachment-0001.jpe>