does not leave large margins of profit the second does. There are two general business methods of attracting : By giving unusually large measures or big bonuses of free lunch or by carrying illegitimate and illegal side lines. The patronage of the saloon is a very fickle and elusive thing. The saloon-keepers themselves believe this when they go into it.Īll this means one thing-a premium on the irregular and criminal saloon-keeper. There is a popular fallacy that there is a great profit in the retail saloon business. Now, if the competition is red-handed among the breweries, it is simply ravenous among the saloon-keepers. Reckoning it out by population, every man, woman, and child in Chicago drank, in 1906, two and one-quarter barrels of beer,-that is, seventy gallons,-three and one-half times the average consumption in the United States. The Chicago market is thoroughly saturated with beer, and incidentally with other liquor. At the main entrance they lie massed in batteries. Around that long and dismal stockade, at every hole from which a human being can emerge, a shop or group of shops sits waiting. In the laboring wards the licensed saloons run as many as one to every one hundred and fifty. There is now one retail liquor dealer to every two hundred and eighty five people, disregarding, of course, the one thousand unlicensed dealers. now limits the number to one in every five hundred people but it will be years before that law will have any appreciable effect. Chicago has four times as many saloons as it should have, from any standpoint whatever, except, of course, the brewers' and the wholesalers'. He pays for everything in an extra price on each barrel of beer. With that two hundred dollars as a margin, the brewery sorts him out a set of its stock of saloon fixtures, pays his rent, pays his license, and supplies him with beer. Italians, Greeks, Lithuanians, Poles,-all the rough and hairy tribes which have been drawn into Chicago,-have their trade exploited to the utmost.No man with two hundred dollars, who was not subject to arrest on sight, need go without a saloon in Chicago. If a new colony of foreigners appears, some compatriot is set at once to selling them liquor. If a rival brewery's saloon keeper is doing well, his best bartender is ravished from him and set up in business alongside. The brewers employ special agents to watch continually every nook and cranny in Chicago where it may be possible to pour in a little more beer. Under these circumstances, the breweries of Chicago can have but one aim-to fill Chicago with beer to the point of saturation.Įach brewer disposes of his product by contracting with special saloon-keepers to sell his beer and no other. At the present time a full third of the capital invested in the forty companies and fifty plants is not earning dividends. This is because the brewery business has become over-capitalized and overbuilt there for at least ten years. The brewery, under present conditions in Chicago, must sell beer at all cost, or promptly die. The business of the brewery is to sell beer. Fully ninety per cent of the Chicago saloons are under some obligation to the brewery with at least eighty per cent, this obligation is a serious one. They have a distinct policy:-if there are not as many saloons as there can be, supply them. The great central power in the liquor business in America is the brewery.The breweries own or control the great majority of the saloons of American cities. The city spends at least half as much for what it drinks as for what it eats. is the grocery trade, which has about 5,200. The only business which approaches it in number of establishments. There are 7,300 licensed liquor sellers in Chicago, and in addition about a thousand places where liquor is sold illegally. The liquor interests are vastly more extended in Chicago that any other. "The sale of dissipation is not only a great business it is among the few greatest businesses of Chicago.
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