A few illustrations of the actual saving in cost of production and distribution may be interesting. Complicated machinery can never be used in producing upon a small scale, just as a small farmer can never afford the use of a harvester. All the benefits of invention applied to machinery have come through its use on a large scale. A factory making a thousand pairs of shoes each year cannot use such machinery as the one making a million pairs will need. Each one of the million pairs, therefore, costs the world less than each one of the thousand pairs. Again the large establishment, like an immense saw mill, being obliged to care for its sawdust, may devise a way of making this waste product of use in pressed blocks for kindling, or possibly in buttons or wood ornaments. The waste of the shoe shop is only a nuisance, but the waste of a great shoe factory is ground and pressed into all sorts of useful forms. All such saving of waste is so much added to the world's store of wealth.
That the large establishment saves unnecessary friction is shown in the order of any great mercantile establishment. It is still more noticeable in immense iron works separated from every other form of industry for the sake of freedom of motion. In these ways, principally, there is a saving of labor in the huge department stores, although the facilities for advertising, advantages for transportation in large bulk and the employment of expert salesmen in every department contribute to the same result. The general expenses of an ordinary store are estimated at nearly 40 per cent of the difference between wholesale and retail prices. The same expenses in the great coöperative store at Paris, the Bon Marché, are only 14 per cent. While the controllers of capital in the large enterprises have the first advantage of such saving, the very necessities of their business compel a sharing with their employés and with the public.
Even the so-called trusts, supposed to be contrivances for controlling the market, have really served in many instances the welfare of the whole community. A biscuit trust, in handling the most of the crackers in the market, saves great expense of advertising, a still greater expense in sales by traveling salesmen, or drummers, and immense waste of stock on hand through condensation into fewer warehouses, reduces its insurance to actual cost, and has brought to the public by means of all these savings a greater variety of crackers of almost uniform quality suited to the fluctuations of demand at a reduced price. No one doubts that even the Standard Oil Company, by means of its savings through consolidation, has at the same time preserved the general supply of oil from waste and brought it to every man's door, with a great improvement in quality, comparative safety in use, and an almost constantly diminishing price.