Читать книгу One Thousand Ways to Make a Living; or, An Encyclopædia of Plans to Make Money онлайн

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An enterprising young man in San Francisco, who knew that the saw blades used by butchers require frequent sharpening and also knew that it costs the average butcher about $3.00 a month to keep them sharpened, figured out a way to save more than half that expense, and make a good thing for himself at the same time.

He heard of a firm in New York that manufactured a machine for automatically sharpening hand- and meat-saws, at the rate of two hundred and fifty blades a day.

He ordered one of these machines at a cost of $60 and set it up in the family woodshed. He also bought 600 new saw blades at 20 cents each, or $120 more, a total investment of $180. Then he started out to round up the butchers of the city, and when he showed them that he could supply each of them with twelve sharp blades a month, at 10 cents each, or $1.20, instead of the $3.00 a month they had been paying, everyone of them gave him an order.

At the shop of each patron he left twelve sharp blades, taking twelve dull ones in their place and collecting $1.20, so that his first month’s receipts from fifty shops amounted to $60. In three months he had his entire investment back, and after that his $60 a month was all profit, but by doubling the number of his patrons he doubled his net income, and so on in proportion to the increase in the number of his orders. All the dull blades collected were re-sharpened and taken to his customers in exchange for more dull ones each month.