Sales Compendium

The notion of lifecycle costs, perhaps expressed as the total cost of ownership, has been around a long time. Calculating the cost of acquiring and maintaining any asset, rather than just considering the initial outlay, is often one of the ways of evaluating alternative investments, or competing brands.

One hundred years ago, Ed Klein placed an interesting ad in the Lawrence Journal-World*. The headline of the ad read: Horse Vs Automobile, and the body copy read as follows: “Before you discard your horse and buy an auto it is well to think of the cost. Figure how much you spend for harness, and then think of what new tires amount to. Figure up what it takes to feed Dobbin for a year and then think of gasoline, repairs and storage charges. Dobbin is worth what you paid for him two years ago. Where’s the man with an auto who can say the same? Come in and get a new harness instead of a new car, and remember that Dobbin will take you through snow and mud as well as on good roads, and his carburettor is never out of order.”

*Lawrence Journal-World | 3rd August 1915 | Page 6

Susan Spellman has been working on a book called ‘Cornering the Market’, with the sub-title ‘Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business’. Earlier this month, she uploaded a 100 second animation showing the geographic spread of around 3000 installations of NCR cash registers between January 1884 and July 1887. This is based on a single sales ledger from the NCR Archive. Spellman’s book is due to be published in 2016.