Sales Compendium

NCR held its fifth Annual Convention of the Hundred Point Club in Dayton, Ohio in early January 1911. For the duration of the convention, the company published a daily broadsheet called The Hundred Point Club Dispatch. Amongst the earnest reporting of each day’s events, and the cartoons and photographs of the club members at work and at play, there was a reprint of an editorial column from The Dayton Herald entitled ‘The College of Advanced Industry’. Below, we have reproduced a lightly edited version of this adulatory paean to The Cash.

There are many valuable lessons to be learned from the convention in Dayton this week of the Hundred Point Club of the National Cash Register company. The club members, as an organization, represent the very acme of modern commercial methods – incomparable methods fostered and perpetuated by the NCR company which have made that concern the pride of Dayton and the envy of the world.

As a selling force, the Hundred Pointers have no superiors. Commercial men generally recognize that fact. We wish there were hundreds of Hundred Point clubs simply for what they would mean to business. Understanding the NCR company one cannot consider the institution alone in the light of a factory. It is more than a manufacturing concern. It is a school, indeed a commercial university, and its 5,700 employees in Dayton and 1,100 employees in other parts of the world are receiving the elements of a generous education. The conditions that attend the mechanical part of the industry are such that conduce to the highest efficiency of the workers. But there is another phase of the situation that is perhaps of even wider significance.

A cash register is entirely unlike any other manufactured article. In a way, it crowns all other products because it records the final word in the barter of other products. A cash register, figuratively, has brains that record and register and inform the customer that the money he has expended for an article has been deposited in the coffers of the merchant of whom he made the purchase. That resembles the tablets of memory as rhetorical teachers would say. Its silvery sound gaily registers the daily human story of buying and selling – a story that has been told from the very infancy of the human race, and which will continue to be told so long as men remain to inhabit the earth. So, sentiment aside, the cash register is a really moral agent. It abridges transactions but it does so with marvellous accuracy. The cash register has done much to render more honest business transactions.

No institution on earth, no matter of what character or what its field, could have attained the prestige of the NCR company without the superior distinctive genius of an idealist like John H Patterson, or the magnificent co-operation of the making and selling divisions such as characterize the big Dayton concern. Thus, the Hundred Pointers are the advance guard of a new commercial age; the harbingers of a business spring time when men realize in all its significance that honesty is the best policy. No longer does fiery oratory appeal to people. Business and professional men, indeed the common people, are not swept away any longer by the smooth tongues of the unscrupulous, or the wild verbal acrobatic display of grandeur, but by simple, unvarnished statements of truth. ‘Show me’ is the world’s inscription, and the National Cash Register company has done the showing.

That’s why the Hundred Pointers’ convention is significant; that’s why the company is spending money liberally to pay for the entertainment of the visitors, its representatives. They have earned what they are being given, and the company is glad to show its appreciation of this vanguard of commercial ideals and morals which combine honesty, fidelity, character and ability.

Source: The Dayton Herald, 11th January 1911 page 6