Garment salesman in the sample room of a rural Alberta hotel, 1910. Source |
Illustration from "All Things to All Men" by Timothy Spears, American Quarterly, December 1993. |
Trunks Full of Wares
Commercial travellers went by train prior to
the 1950s. When they arrived in a town or village, they hauled their trunks and
sample cases to the hotel where they rented both a room and the sample room –
if it wasn’t already rented by another salesman. In the evenings, local
shopkeepers came to the hotel to see the sample goods and place their orders.
The next morning, the travellers boarded the train to the next town, or to
return to the city from whence they came.
An article in the February 15, 1949 issue of
MacLean’s, McKenzie Porter profiled Bert Thorne, one of Canada’s 40,000
commercial travellers. “For Warwick Brothers and Rutter Ltd., wholesale and
manufacturing stationers of Toronto, [Thorne] covers 25,000 miles a year,
mostly by train but some by car,” Porter writes. “He books orders for writing
pads, cashbooks, paper napkins, gift wrappings, pencils, rulers, erasers,
bridge scorers, artists’ water colors, thumbtacks, rubber bands, fountain pens
and a few thousand other items from small-town druggists, booksellers and
general stores. The biggest order he ever booked was $4,000 worth of Christmas
cards, his smallest 25 cents worth of sealing wax.” Thorne travelled with two
big trunks containing some 4,000 articles. It took him an hour to unpack the
trunks and lay the items out on tables around the sample room before inviting the local storekeeper to view his wares.
Ad in The Simpson Lance, October 31, 1918. |
Hotels placed advertisements promising travelling
men comfortable accommodations and “good sample rooms.” Sometimes, the accommodation
was less than comfortable, with a bare floor and a jug of frozen water by
the bed. “One of the mysteries of the commercial traveller,” Frank Phillips
wrote in the June 1, 1926 issue of MacLean’s magazine, “is the way he manages
to keep spruce and well groomed after a long course of small-town hotels,
rising before daybreak to catch a mixed train, bolting a breakfast that will
haunt him for the rest of the day, making his toilet minus hot water in a cold,
bare room with a distorting mirror and yet emerging from the process neat,
clean, smoothly shaven.”
Illustration from "Couriers of Commerce" by Frank Phillips, MacLean's, June 1, 1926. |
The Carnduff local history book recounts that
commercial travellers often arrived at the Clarendon Hotel with ten to fifteen
trunks full of merchandise. “They carried a sample of each item they sold; fifty different kinds of shirts
available meant they carried fifty samples around with them.”
In a story about the Pense hotel in the Regina Leader-Post on March 27, 1943, Arthur Tims recalled the days when he worked as a porter shortly after the hotel was built in 1904. One salesman would tip him a dollar for taking his sixteen trunks from the train to the hotel’s large sample room. “Travellers used to leave shirts in their rooms,” Tims told the paper. “They never came back for them. We kept them for a while, then I’d get the ones that fitted.”
In 1940, the Government of Saskatchewan passed legislation which, among other things, empowered city, town and village councils to provide sample rooms for the convenience of travellers, and to fix the fees for the use of such rooms.
In a story about the Pense hotel in the Regina Leader-Post on March 27, 1943, Arthur Tims recalled the days when he worked as a porter shortly after the hotel was built in 1904. One salesman would tip him a dollar for taking his sixteen trunks from the train to the hotel’s large sample room. “Travellers used to leave shirts in their rooms,” Tims told the paper. “They never came back for them. We kept them for a while, then I’d get the ones that fitted.”
In 1940, the Government of Saskatchewan passed legislation which, among other things, empowered city, town and village councils to provide sample rooms for the convenience of travellers, and to fix the fees for the use of such rooms.
Changing Times
The economic boom times of the 1920s
gave way to the Great Depression, then the 1940s' war-time
economy gave way to more boom times in the 1950s. Travelling salesmen were
vulnerable in terms of the market’s increasing scale. As Timothy B. Spears writes in the December 1993 issue of American
Quarterly, "The rise of mail order houses, the increased
importance of branded products, the emergence of corporate selling
organizations … and other related factors reshaped the commercial traveller’s
professional identity and his role in the marketplace.” Specialization was one strategy adopted by salesmen. Instead of carrying several products and product lines, they would carry just one line which enabled them to make better time between sales calls.
In addition, improvements to Saskatchewan’s roads in the1950s meant that commercial travellers could switch from trains to cars to get from place to place. Unfortunately for hoteliers, automobiles enabled salesmen to move more easily between towns and get home more quickly, cutting into the hotel business. Then, in 1960 when mixed drinking was allowed in Saskatchewan, many hotels turned their sample rooms into beverage rooms. Commercial travellers were not longer hotel-dependent.
© Joan Champ, 2018
I remember the sample men coming through Regina in the early 1980's. I will always remember the extra luggage they had and some of the over sized cases they brought. I particularly remember stuffing a large taxi full outside the Hotel Saskatchewan circa 1981 or so. No tip for me and no tip for the driver, IIRC. My girlfriend at the time worked the front desk at the Hotel at the time as she was the one who told me who and what sample men were.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the well written article. Your blog here is one I don't frequent enough but almost always find some great article on Sask history. Have a good new year.
Thanks so much for taking the time to read my blog, and for your comments! All the best to you for 2019.
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ReplyDeleteThank you! I appreciate you taking the time to read my blog posts. This one was fun to research and write.
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