Bel 550 "rmt10 360, 
GREATER PROFITS FOR EVERY BUSINESS 213 
be ashamed not to know as much about their own country 
as they know about Europe. 
To stimulate travel in this country it would be advan- 
tageous for the railroads also to adopt the Model Stock Plan 
and make such travel available at home. During the past 
few years the railroads have been doing some things in this 
direction with the purpose of building up their passenger 
revenues and making up for some of the business lost to the 
automobiles and motor buses. Along such lines are the 
week-end day-coach trips to points of popular interest, such 
as Atlantic City, Washington, Niagara Falls, and Montreal. 
But these are merely sporadic, haphazard applications of 
some of the Model Stock Plan ideas. When the Model 
Stock Plan is fully applied to the railroads’ passenger traffic 
problem—as it must eventually be to permit them to estab- 
lish it on a basis of real profit making—it will enormously 
increase the number of passengers carried, greatly increase 
the use and the total profits of the railroads, and win them 
the enthusiastic support of a better served public. 
The tendency in any business where Model Stock Plan 
thinking is not applied is to raise rates when some outside 
force has operated to cut down the volume of profitable 
business. It is, of course, possible to get away with this 
policy for a while; it actually consists of using up the goodwill 
of the business. But eventually competitors come to an 
understanding of the Model Stock Plan principle that the 
greatest total profits are earned by offering the public the 
goods or services it wants at the price it is prepared to pay. 
An instance of a business where this reasoning applies 
directly is the hotel industry as it is today. Most of the 
hotels lost a source of great total profits when prohibition 
took away their liquor trade. Forthwith they raised their 
rates on rooms and their prices on meals. 
The traveling public has no adequate source of shelter 
except hotels, so the rooms are fairly well patronized, but a 
very large proportion of their guests do not ¢at many meals in 
the hotels. There have grown up around every large hotel 
many cafeterias, tearooms, drug stores with lunch counters,