152 THE MODEL STOCK PLAN 
exactly what have been the results, in dollars and percent- 
ages, of dealing with him. Obviously, if a resource is con- 
sistently unprofitable, if it does not help us in our purpose to 
offer an entire stock of bargains, we had best scratch it off 
our list. But if a resource is neither particularly good nor 
particularly bad, our records may help to bring better 
methods into its manufacturing and better judgement into 
its designing. - The manufacturer who urges us to buy with 
the utmost assurance of the profits we shall make from the 
order he is pressing upon us loses much of his jaunty air when 
shown the high percentage of mark-downs we had to take 
on his last shipments. In fact, he is likely to be much more 
amenable to finding new methods of fighting the waste in 
his production and finding other improvements. As for 
the resource which shows a very good record of profit yielded, 
we have every reason to help it to earn a fair profit on the 
satisfactory goods we get from it. 
An unprofitable producer does not become a good resource 
for us simply because he offers special lots at less than market 
prices. Plainly, he must make up these losses on something 
else, for he cannot continue to sell us only goods on which he 
loses money. Nor need we assume that a manufacturer 
preeminent for style will continue preeminent. Often this 
leadership depends on various factors, such as a particularly 
good designer; when this designer leaves, the factory becomes 
just one producer of a thousand. 
In order of their importance, what we want from our 
resources is the right goods, the right deliveries, the right 
prices. Right goods we have already studied in some detail. 
Right deliveries should always be considered in connection with 
price. If a resource sells us scarce fur coats for 25 per cent 
less than the market price and does not deliver them because 
he has miscalculated the cost, the low price does not help us. 
Sometimes the lowest price is the highest, if deliveries are 
too slow. This fact must not be accepted, however, as 
defending poor buying, 
It will pay us to keep a regular record of delivery failures 
and to let our resources know we keep this. As we have