HKB
in a single factory.[109] Thus a number of small simple business-units representing the various stages in the production of a commodity, come to group themselves into a large complex unit.
This complexity is further increased by constant demand for variety in size, quality, and character of goods to meet the growing variety of demand in a market of increasing area. Special classes of goods must be manufactured for Australia, for Egypt, for Burmah. Less civilised customers, including such countries as China and Persia, insist upon their imported goods being made up and packed in some familiar form long after the use or convenience of this form has passed away. The exigencies of close competition require constant experiment in new lines of goods to benefit the fancy of a newly-opened market, or to get away the trade of some competitor. Moreover, the increasingly important part which is played by advertising in the trades where competition is keenest is followed by a very singular result, which seems at first sight to contravene the growing specialism or differentiation of function that marks modern trade. Finding that goods advertise one another, manufacturers are frequently induced to add new departments to their business, expanding the scope and variety of their productions. In retail trade this tendency is widely operative. The modern grocer sells tinned meats, cakes, wine, tea-pots, and Christmas cards, the draper sells every sort of ornamental ware, the stationer, the oil shop, the china shop set out an increasing and miscellaneous number of differing wares, moving towards the position of a general dealer. The Stores and the Universal Providers represent the culmination of this movement in the retail business, returning to an enlarged and more complex form of the primitive little "general shop" of the village. But this same economy is strong enough in certain classes of manufacture to overpower the advantages of an expansion of business in the older form. Up to a certain point the economies of production upon a large scale will make it advantageous to a manufacturer to employ all the capital at his command in producing increased quantities of the same class of goods. But after the market for these goods is fairly supplied it may pay better to appeal to a variety of wants by new species of goods of the same generic character, than by attempting to force new markets, or to effect an increased sale in the old markets at such reduced prices as the increased scale of production may permit. The business of Messrs. Huntley & Palmer is a striking example of this enterprise, issuing in a large variety of products and of processes which, though generically related, cover a widening range of food luxuries. The new products which are taken on will of course not only reap the advantage of being effectively advertised by the earlier products, but consisting largely of new adaptations of the same kind of raw material, the economies of purchase and transport will be almost as great as attend an increased production of the same goods, while much of the machinery of management, and even of manufacture, can be utilised for the new processes. This tendency not merely to multiply processes in the manufacture of a single commodity, but to increase the variety of commodities turned out by analogous processes in a single business, is also operative in certain textile and metal industries, where an increasing proportion of the expensive machinery and skilled labour is engaged, not in narrowly specific processes of manufacture, but in generating power and in transmitting it for a number of later uses to be governed by specific machinery. There is in many factories an increasing facility to take on new processes, and to transfer a large portion of the plant from the manufacture of one class of goods to another class.