INVENTORY

The term inventory is readily understood when used in commerce by persons who are engaged in some manner with the supply of the satisfaction of man’s desire. If your industries figure into the millions, or if you are a clerk selling calico; if you are spending an allowance, or are a housekeeper depending on your husband’s or children’s wages, you take stock. The method and time of taking stock varies. In vast industrial or commercial enterprises it is not so frequent as with the man of meager resources. The large commercial dividend-paying houses ought to take stock before they declare dividends. If they don’t take inventory of the assets and the liabilities, they take inventory of the stockholders. The ones who can be easily frozen out of their stock considered as assets, the ones who cannot are marked as liabilities, for they have to be taken along in the combine when reorganization takes place.

The man who sells his labor at one dollar per day need not work overtime to take stock; he takes stock mentally. “I get six dollars per week; can’t have champagne for dinner; saloon must be my club; free lunch and ‘schooner’ is my bill of fare; one dollar for the week’s lodging, fifty cents to Lizzie or Mary, and by Christmas I will have enough to get me a second-hand suit of clothes and an overcoat.”

Success in business does not depend so much on the largeness of the capital as upon the knowledge of how to use this capital to the best advantage. You find when you take stock what goods sold best, what paper is the best advertising medium, who is your best clerk, what departments you are to enlarge, and from what charity donation you got the most benefit. All must focus to this one point if you wish to succeed—to increase the assets, decrease the liabilities, get as much as possible, give as little as you can, and have the people satisfied.

The taking of stock is not only in what we call legitimate business. Even the criminals have a way of taking stock. The assets are the plunder, the liabilities are the risks. They have to figure as to the price of the policeman on the beat, what a pull with the alderman will cost, and how about straw bail. The robber has his way, the preacher his way; there is not one that can escape it.

It is not business alone that monopolizes stocktaking. In whatever you are trying to accomplish you must take inventory. Success does not depend so much on vastness of resources as on the knowledge of how to use the capital with which to work to the best advantage.

In European countries even the family is inventoried—daughters are the liabilities, sons the assets. With an income per annum of so much, if his children be sons he can live up to the limit; if girls he cannot; he must be saving for the dowry. It is amusing how some try to minimize the liabilities and maximize the assets when they are being inspected.

The young man who calls on a girl with the intention of making an impression upon her, dresses in his best, takes out his Sunday manners, and shows himself off all assets and no liabilities. And she has the parlor and sitting-room furniture dusted, massages and powders her face, sprinkles rose-water on herself. If her cheek or her chin is beautiful she takes pains that he may see them, so a beauty spot is pasted that it may call attention; he cannot fail to notice it. And her language, how choice, and her voice, how different, when her best young man is there than when she scolds the cook. I know a lady who changes her voice automatically whenever a stranger is near. If you see her at that time you see a bundle of assets and no liabilities.

Stocktaking is not monopolized by man. The taking of stock goes on everywhere; it is the most important factor in the world; it is responsible for everything there is.

The forest with its animal life, the sea with its life, the air with its life, owe their being to the taking of stock in the beginning by the molecules and atoms which compose them. The world, with its pains and its pleasures, its happiness and its misery, its arts and its sciences, its progress and its woes, its smiles and its tears, is the net balance of the inventory.

Natural selection is the result of the summing up as to whether you will remain where you are and receive hard knocks, or struggle to get ahead and change your environment to escape the knocks—and you have decided to change—which results in evolution. It began with the mystery of the world. It has been kept up ever since, and will continue unto its very end. Things that came into being are records; and the things brought into being by the things are records. The world is a counting-house, life its book-keeper, and the net balance, man.

The balance is the working capital of the future, and while the present balance cannot be changed, as that is the net results and is final, yet man thinks he can and exerts himself to change the balance, and does change it, but not for himself; the change is for the future. Man is working for the future by working in the now—for what he thinks the present will bring to him. Being uncomfortable where he is, he has to move. His motives in stepping up is the betterment of himself, and in so doing he unconsciously carves the future. Life is a series of stocktaking, from the cradle to the grave; the figures are alive; they are actors, spectators, and critics; some have the privilege of being players, and some are being played upon.

Stocktaking is Judgment Day; then we get the net balance of the past, but do not forget that the lessons for the future are the most important in the day of inventory. If you miscalculate on that day you shall surely “go broke.”