EDITORIAL
Could a couple of ads taken out in The Reporter exactly 100 years ago have anything to say to consumers living in our town today?
The parallels are interesting.
Ben Loewenstein Jr. was a pioneer Rockdale merchant. It’s not going too far to say he was one of the founders of our town’s economy, many years before Alcoa.
His Loewenstein’s Inc. store was literally Rock-dale’s Walmart of its day. But, 100 years ago, local stores were being seriously challenged by the Sears & Roebuck mail-order catalog.
Ben was more than a businessman. He was one smart cookie. He ran an ad showing side-by-side the prices of items for sale in his store and their identical prices in the catalog. He...well, let Ben tell the rest in his next Reporter ad:
“One man came in with a list he had picked out from a catalog house. It amounted to $18.17. I sold him every item he had on it for $16.65, thereby saving him $1.52...
“He saw the actual goods he was getting instead of pictures of them...And here’s what else happened. “Instead of the money going to a foreign mail order corporation, it stayed here at home. Part of it went to Hal Harris for drayage (transportation). Part of it went to my clerks for salaries.
“Part of it went to the newspaper man (advertising). Part of it went to the school funds and the road funds. Part of it went to local charities.
“Part of it went to A. N. B. Smith for a load of wood. Part of it went to A. Longmire for a pound of the best butter you ever saw and part of it went to other folks here.
“That money will be spent by all these people and eventually the whole community will get some benefits out of it.
“If that gentleman hadn’t read my ad last week, he would have sent $18.17 to a foreign concern and that money would have been lost forever.”
Now, obviously things have changed. You can’t go downtown to get a pound of A. Longmire’s butter. But there are still opportunities to shop locally, if we just think about it, and that money spent at home still goes to salaries of people who live here. And, yes, Ben might have found a better word than “foreign” to describe sending money to Chicago. But you know what? Chicago, or Austin for that matter, isn’t Rockdale.
We could all do a lot worse than to think about old Ben every once in a while.—M.B.
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