The Trust’s Empty Wallet: How Monopolies Are Starving Seattle’s Hotels and Stables
As giant combines fire thousands of traveling salesmen to boost profits, the ripple effect hits local businesses hard—yet consumers see only higher prices.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The commercial traveler is at the United States now feeling the mallet influence of the trusts. Thousands of them have been notified recently that their services will not be required. Several of the great combines have dispensed with nearly all expense in the way of road salesmen.
As a consequence, the country and city hotels will suffer, for many of the hotels part largely upon the drummers for patronage. The livery stable will be affected to a great extent, and many of the proprietors will doubtless butt heads as an effort to the financial distress occasioned by the discharge of so many thousand traveling men.
What compensations are offered by the trusts? None whatever. Prices for all kinds of trust products have sharply advanced, in the face of hypocritical assertions that prices would be reduced to consumers. Everybody knows that the manufacturers of the trusts propose to get every dollar possible out of the people.
This 1902 commentary on the 'trusts' mirrors modern anxieties about corporate consolidation and the gig economy. Just as traveling salesmen were cut to streamline costs for monopolies, today's platform economies often automate or eliminate middlemen, concentrating wealth while leaving local service industries—like hotels and transport—to bear the brunt of reduced foot traffic.
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