The Apple Market Revolution
A local lecturer urges Kennewick fruit growers to bypass traditional middlemen and adopt large-scale auction houses to fix stagnant apple prices.
Arthur M. Geary, an advocate for modernizing fruit sales, presented a lecture to the Kennewick Commercial Club regarding the defects in the current methods of marketing apples in the Northwest. Geary argued that although Washington cherries and apples were superior in quality, they were losing 25 to 30 cents per box due to inefficient packing and a reliance on private jobbers. He advocated for a shift toward the clearing-house auction systems used by California and Florida associations, which allow buyers to bid directly on products in major population centers. Geary noted that while big-city jobbers resist this transition because it eliminates their monopoly on supply, hundreds of rail cars from the Northwest sat rotting or in cold storage last year because owners could not find buyers, proving that the old system of private selling has outgrown its utility.
“The apple industry of the northwest has outgrown the system of private selling from jobbers’ stores.”
This 1915 struggle for control over agricultural supply chains mirrors today's ongoing debates in the Tri-Cities region regarding the balance of power between local producers, corporate distributors, and global market forces.
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