Quote:
Originally Posted by G1911
The ATC and its component companies put out a lot of ads in the journals, like the below, asking to send orders to their office directly.
There don't seem to be major distributors at all, and even local distributors appear to be rather limited and often sound like they are not independent, but a part of the monopoly. This comes up in the court testimonies sometimes, where the few independent makers are battling with the problems of the ATC's might in areas outside the direct tobacco manufacturing, and cite that they are blocked from distribution. I gather the ATC did not formally own in a clean way these local distribution channels, but they function as an arm of the trust and appear to be part of it; like the relationship between Brett and American Lithography. It seems to be an internal network they are using, not outside distributors like Topps uses today.
I imagine this was probably not more profitable - but a lot of the ATC's work isn't about making direct profit but stifling competition to later make all of the profit. Allowing independent distributors would have made sales easier for their competition. I would guess this is why the system is more complicated than it needed to be, but you know what guesses are like!
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That's pretty interesting.
The industries I've been in have been all over the place as far as distributors go. Anywhere from one place where I worked for their distributor and ended up getting every strange request east of the Mississippi. To a company that got really mad at me when I bought from a distributor way outside my area because the local guys wouldn't call me back for 2 weeks on a price and delivery request when I gave them their own part number, and it was basically sold I just had to quote it for my customer who wasn't going to wait a couple weeks.
Bikes produced some bad ones. Fuji had the place I got parts from set up as a distributor. They put together a whole dealer network, then partway into year two Fuji decided to not have distributors and took every one of those places - all of New England - direct. Cost the distributor thousands.
The other is a brand the shop I worked for sort of carried. We could get them, but a much larger local place also has the brand, and for some reason if we want to sell a high end bike they can and have told the distributor we can't have the bike and to send the sale to them. (This would be a point where I wouldn't carry that brand OR do any favors for that larger shop like they asked for a few days after stealing a big sale. But the owner like to play nice. )
I can see ATC not owning a jobber, but being the biggest and nearly only game in town telling jobbers that of they carry a non ATC brand that isn't approved they might not have ATC anymore.