Sell Secondhand Newspapers

1895

How Trainmen on City and Suburban Lines Help Out Their Monthly Salaries.

Owing no doubt to the large and open handed style of living which characterizes the American, there is very little regular traffic in secondhand magazines in this country and practically none in secondhand newspapers so far as the general public is concerned. In England a great many people are regular subscribers to secondhand papers, and the business is so important that one concern finds it sufficiently profitable to quote its prices for "read" copies of the leading London dailies at considerable length in The Times.

In Chicago, although nobody is willing to wait a few hours for his news in order to save a few cents, the business of selling secondhand newspapers is carried on pretty extensively, owing to the exchange privilege allowed by the papers to railroad news agents and to the newsboys. The brakemen on the suburban trains, the guards on the elevated roads and the conductors on the street cars gather up the castoff papers on their trains at the end of every run. The street railway conductor, as a rule, has no market for his papers, and after giving the gripmen and the men in the barn all they want to While away idle moments he destroys the rest, but the men on the suburban trains and the elevated roads dispose of their surplus to the news agents on the trains in the case of the suburban roads and at the stations in case of the elevated. For a 2 cent paper the agent pays 1 cent, and for the 1 cent papers 15 cents for 50. If the news agent gets them early in the day, he can resell many of them. If there is some big piece of news in the market, he has no trouble in disposing of all he can get up till noon. Those he doesn't sell he can exchange within 24 hours for new ones of the next issue, so that he cannot lose by the transaction, no matter what the condition of the market may be.

This extra money, if the paper collector is lucky, amounts to several dollars in the course of the month. One of the curiosities of the business is the fact that the conditions which make business lively for the news agent make it dull for the paper collector and vice versa. If the weather is stormy, more papers are sold by the agent, because people expect to be kept indoors more and to have fewer interruptions from visitors, but for the same reason they are less apt to leave their papers in the car seat. During a cold snap the trainmen have rather slim picking comparatively, and the same thing is true on rainy and stormy days in the summer. — Chicago Tribune.