TRAVELING SALESMEN

TRAVELING SALESMEN are representatives of business firms who travel through assigned territories to solicit orders for future deliveries of their employers' goods and services. Unlike peddlers or canvassers, they seek orders from other business firms and public institutions rather than from individual consumers or households. Also, unlike peddlers and other itinerant merchants, they usually sell from samples or descriptions of their products rather than carry goods for immediate delivery.

Although itinerant dealers, such as seagoing and overland traders, emerged early in American economic life, traveling salesmen were virtually nonexistent before the mid-nineteenth century. Thin, sparsely developed market areas, small-scale manufacturing, and the lack of branded merchandise lines provided little incentive for the use of salesmen. Wholesale merchants, who maintained their own contacts with suppliers, dominated trade. Retailers either made periodic buying trips to major wholesale centers to replenish their inventories or patronized local wholesale jobbers. After 1840 manufacturers began to take the initiative and send salesmen in search of customers. This change resulted from (1) the growth of market opportunities as America became more urban; (2) transportation improvements that reduced travel time and expense; and (3) growth in manufacturing capacity and the consequent need to sell greater quantities of goods.

The pioneer traveling salesmen cannot be precisely identified, in part because of definitional problems. For example, should a company owner or partner who made an occasional visit to distant customers or agents be classified as a traveling salesman? A Wilming ton, Del., railway equipment manufacturing company, Bonney and Bush (subsequently Bush and Lobdell and then Lobdell Car Wheel Company), employed a traveling agent starting in the 1830s and added additional salesmen in the 1850s. Scovill Manufacturing Company of Waterbury, Conn., which made brassware, experimented with a traveling salesman from 1832 to 1835 but did not finally adopt that selling method until 1852. The Rogers Brothers Silverware Company and other metalworking firms also began using traveling salesmen in the early 1850s.

Many states and municipalities, acting at the behest of their local wholesalers, imposed costly licensing requirements on traveling salesmen entering their jurisdictions. These barriers proved ineffective and eventually were declared unconstitutional in Robbins v. Taxing District (1887). The U.S. Census reported 7,262 traveling salesmen in 1870 and 223,732 in 1930, but these figures may represent only one-half to one-third of the true numbers. The number of salesmen undoubtedly increased after 1930.

Salesmanship in the twentieth century became increasingly professionalized and scientific. The early sales management textbooks of the 1910s and 1920s were followed by a steadily expanding stream of books, periodicals, and college courses; more careful planning of salesmen's itineraries; attention to new methods of testing, selecting, and training salesmen; and experimentation with various commission and salary methods of compensation.

Traveling salesmen continued to ply their trade well into the twenty-first century. But while salesmen selling to businesses thrived—selling drugs to doctors or cosmetics to salons, for example—the door to door salesman became extremely rare. The rise of the two-income family after the 1970s deprived door to door salesmen of daytime access to customers. In addition, the rise of the Internet as a marketing device and the trend toward gated and policed suburban subdivisions created steep barriers for door to door work. In many parts of the United States by the end of the twentieth century, the door to door salesman was a thing of the past.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hollander, S. C. "Nineteenth Century Anti-Drummer Legislation." Business History Review 38 (1964).

Moore, Truman E. The Traveling Man: The Story of the American Traveling Salesman. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972.

Porter, Glenn, and Harold C. Livesay. Merchants and Manufacturers: Studies in the Changing Structure of Nineteenth-Century Marketing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.

Spears, Timothy B. 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Stanley C.Hollander/l. t.;a. r.

See alsoAdvertising ; Consumerism ; Marketing .