Who are middle man?How do they help the farmers?
chapter name is a wholesale market.
please answer me......
i will choose as brainliest
Answers
He is., so useful, so indispensable, we may say, that it is hard even to imagine a. state of life from w lich he should be absent. Yet there is no institutio”, not even the House of Lords, that has been more frequently attacked. His very success has made him a target alike for the. producer and the consumer. Why, cries the producer,. should my profit be intercepted by a man who does. nothing but stand behind a counter to sell, or load carts to despatch, the goods with which I have provided him ? He has had none of the trouble and none of the risk. It is not his beasts that have died of the cattle-plague, nor his sheep that are the fewer by the foot-and-mouth disease. He merely distributes what I send him, and if I do not send him enough for his customers he either goes. to other farmers or reduces the demand to the level of the supply by the simple process of raising the price. Why should this superfluous link between me and my customers take the lion's share of the profits when he takes no part either of the risk or of the labour ? The consumer approaches the question from another side, but he hates the middle- man as cordially as the farmer. He reads from time to time of the fluctuations in the price of cattle, of wheat, of all the various produce that furnishes his table, and he turns to his butcher's or his baker's book to see what record these fluctuations have left in its pages. Alas ! the entries in these squalid red volumes show a wonderful uniformity. And then he hears from some complaining farmer of the low prices that he gets for what he sends to London, and satisfies himself by a rapid calculation that he might easily pay half what he pays and the farmer make twice what he makes. Thus the consumer's indignation at being fleeced takes quite an unselfish and almost heroic complexion from the fact that the producer is fleeced as well as himself. Nor have these emotions always remained without result. Effort after effort has been made to bring producer and consumer into closer relation with one another, and effort after effort has for the most part ended in the creation of a new middleman. The chief example of this is the growth of co-operative stores. They are now a conspicuous incident of London life. They supply occupation for whole mornings or afternoons to the heads of families, and moderate exercise combined with agreeable society to the younger members. They furnish objects for a walk or a drive, and even a use for a bicycle when it has ceased to be its own reward. But do they really abolish the middleman ? They take his place, no doubt, but is it not a substitution of persons rather than of systems ? Prices at a co-operative store are lower, it is true, than prices at the small shop round the corner. But they are not lower than at the huge shops which have followed on the heels of the stores, and in some cases give more value for the same money. The original idea of the co-operative stores has faded into remote history. They are—in London, at all events—no more co-operative than any other joint- stock concern, and the belief that customers would like to save their money by taking the burden of delivery upon themselves has proved to have but a scanty foundation in fact. In one form or another, under one excuse or another, free delivery is now a very common practice in stores, and in proportion as this change becomes universal the last vestige of distinction between a store and a shop will disappear. The convenience of the middleman secures his recurrent resurrection.
Both the consumers and producers gain immensely from the roles of middlemen, who ensure that there is a seamless flow of goods in the market by matching supply and demand. Intermediaries provide feedback to the producers about the market, thus influencing the decisions made by the manufacturers