Harold Dunning, the sales manager of a New York wholesale supply company, had kept three Harlem merchants waiting for 11 minutes past their scheduled 2:30 appointment on October 11, 1949. When he finally emerged from his office on Reed Street in lower Manhattan, he told them that they had no standing with the firm, that the payment and delivery terms applied to stores above 110th Street were company policy, and that the matter was not open for discussion. The delegation had come downtown on behalf of the Upper Harlem Merchants Committee, a loose association of about 70 grocers, druggists, cleaners, restaurant men, and furniture dealers. Among them was Ellsworth Johnson, 44 years old, a man Harlem knew as Bumpy, who had spent much of two decades in and out of the city’s institutions and was a figure of standing in the numbers business.
He had been asked to come because he was the only person on the committee’s list who could read a ledger, keep his temper, and be counted on to show up. Dunning’s dismissal of the committee lasted roughly 90 seconds. He said the firm had built its business on service and did not intend to be lectured by people who had come downtown to make a speech. Then he returned through the inner door.
Johnson did not react. He waited about ten seconds, stood, put on his hat, and held the door for the other two. On the way out, he stopped at the reception desk and asked courteously for the correct spelling of Dunning’s name and the name of the head of the delivery department. What unsettled Hattie Dunar, one of the merchants, was that Johnson did not appear furious.
He seemed instead to have become interested. The apparent insult had been a clue: the firm’s terms for Harlem were not a decision made on the spot by one rude man. They were written down. Johnson knew that in a prison, the guard who shouts is less dangerous than the clerk who files, because the shouting ends and the file does not.
Somewhere in that building was a schedule of terms containing a classification for the territory above 110th Street, and that classification had been copied into route books, credit ledgers, and reports to the firm’s bank and insurance company. The arrangements were specific. Deliveries above 110th Street carried a “zone 4” service charge of 4%, described as covering the additional cost of the route. Orders below a minimum size were not delivered at all.
Payment was cash on delivery rather than the 30-day terms extended to comparable stores elsewhere. Combined orders that would qualify for volume pricing had a way of not being approved. On the route books, Harlem stores were marked class C. The effect was that Harlem storekeepers could never accumulate.
Paying cash on delivery, a grocer could not use the interval between receiving goods and selling them to finance the next order, so could not buy in large enough quantities, so kept thin margins, poor credit, high insurance premiums, and less cash. The system did not need anyone to be hostile. It only needed to keep running. Johnson understood that the question was not how to make Cranwell and Reic Wholesale Supply Corporation treat the committee with respect.
It was how to make the zone 4 schedule more expensive to keep than to withdraw. The campaign he assembled over the following months worked on several fronts at once. Bernard Seely, a bookkeeper, gathered 12 months of invoices from cooperating merchants and built a comparison of what each store paid against what the same firm charged for the same items elsewhere. Willilamina Vaughn, a union organizer, obtained from drivers and platform men the actual running times and drop counts for the Harlem routes, which showed that trucks made more stops per mile above 110th Street than below it, and that the average time per case delivered was lower, not higher, than on routes that carried no service charge.
The finding meant the 4% had no cost basis. Delphia Puit, an attorney, understood the strategic value of the insurance angle: the underwriters’ loading for the district relied in part on credit and inventory classifications supplied by wholesalers. If the firm’s own class C markings were the basis for premium loading, then the firm was manufacturing the evidence that justified everyone else charging more. Reverend Isaiah Pride held the merchants together in his church basement on alternate Wednesday evenings.
Nathaniel Wills, a bank officer, arranged short-term bridging credit secured against inventory for any merchant whose supplier credit was suddenly withdrawn. Jacob Riseman, a Brooklyn wholesaler with unused capacity, quoted a rate below the Reed Street price for the combined purchasing of 61 Harlem stores, delivered on 30-day terms. Odell Grant, a newspaper editor, was given the whole plan and asked to publish nothing until the appropriate moment. A district leader named Curtis Meade agreed to make one telephone call at the right time so that a written complaint from a Harlem attorney would be read by someone rather than filed.
Sylvester Boon, an insurance broker, provided premium histories showing that the loading on storefronts above 110th Street had increased twice in six years without any corresponding change in loss experience. Johnson presented the strategy at a church basement meeting on December 7, 1949. He told those present that nothing they were about to do was illegal, that it all depended on doing dull things consistently for 8 to 12 weeks, and that anyone who could not commit should leave. Four merchants left.
Sixty-three stayed. Johnson later said the four who left were the most useful thing that happened that evening, because everyone who remained had now chosen to. The stores did not announce a boycott. They simply reduced their orders from Cranwell and Reic over a period of weeks and placed the difference with Riseman.
The reduction began with the highest-volume, lowest-margin categories: canned goods, paper products, and cleaning supplies. A firm losing a tenth of its revenue on a route feels it in the ledger at the end of the quarter, but losing a third of its cubic volume is felt the same week because the truck still costs the same to run. Puit filed her complaint with the state insurance department on January 16, 1950. Meade made his telephone call two days later.
On January 30, the department wrote to the rating organization requesting supporting data for the district loading, with a copy going to the principal underwriters, one of whom carried Cranwell and Reic’s own liability and fleet coverage. The firm’s response came in the first week of February. Three merchants on the committee received notices that their accounts were being placed on immediate cash terms with balances due in seven days. One was a furniture dealer with a balance large enough to close him.
Another received an unexpected visit from a city inspector. A fifth was told that his lease renewal would require a review. None of it worked. The furniture dealer drew on his bridging facility and paid the balance in full within four days.
The merchant visited by the inspector had, on Puit’s advice, put his premises in order months earlier. The lease question was handled by a letter from Puit, and the renewal was signed nine days later. Every threat had been imagined months earlier and answered in advance. What broke the firm’s position was not the failure of the threats but the fact that they had been made at all.
A supplier that responds to declining orders by attempting to squeeze its remaining customers has told everyone watching, including its own bank, that it no longer believes it can compete on price. Riseman’s rate had already established that the 4% was not a cost. The credit calls established that the firm knew it. On February 6, the firm’s counsel telephoned Puit and asked whether the committee would be willing to meet.
She said the committee met on Wednesday evenings, and that a meeting could be arranged for Thursday, February 9, at 10:00 in the morning, at the committee’s offices on West 123rd Street. The counsel assumed the meeting would be held downtown. Puit said the committee’s records were uptown. On the evening of Wednesday, February 8, after the committee’s meeting had ended, Johnson stayed behind with Seely and set the four clocks in the office 11 minutes fast.
When asked about it long afterward, he explained that in October he had been given a 2:30 appointment and been received at 11 minutes past it, and that the intervening months had taught him the 11 minutes had not been about him. It had been a way of telling him what he was worth without having to say it. He said a man who controls the clock in a room controls the terms of everything discussed in that room, and he did not intend to hold a negotiation on Reed Street time. The firm’s delegation arrived at 9:56 on February 9: Emmett Cranwell, 61, who had run the firm since his father’s death, and Harold Dunning, who had not been told in advance who would be present.
The clock above the door read seven minutes past ten when they sat down. Nobody mentioned it. The counsel glanced at it and then at his own wristwatch, and then at the mantel clock behind the table, which agreed. The meeting lasted two hours and ten minutes by the room’s clocks.
The memorandum signed on February 21, 1950, set out the terms: the zone 4 service charge was withdrawn in its entirety; 30-day payment terms were extended to any account on the committee’s list with 12 months of trading history on the same qualifying basis as other districts; the minimum order size for delivery above 110th Street was set at the same figure as below it; pulled orders from groups of five or more stores would be quoted at standard volume rates; and the class C designation was struck from the route books, with credit classifications based on payment history alone. Two further provisions mattered more over time. The firm agreed to supply the committee quarterly with a schedule of its published delivery charges and terms by district, so that any future divergence would be visible on paper. And it agreed to employ two route salesmen based above 110th Street with authority to write orders and quote standard terms.
The insurance matter took longer and ended less completely. The rating organization’s response defended the district loading on grounds Puit considered inadequate, but the loading was not increased again and was later reduced for storefront risks of the class the committee’s members occupied. Seely’s tally for the 12 months following February 1950 showed committee members buying at delivered prices between 6% and 9% below the previous year on comparable goods, with the largest part of the improvement coming not from the withdrawn service charge but from the pooled ordering the fight had taught them to organize. Thirty-eight stores extended their trading terms.
Four opened second locations within three years. The Brooklyn arrangement with Riseman continued at about a third of the committee’s total buying for the better part of a decade, and it was the standing reason no one at Reed Street ever proposed reinstating the charge. The pulled buying arrangement became a permanent cooperative in 1952, incorporated with a small warehouse on 133rd Street and a paid manager. Seely’s comparison ledger was used as a model in at least three later disputes in the neighborhood.
Puit’s insurance complaint became the template for a similar filing by a merchants group in Brooklyn four years later. The broader significance was the assumption that had been altered: that the people subject to such arrangements could not measure them. A service charge survives on the belief that nobody will ever put its cost basis on paper. Sixty-three storekeepers, a bookkeeper, an attorney, a broker, a union organizer, and a Brooklyn wholesaler had made that measurement, and having made it once, they were able to make it again.
The clocks in the office on West 123rd Street were never put right. They stayed 11 minutes fast through the whole of the committee’s occupancy. When the cooperative moved to 133rd Street in 1952, the mantel clock went with it and was set 11 minutes fast on the new shelf. Seely kept the practice in his own office until he retired.
He told younger men who assumed it was superstition that the 11 minutes were a reminder that the difference between being made to wait and making others wait is not a matter of character but of arrangement, and that arrangements can be studied, and that anything which can be studied can be changed.