potting-room of a green house. Roof and sides are painted conspicuously the Standard Oil Company's always in red, white, and blue colors and other companies' in uniform trade-mark colors. All kinds of oil supplies are attractively arranged on the shelves within, and polite attendants in white suits remind you of a combination between a certified milk dairy and a well-kept green house.
COMPETITION BY SERVICE
What interested me most was the problem of how all these corner oileries could compete with the Standard Oil Company, with its organization, system, and unlimited capital. I promptly found the answer they did not compete at all. The Standard Oil Company fixed the prices and everybody else made the same price. There is no difference in gasolene of the same specific gravity, whether made by the Standard Oil Company of California or the Ventura Oil Company of Boston and Los Angeles. The California people brought up in the oil regions know the fraud of any advertiser who declares that his gasolene will carry a car more miles than the gasolene of his neighbor, if it is of the same gravity.
The competition was entirely in the service
