Moreover if the commissary hasn't the stuff you want you
had better give up wanting, for it has no object in laying in a
supply of it just to oblige customers. Its clerks work in the most
languid, unexcited manner. They have no object whatever in holding
your trade, and you can wait until they are quite ready to serve
you, or go home without. True, most of them are merely negroes,
and the few Americans at the head of departments are chiefly
provincial little fellows from small towns whose notions of
business are rather those of Podunk, Mass., than of New York. But
lolling about the commissary a half-hour hoping to buy a box of
matches, one cannot shake off the conviction that it is the system
more than the clerks. Poets and novelists and politicians may work
for "glory," but no man is going to show calico and fit slippers
for such remuneration.
Nor are all the old evils of the competitive method banished from
the Zone. In the Canal Record, the government organ, the
government commissary advertised a sale of excellent $7 rain-coats
at $1 each. The "Record"! It is like reading it in the Bible.
Witness the rush of bargain hunters, who, it proves, are by no
means of one gender. Yet those splendid rain-coats, as manager,
clerks, and even negro sweepers well knew and could not refrain
from snickering to themselves at thought of, were just as rain-
proof as a poor grade of cheese-cloth.
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