“I don’t know,” mused Trent, a bit dubiously. “Mom and Dad are all right, but they take their responsibilities really seriously. So far, they have looked at this as your Grandma’s company, with us helping out. We get the occasional lecture about listening to Mrs. Higgins, and the great opportunity she is giving us. I think they have sort of assumed she has been making the decisions right along.”
“It’s the same with my parents,” said Sarah. “There may even be some truth to it. She lets us make the decisions, but she is sorta there. You do the same thing, David. When we get into a fight, you start bringing up stuff that we’ve forgotten then. I don’t know, we’re agreeing again, and we have a plan.”
This came as a revelation to David. He hadn’t realized the others knew what he was doing, and he hadn’t realized that Grandma was doing the same thing. He wasn’t sure he liked it.
Brent looked at David and started laughing. Then Trent and Sarah joined him. All this time, David had thought he was getting away with something, and all the time, the others had been letting him do it. “Anyway,” David said as much to change the subject as anything, “now that we have a sewing machine, what do we do with it? And the next one, and the one after that. How do we sell them?”
“Rent with an option to buy,” said Sarah. “Layaway, and in-store credit, first in nearby towns, then through dealerships. If someone wants to pay cash up front we’ll take it, but I don’t expect that to happen often. They are just too expensive. I figure we’re gonna have to charge about four months wages for a journeyman tailor for each machine, or more. I don’t think we’ll sell many in Grantville. The big plus for our sewing machines is they don’t need electricity, that’s no big deal here.”
“What about the laws restricting who can sew what?” asked Trent.
“Not our problem. If someone wants to buy or rent one, we assume that they are only going to use it to sew in legal ways. Stupid laws anyway.”
“I don’t know,” said David. Then, seeing Sarah’s look, he held up his hands before him; fingers in the sign of the Cross, as if to ward off a vampire. “Not about the ‘stupid law’ part. About the ‘not our problem’ part. I figure the tailors’ guilds will do everything they can to make it our problem. Making clothing is big business. It employs a lot of people. Some of them are going to lose their jobs. A lot of them, actually. As best as I can tell, it seems to take about a man-week to make one set of clothing. Most of that six-day week is spent just sewing the seams. That is one tailor fully employed for every fifty-two men. For one suit of clothes per-year per-man. It’s less than that, but that’s because most people don’t get a new set of clothing every year. More like every two or three years. I’ve been talking to some of the German girls.”
That announcement brought “Woo Hoos” from the guys and a haughty sniff from Sarah.
“About their hope chests,” corrected David, which only made it worse. “About the sewing in their hope chests.”
David tried again to get the conversation back on track. “That’s mostly what’s in them, you know. Clothing, blankets, bed linen, sewn stuff that they take years making, and it’s not because cloth is so expensive. Well, not mostly. Mostly, it’s because it takes years to sew the stuff. The women will love the sewing machines, but the tailors won’t. Have any of you guys had a run-in with Hans Jorgensen?”
That bought the guffaws to a halt.
They had indeed had run-ins with Hans. In most ways, Hans was a standard down-timer kid trying his best to assimilate, but Hans hated sewing machines and sewing machine makers. It was a fairly convenient hate. He had no direct contact with sewing machines and there were only four sewing machine makers in Grantville, all teenagers. His father was a master tailor who was now reduced to working in the labor gangs because there was not enough work in the tailor shops. Why wasn’t there enough work in the tailor shops? Because the Americans had sewing machines, and aside from fitting and finishing, they didn’t need tailors. Clothing, for the moment, cost less in Grantville than it did anywhere else in Europe. The difference between the cost of the fabric in a suit of clothing and the price a tailor could get for a finished suit of clothing was not enough to pay for the labor of the tailor—not without a sewing machine, and Hans’ father didn’t have one. Also, as the cost of sewing had gone down, the demand for new cloth had gone up and so had its price.