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Articles \ "Causes of the Depressed Condition of the Waterbury Watch Trade" THE JEWELERS CIRCULAR May 6th, 1896 The Causes of the Depressed Condition of the Waterbury Watch Co. A.O. Jennings, secretary of the Waterbury Watch Co, Waterbury, Conn., in an interview with a local reporter a week or so ago, said some very interesting things in respect to the condition of the watch trade. “The Watch company,” he said, “has had a very large trade with Australia – a trade that has usually been continually increasing. Now, however, that country is passing through a series of calamities which have occasioned a vast amount of suffering there. They have had droughts and floods and earthquakes, and now an epidemic of typhoid fever is raging. Their greatest suffering has been caused by the intense heat there during the present Summer – our Winter being their Summer. Loss of life was also reported. “Charles O. Kemp, of Sydney, New South Wales, a merchant who has handled our goods quite extensively, called on my last Thursday. He gave a most vivid account of the suffering caused by the heat. According to his account it was something terrible. The thermometer is said to have registered 170 degrees in some places. Nearly all vegetation was destroyed. Birds dropped down out of the trees dead, and large numbers of cattle died in the fields. The heat was so intense that it melted the honeycomb in the beehives, thus smothering the bees. Many aviaries were lost in this way. At present time the springs and wells are all dried up, and an epidemic of typhoid fever is breaking out. The suffering has been horrible, and it will probably be some time before the details are published.” In regard to the business situation Mr. Jennings said: “1896, so far, has been the worst business year we have ever experienced, 1893 and 1894 are not to be compared to it. There seems to have been an accumulation of misfortune and trouble all over the world. Everything seems to have gone wrong, and there appears to be an utter lack of confidence in all countries. We had a large trade with South Africa. The recent troubles there have almost entirely destroyed that. The trouble in Egypt has seriously crippled our trade in that country. In the United States buying is very slow. A little more can be said of the European trade. The three months trip I took through Europe recently is resulting very satisfactorily. The Swiss are our principle competitors in the manufacture of low priced watches. We have been very successful in competing with them thus far. “At the beginning of the present year we endeavored to keep running with our full force of employees in the hope that something favorable might happen. Toward the end of January, however, it was apparent that there was no use accumulating a large amount of manufactured goods. At that time we were running with 500 employees and turning out 1,500 to 1,800 watches per day. The number of employees was cut down to 290. About a thousand watches per day are now being manufactured, all of them of the low priced variety. We are doing very little high priced work at present. “This enforced cutting down of the number of the number of our employees is a very serious matter. The help is all skilled. We have to train them to do particular kinds of work and it is a long, hard job for us. When these dull times came on we were in splendid working condition. We hope to be able to ride over the hardships, however, and go back to work with our full quota of help as soon as business revives.” |