Week 12 Story: A Tale of Two Merchants

The Silk Merchants by Edwin Lord Weeks, via Wikimedia Commons

Two traveling merchants boarded a ferry in a large city with the goods they hoped to sell. The ferry pushed off into the flowing water and headed down the river to a smaller town.

During the trip the merchants discussed their views of their profession.

The first merchant explained that he values a fair exchange of equally valued goods. The second merchant chuckled and with a patronizing smirk told his colleague that he will never become rich with an approach like that. The second merchant continued his self-righteous speech by explaining that he plans to accumulate wealth by selling his goods for much more than they are worth or trading inexpensive items for much more valuable items.

The first merchant was not impressed with the other merchant's philosophy. The first flaw he found with his fellow merchant's plan was that he can only do business with people who do not know what products are worth. Then once he has done business with a trusting customer once or twice most of them will surely realize he is being dishonest in his appraisals and stop buying and selling goods with him. The second merchant's strategy will leave him with no customers in a town very quickly, and he will spend all the money he makes deceiving his customers on traveling to new markets all the time. And finally, the first merchant, who is a good and honest man, could not understand why for so little reward a person would give up his self respect and dignity.

When the first merchant shared his thoughts of the other's business model, the second merchant again chuckled and pulled his face back into the patronizing smirk he wore after hearing his colleague's philosophy. He then told the honest merchant that he was being naive and that it would all be worth it when he found the perfect gullible customer looking to sell a treasure for a pittance.

Author's Note:
My story is based on "The Merchant of Seri." In that Jataka Tale two merchants, one who is honest and one who is greedy, enter a town and divide the streets equally between themselves. The greedy merchant comes to a house with an old woman and her granddaughter inside. The granddaughter begs her grandmother to buy her something from the merchant's cart, but they have no money. The only thing they have to trade is an old bowl that the woman's husband used to eat out of. When the greedy merchant sees the bowl he realizes right away that it is gold and very valuable. He hopes to buy the bowl for as little money as possible, so he tells the woman it is worthless and throws it on the ground. He then leaves planning to come back and offer a very low price for the bowl at the end of the day.

Eventually the honest merchant comes to the old woman's house, and she asks to trade the bowl for something he's offering. He looks at the bowl and tells the woman that it is worth more than everything he has with him. She agrees to take everything he has except 8 pennies in exchange for the bowl. The honest merchant then uses the 8 pennies to buy a ride to a large city where he sells the bowl and lives well off the money. The greedy merchant comes back to the woman's house to find that she had already sold the bowl to the other merchant.

I chose to write about a possible conversation the two merchants could have had heading to the town that day before they encounter the woman and her valuable bowl.

Bibliography.
"The Merchant of Seri" from Jataka Tales by Ellen C. Babbit. Source