The storekeeper is the middleman, really serving both producer and consumer. Every one can see this clearly in cases where there is only one middleman.
=Additional middlemen.= If the farmers trading at a country store bring to it more eggs than the people in the town will buy, the storekeeper must either sell them elsewhere or refuse to take them. If possible, he will find a market for the surplus, usually by shipping them to the nearest large city. But he does not send them direct to consumers, for he could not deal with them any better than the farmers could with the people in his town. He may send them to a storekeeper in the city, but he is more likely to send them to some one who makes a business of receiving eggs from country collectors and selling them at wholesale wherever there is a demand for them. If the receipts in a city exceed the local requirements, the surplus will be sent to one of the great cities which are the principal receiving centers for produce of all kinds. The large receivers in the great cities distribute the eggs to retailers in the cities and also to jobbers and retailers in smaller cities where local supplies are inadequate.
[Illustration: Fig. 225. Unloading coops of poultry at a receiving warehouse. (Photograph from the Bureau of Chemistry, United States Department of Agriculture)]
Thus between the producer and the consumer there may be as many as six or seven middlemen who in turn handle the eggs. At first thought it seems that so many middlemen are not necessary. But it is not a question of numbers; it is a question of conditions. The number depends more or less upon whether the middleman at any stage finds it more advantageous to deal with one next to him in the general series or to pass one or more and deal with another farther away. In the United States prices of eggs are finally determined by the demand and supply in the large cities of the East; the prices at other points are usually the prices in these cities, minus the cost of transportation and handling. In periods of scarcity, however, there is a tendency to uniformity of prices in all large cities.
The movements of poultry to market are made in much the same way as the movement of eggs. As a rule the same people handle both.