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By E. C. Tracey (If you had an actual)

If you had an actual money-making machine, turning out real nickels and dimes, with permission from the Government to manufacture all you wanted for your own use, how many months in the year would you operate such a machine? Would you run it through the hot season only, and shut down when cold weather came? Would you let the wheels of a dime-coining apparatus become clogged and rusty with disuse?

You have a nickel-making, dime-coining, dollar-bringing apparatus in your store this very moment-your soda fountain makes the coins jingle merrily into your till during the busy season. But why not have a busy season the year round? Why set a limit to your soda fountain's money-making capacity? All through the summer season you give time and thought to improving the variety and quality of your drinks. You work hard to please your customers and to build up a good, steady trade. In the fall you have a fine patronage of regular customers. Why shut down your fountain and turn them all away? Why stop the cheerful hum of the dime-coiner? Do not forget that in driving away your daily soda drinkers you drive away other trade as well. Keep your soda fountain open the year round, and your winter quality up to the summer standard. Give your customers the chance to get the daily pleasant drink they have become accustomed to. If the sale of summer drinks begins to drag a little in the cool days of early fall, offer hot, spicy drinks-beef tea, clam, chicken, tomato and oyster bouillons. Serve really fine hot chocolate as a finished beverage and good satisfying coffee with real cream. You'll find plenty of trade. In all desirable localities, the rent is now a serious tax on retail trade. In the modern store the soda fountain occupies from 15% to 50% of the available selling space. It should pay the same proportion of the rent. If you close the fountain in winter that space becomes non-productive, and the whole burden of the expense falls on the other departments. Make your soda fountain pay its share of the rent and profits twelve months in the year. You can make your soda fountain as popular with the money-spending part of the population in the winter on hot drinks as you can with your ice cream soda and sundaes during the thirsty season.

To make your hot soda trade what it should be needs attention, some good energetic pushing, and above all, up-to-dateness. You cannot run hot soda in a half-hearted, small way out of a small urn with a small, poor line of hot drinks. These speak plainer than words to your trade "There is nothing in this for me" and assures them with equal plainness "there is nothing in it for them." Put the same amount of thought and energy into your hot soda trade in winter that you give to your cold soda trade in summer, and you will find it one of the best business ventures you ever made. Light Lunches-New Idea.