How did a business decide what price to charge for freight? The answer was a shipping company always aimed to charge, as the railmen put it, “what the traffic will bear.” If the company raised fees too high, people would not use your company or your railroad to ship their goods. And sometimes a big cut in rates brought many more customers. Such a large rate cut would therefore cost only a little revenue. Sometimes you could lower a freight rate and even get more revenue than you had at the higher freight charge. Then you not only made up what’d you lost on paper but gained extra revenue. In
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