Tea shop

“ In the provinces, and particularly in the north and in Scotland, where men take tea with passionate sincerity, frequently starting with sardines and ending with apple tart, the tea-shop occupies an appropriately massive position in daily life. London's tea-shops are, however, talk-shops, refuges from a day's shopping, trysting-places after a terrible eight hours' separation. ”

“ He craves a stronger liquor, and believing he can only get it at the publichouse, he returns there. In the same way a poor working woman, exhausted by long hours of toil in a confined workroom or foetid dwelling, finds that the weak washy fluid too often sold under the name of tea will not allay the 'sinking' of which she complains, and she too returns to the dram shop. Yet coffee and tea of excellent quality, strong and fragrant, may be sold to a fair profit at 1d. per cup, holding half-a-pint, and a wholesome, though less nutritious, beverage at 1d. ”

“ So that the practice of blending teas, if properly understood and skillfully performed, would prove a more satisfactory and profitable one to both consumer and dealer. The object is not, as the public may imagine, to lower the quality or reduce the cost to the dealer, but simply to produce better tea and obtain a finer and more desirable flavor than that yielded by any single variety, one giving better satisfaction to the consumer at a more moderate price and at the same time allowing a larger margin of profit to the dealer. ”

“ Tea-shops are numberless. They are piled up with chests such as we see in England, and with open baskets of coarse and inferior tea for the poor. The cheapest kind is made in thin round cakes or large wafers, strung upon slips of bamboo. ”

“ Of the millions of people who drink tea, very few seem to know how it is grown or manufactured.
They would hardly believe that there are just on 800,000 acres of land planted under tea in India and Ceylon, employing over one million people—all British subjects. Just imagine employing a fifth of the population of London for the production of one article! Then, again, look at the thousands of people who are employed in the tea trade at home—merchants, dealers, brokers—all dependent on this one article of consumption for their bread-and-butter! ”

“ While on the other hand, if the dealer makes a small but necessary sacrifice for the sake of future gain and reputation by selling only Tea that is Tea, and content himself with a fair but legitimate profit, satisfaction will be given to his customers, his Tea trade fostered and extended, and the consumption of this most important food auxiliary increased throughout the country. ”

“ In these warehouses the tea is assorted, repacked, and then put on board the chop-boats and sent down the river to the ships at their anchorage off Whampoa. Here are enormous scales for weighing the chests; here, where the light falls in from the roof, are tables placed for superintendents, who carefully watch the workmen; farther off, are foreigners inspecting a newly arrived chop; at the extreme end is the little apartment where the tea merchant receives people upon business ”

“ A grocer cannot manufacture spices or sugar, grow wine, distil whisky or brew beer, but he can, as generations of grocers have done before him, sell good tea out of an honest tea-chest,—or caddy—and make a respectable living, if not money, out of it for himself and not for others, while serving the public well at the same time. ”

“ One needs not the expensive craft of the cha-sze to know how neatly a little skilful manipulation, and a little heat applied secundum artem, can transform these willow leaves into genuine and delicate85 tea leaves. Whether the mercantile result be intended to astonish the palates of old ladies in London or Glasgow, or to pass as genuine Souchong with skippers, who have little knowledge of Tea, we know not; but the fact remains, that the trade thrives well and pays. ”

“ At any rate, it is a misnomer to call them "Tea-gardens." We think "Beer-gardens" would more accurately indicate their character. Some day, probably, the landlords of "public-houses" and of "tea-gardens," will endeavour to meet the wants and tastes of all persons. At present they utterly ignore the existence of a large class, not necessarily teetotalers, to whom a cup of tea is more cheering than a glass of grog after a long walk from the city. ”

“ In the first place it is insisted on in their warehouses that previous to trampling the Tea into the chests, a cloth shall be placed over it to preserve it from the dirt of the man’s boots, and to some extent from injury—a precaution which, strange as it may seem, is not taken in every bonded warehouse. ”

“ This superior article is entirely unknown in the consuming countries, and is one of the luxuries in store for us when tea-culture becomes one of our industries. Thus, seeing that much of the care bestowed upon the manufacture of tea is merely for the purpose of meeting these commercial exactions, both in regard to protecting its flavor as well as to its appearance on arrival, it may be that by ignoring mere appearance and style, as equally good a beverage may be produced by an entirely different system of preparation of the leaf for the home market. ”

“ If man cannot live by bread alone, many foreign residents live by tea alone, and live luxuriously. Great fortunes are made quickly in the tea trade no longer, as in earlier days. Romance departed with the clipper ships, and the cable and freight steamers reduced the tea trade to prosaic lines. Only the best and most experienced men now succeed in this trade, but the tea-merchant toils in his counting-room and godown only from April to October. ”

“ Every pound bought had to be paid for in a very short time, and this fact, coupled with the fear of a falling market, has continuously forced the pace and driven the tea into the consumer's teapot. The demand from the masses for strong tea was met by the extra strength from the British-grown varieties. This demand exists mainly from English tea drinkers of middle and lower classes, who have always insisted that all their beverages should be pungent, strong and stimulating, whether it be porter, ale, coffee or other liquor, regardless of the effect upon the nervous system. ”

“ This tea-manufacture is sold to “cheap” or “slop” shopkeepers, both in town and country, and especially for hawking in the country, and is almost always sold ready mixed.
The admixture of sloe-leaves, &c., which used to be gathered for the adulteration of tea, is now unknown, and has been unknown since tea became cheaper, but the old tea-leaf trade, I am assured, carried on so quietly and cleverly, that the most vigilant excise-officers are completely in the dark; a smaller “tea-maker” was, however, fined for tea-leaf conversion last year. ”

“ Remember the larger the quantity of Tea, of any one kind, to be sold at one auction, the higher the price it will probably fetch. Sell, if possible, twenty or thirty chests of one kind of Tea at the same time, for small quantities as a rule sell below large, both in Calcutta and London.
Equality of tares is the most important point to attend to in packing Teas. It may be difficult, but with machine-sawn boxes, nearly the same weight, any difference must be made up with extra hooping, lead, solder, or nails. ”

“ The public generally are ignorant in such matters, and the legitimate dealer might look with amused surprise on the apparent demand for packet teas if it were not that an increasing number of dealers are adopting the new system. Engaged as most of the grocers are in trying to stop the plague of all sorts of proprietary goods which yield them so little profit and make them the servants only of the manufacturers and proprietors, it is astonishing, to say the least, that other dealers should be found who are adopting the same system with tea. ”

“ Once on a time no confectioner, railway-station, or refreshment-house could rival the home-made brew, made under the eye of the mistress of the household, with the kettle on the hob and the ingredients at hand; but now that the good old custom of tea-making is considered unladylike, and the manufacture has been handed over to the servants, the great charm of the beverage has virtually departed. No one can conscientiously say that they like English tea as at present administered, for the very good reason that it is no longer prepared scientifically. ”

“ The tea-farms are in general small, and their produce is brought to market in the following manner: A tea-merchant from Tsong-gan or Tsin-tsun, goes himself, or sends his agents, to all the small towns, villages, and temples in the district, to purchase teas from the priests and small farmers. ”

“ So that it does not pay a dealer to make any mistake in the selection of his teas, such mistake proving fatal to drawing or holding trade. Poor teas will drive more customers away in a week than can be made in a year; it is therefore much better and more profitable in the long run to sell only good teas at a smaller margin of profit than to sell poor teas at a larger one. Many dealers make use of the argument, “I bought this tea so much cheaper and my customers do not appear to notice the difference; they do not complain.” ”

“ Even a brief investigation of about 20 inventories—itemized lists of the goods and property of deceased persons that were required by law—reveal that in New York between 1742 and 1768 teapots, cups and saucers, teaspoons, and tea canisters were owned by both low and high income groups in both urban and rural areas. ”

“ Beside the tea gardens, on the road of approach, just outside the gardens, there were every species of hucksters' refreshments—all kinds of buns, cakes, fruits, &c., in little booths and stands of those who vended them, for the refreshment of little family parties, or individuals who had come from London here to pass the day. Hot waffles were baked and sold at two pence each, as fast as the vender could turn his hand to it; an uncertain sort of coffee at two pence a cup, and tea ditto, were served out by a vender from a portable urn kept hot by a spirit lamp beneath it ”

“ Gain being the fundamental object of all business transactions, and as tea to the grocer plays such an essential part in determining this profit, we may be excused if, in considering the article from a purely practical standpoint, we urge the relation which it has to the success of the dealer, and who, as a general rule, experiences much more difficulty in the judicious selection of his Tea than in any other staple he trades in. ”

“ If there were a retail Tea trade worthy of the name, in the proper sense of the term, in Calcutta, it would probably not be to the interest of planters to enter into competition with it. But though we have many retail establishments who deal in Tea, its sale is, in the great majority of cases, only one item of a very multifarious business, the profit on which, as a whole, is probably not excessive under all the circumstances of the case. ”

“ Extract of a Letter from a merchant in New York, to Wm. Kelly, of London, dated 5th Novr, 1773:
"The introduction of the East India Company's tea is violently opposed here, by a set of men who shamefully live by monopolizing tea in the smuggling way." ”

“ That tea-service, now, it's Rockingham or Nantgarw, possibly Chelsea. The three moon-white jars in the window, two of them gourd-shaped—"
"Did you want to look at them?"
"No," I blurted out, "to—to sell them."
"Sell them? How do you mean? We mean to sell them ourselves." ”

“ Again assailed as the retail grocery business now is by keen competition from so many queer Teas, the necessity for a better knowledge of and more careful attention to the article is at once apparent if the grocer—to whom its sale of right belongs—is not to find the almost entire withdrawal of this article from his line of business.
To properly understand the selecting and blending of Teas is therefore to be possessed of a valuable and profitable knowledge ”

“ Oranges were changed into pots of marmalade, and given away to the boys, and a chest of tea was converted into a tray carrying a steaming teapot, sugar, milk, cups of tea, and handed by the attendants to the ladies in the reserved seats only—such is the blighting influence of cash, which caused the one-shilling people to be neglected and the eighteenpenny-reserved-seat folks to have their teas. ”

“ From the mountains the road drops to a rich tea country, where every hill-side is green with the thick-set little bushes. At harvest-time cart-loads of basket-fired, or country-dried, tea fill the road to the ports, to be toasted finally in iron pans, and coated with indigo and gypsum to satisfy the taste of American tea-drinkers. In every town farmers may be seen dickering with the merchants over the tough paper sacks of tea that they bring in, and within the houses groups sitting at low tables sort the leaves into grades with swift fingers. ”

“ Some of the workers buy jam to spread on their bread. In one place we see a tray with a large pile of cakes and biscuits; but these are being sold, though the tea and bread-and-butter are supplied by the Post-Office to its workers free. It must be a big business to make tea for about fifteen hundred persons every day. ”

“ But while the question of making its production a commercial success is conceded by many authorities, some contend that while we can undoubtedly cultivate tea of fair quality in many sections of the country, we cannot supply the cheap and skilled labor necessary to prepare it for market, advancing the argument that from the time the leaves are picked until they are packed for export they are subjected to a continued series of manipulations, demanding an immense amount of such labor without which it is next to impossible to produce a merchantable article. ”