Word: discount
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...pair of socks at a time, have also appeared; Ronson now makes 25% of its sales in labor-saving devices. As competition in the small-appliance market increases, prices are coming down. General Electric recently reduced the price of its most popular electric knife from $22.95 to $18.98 (discount houses have cut it even further, to $12.44), and Du Pont has come out with a toothbrush...
When the Rev. Robert H. Jonte was a newly ordained Methodist minister in a small Texas town 19 years ago, he got a 2?-a-gal. discount on gasoline from his service station, the wholesale price when he bought household appliances, and an extra item or two free on his food order, courtesy of the local grocer. Jonte is still a minister in a small Texas town, but now he pays full price for nearly everything he buys. "The clergyman's discount," he says, "is completely gone...
Otherwise ministers generally pay the same prices as laymen do. The discount at discount houses is the same for preachers as for everyone else; many other stores refuse to favor preachers on the ground, as a spokesman for Chicago's Marshall Field & Co. puts it, that "a customer is a customer." Ministers generally get 20% off on rented cars-just as employees of many corporations do. Doctors often do not send bills to preachers, but doctors do not send them to other doctors, either...
Cash in the Pants. One reason for the decline in discounts is that men of the cloth are getting more pay and prefer it that way; they would rather have cash in the pants pocket than 10% off on the pants. Moreover, they increasingly find the "clerical discount" demeaning. "I used to use a railroad discount," says the Rev. George Reck, pastor of Houston's Zion Lutheran Church, "but I always felt the conductor was saying to himself, 'Here's another chiseler.'" And chiseling can work two ways, suggests Father George McCormick of Trinity Episcopal Church...
...effect, the fringe benefits that modern ministers get no longer come from their positions as church leaders but from their rough equity with the rest of society. On the way out with the discount is a nostalgic custom that dates back to the days of the U.S. frontier-but going with it is a practice that bespoke a general public guilt over paying preachers too little to live...