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Summary Of The Meatpacking Industry

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The Beginning of the Meatpacking Industry June 24, 1838 near Sandwich, Massachusetts the man who was going to change the meatpacking industry forever was born. Gustavus Swift left school at the age of 14 and joined his older brother butcher’s shop which he was unhappy by the lack of advancement, Soon after he made the decision to move to Boston but his father loaned him $25 to stay and not leave his hometown. Swift stayed and used $19 out of the $25 is father loaned him to buy a heifer , slaughtered it, and sold the beef from door to door. By 1859 he had opened his first butcher shop in Eastham and from there his business began to grow. Although people saw Gustavus Swift as bad and a Robber Baron he also was a philanthropist in many ways. …show more content…

In his slaughter houses swift was known as a tough taskmaster who on a daily basis inspected plants and tyrannized employees if he saw evidence of what he considered “waste”. If Swift saw so much as a piece of animal fat to make soap he would fire the workers. Swift once hired an efficiency expert to make suggestions at the office headquarters but then fired him as a fraud(world biography). The man protested and decided to keep him but sent him to squeegee blood into the drains of the slaughter house. Although he was very hard on his workers the way he worked and what he did made a great impact on the way America works their meatpacking industry today. The way Swift treated his competitors was harsh. He found a way to get rid of them if they got in his way he did not like competition he would find anyway possible to try and get rid of them. If his competitors did not buy his meat by the amount he wanted he would boost up the prices higher than they would normally be. No one likes competition but Swift was especially against them he wanted to find anyway possible to destroy them in a way so they wouldn’t be problem for him …show more content…

Gustavus Swift tried everything in his power to make his business grow and make it better for the people and easier on the way meat got to them. The way his slaughterhouses were through the inside was not good at all being that they weren’t sanitary for the people. If his company would have not been regulated his company would have grown into a bigger and better company. His business grew in such a short amount of time it was such a shock. His invention the refrigerated railroad car was one of the smartest and easiest thing he could have done to his business, because after that his business boomed. Although at first it wasn’t going well for him he still managed to make it work. Gustavus Swift had a great impact on America from his invention of the refrigerated cart to the way all of his slaughterhouses grew all over the world. It made meatpacking a lot easier to transfer instead of it having it delivered from door to door. (Hamilton) His company grew so big making it worth $25million dollars in less than 15 years (world

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