What Did Rockefeller Learn as a Teenager?

David Senra says Rockefeller learned as a teenager that all is not how it seems on the outside, and he carried that belief through his entire career. Before the oil business, shipping commodities all over the country forced him to study transportation, which became his main edge in building Standard Oil.

His eyes were open to the business of transportation. A large part of Rockefeller's time went to dealing with freight agents and boat captains. He learned how to negotiate with them. Posted rates that carriers said publicly were fixed were not fixed, and they could all be negotiated. A favored shipper at the end of the month would receive a rebate on the public rate that could amount to a substantial sum. He did the same thing later when he was shipping oil with the railroads.

The sequence of experiences mattered. There is no Standard Oil monopoly without the transportation work that came first.