Introduction
"Caveat emptor," the Romans said, in their day.
"Let the Buyer beware," we would read that phrase, today.
For nearly four thousand years, perhaps longer, caveat emptor ruled the hard world of barter. Yet for the past sixty years, or thereabouts, a new principle has come into merchandising. You may call it progress, call it idealism, call it ethics, call it what you will. I simply call it good business.
Caveat emptor has become a phrase thrust out of good merchandising. It is a pariah. The decent merchant of today despises it. On the contrary he prides himself upon the honor of his calling, upon the high value of his good name, untarnished. The man or the woman who comes into his store may come with the faith or the simplicity of the child. He or she may even be bereft of sight, itself—yet deal in faith and fearlessly.
Caveat emptor is indeed a dead phrase.
How and whence came this murder of a commercial derelict?
You may laugh and at first you may scoff, but the fact remains that the development of the department store as we know it in the United States today first began some sixty or sixty-five years ago. And almost coincidently began the development of a code of morals in merchandising such as was all but undreamed of in this land, at any rate up to a decade or two before the coming of the Civil War. Not that there were no honest merchants in those earlier days of the republic. Oh no, there was a plenty of them—men whose integrity and whose sincerity were as little to be doubted as are those same qualities in our best merchants of today. Only yesterday these honest men were in the minority. The moral code in merchandising was yet inchoate, unformed.