When Stewart built the Business Palace, people said, "Oh, it is too far uptown—nobody will go there." But they were wrong. When John Wanamaker moved in, many said, "Oh, it's beautiful—but you know, it is too far downtown—nobody will go there." And these were as wrong as the first. "Where McGinty sits is the head of the table." The trade siphoned itself thither under the magic name of Wanamaker, as though the shade of A. T. Stewart had been summoned from its confines in the Isles of Death.
In Stewart's day no sign had been placed on the building. He said, "Everybody will know it is A. T. Stewart's!" And they did. After his death the place was plastered with signs that called in throaty falsetto at the passer-by, like eager salesmen on the Midway who try to entice people to enter. The new management took all these signs down, and by the main entrance placed a modest tablet carrying this inscription:
John Wanamaker
Successor to
A. T. Stewart
It was a comment so subtle that it took New York a year to awaken to its flavor of tincture of iron.
That little sign reminds one of how Disraeli was once dining with an American and two other Englishmen. In the course of the conversation the American proudly let slip the information that he traced a pedigree to parents who came to America in the Mayflower. One of the Englishmen here coughed, and vouchsafed the fact that he traced a lineage to Oliver Cromwell. A little pause followed, and the other guest spat, muzzled his modesty and said he traced to William the Conqueror. Disraeli, with great deliberation, made a hieroglyphic on the tablecloth with his fork and said, "And I trace a pedigree to Moses, who walked and talked with God on Mount Sinai, fifteen centuries before the birth of Christ."
John Wanamaker leaped the gulf of twenty years and traced direct to A. T. Stewart, as well he might, for it was Stewart's achievement that had first fired his imagination to do and become. A. T. Stewart was the greatest merchant of his time. And John Wanamaker has been not only a great merchant, but a teacher of merchants. And the John Wanamaker Stores now form a High School of economic industrialism.
John Wanamaker is still teaching, tapping new reservoirs of power as the swift-changing seasons pass. As a preacher and a teacher he has surely surpassed the versatile Stewart.
To succeed in business today it is not enough that you should look out for Number One: you must also look out for Number Two. That is, you must consider the needs of the buyer and make his interests your own. To sell a person something he does not want, or to sell him something at a price above its actual value, is a calamity—for the seller. Business is built on confidence. We make our money out of our friends—our enemies will not trade with us.
In law the buyer and the seller are supposed to be people with equal opportunity to judge of an article and pass on its value. Hence there is a legal maxim, "Caveat emptor"—"Let the buyer beware"—and this provides that when an article is once purchased and passes into the possession of the buyer it is his, and he has no redress for short weight, count or inferior quality. Behind that legal Latin maxim, "Caveat emptor," the merchant stood for centuries, safely entrenched. It was about Eighteen Hundred Sixty-five that it came to John Wanamaker, a young merchant just starting business in Philadelphia, that the law is wrong in assuming that buyer and seller stand on a parity, and have an equal opportunity for judging values. The dealer is a specialist, while the buyer, being a consumer of a great number of different things, has only a general knowledge, at best. The person with only a general idea as to values, pitted against a trained specialist, is at a great disadvantage. Therefore, to be on ethical ground the seller must be the friend of the buyer—not his antagonist. For a seller to regard the buyer as his prey is worse than non-ethical—it is immoral—a violation of the Golden Rule.