It remains for the retail salesman to meet the customer face to face and upon the ability he has to move the stock is determined the success or failure of the whole undertaking. This, surely, is a big job and it carries with it a big responsibility. Amid present-day competition no longer can we sit back in hopeful anticipation for the best. Selling is mainly a matter of brains, and success comes in proportion to the amount of ability mixed with effort.
RETAIL SHOE SELLING
The annual shoe business of the United States is estimated at more than $1,500,000,000. There are close on to 250,000 men and women engaged in the retail selling of shoes, most of whom spend their entire effort in the work. Billions of invested capital is required to furnish the means of carrying on this enormous business.
From the standpoint of cost as well as importance as part of a man’s wearing apparel the shoe ranks second only to his suit of clothes. With most women this is true also. No other part of a person’s wardrobe, whether it be of a man, woman or child, becomes so intimately associated with the senses of comfort, self-satisfaction, and the mild and harmless conceit of the wearer. A new shoe is an event. In the selection of a shirt, a collar or a tie the main consideration is that of appearance, and if the article proves a disappointment it goes to the scrap heap without any great money loss. Furthermore it has caused no actual physical discomfort.
But not so with the shoe. A ten-dollar shoe is expected to give fifteen or twenty dollars worth of wear; it must stand all kinds of abuse and weather; it must look trim and neat at all times; it must match all cuts and colors of clothing; it must hold its shape, and never, never cause the wearer any pain or inconvenience. That same shoe must attract the approving attention of the wearer’s friends; it must wherever worn give the sensation of snug sufficiency; it must help the chest to expand a little with pride of possession and the shoulders to straighten up as that “well-dressed” feeling asserts itself. Every shoe salesman has noticed these things, that spread of honest joy on the customer’s face as he stands up, stamps his foot into the shoe and strides up and down a few feet, erect and confident, and then reaches into his pocket for the price.
This, briefly, is what goes on in the customer’s mind while he is buying a new pair of shoes. It is for shoe salesman to realize that although the individual sale is only a small part of his day’s work, it is really an event in the mind of the average customer. Success follows in proportion to the salesman’s knack in “tuning-up” to the customer so that both minds harmonize, so that they mutually understand each other, and so that the sale results in mutual satisfaction and benefit.
CHAPTER II
RELATION OF THE MAN TO HIS JOB
SERVICE
Why is it that of two salesmen working together in the same store, selling the same goods, at the same prices and under the same conditions, one regularly books twice as much business as the other? “Oh well,” someone says, “he has a following; he has friends who come in year after year and won’t buy from anyone else. He knows what they want, and all he has to do is to take the order. It’s a case of having them drop in his lap. The other man gets only the left-overs.”
“Simple enough,” he says, but is it quite as simple as he says it is? What has the one salesman to sell that the other doesn’t have?