"Well, I'm sure I don't know."
Some of those old-timers' were pretty shrewd fellows after all. I had never thought of analyzing my sales in that way.
"Tell you what to do," he said. "Find out what proportion you are buying of five- ten- and fifteen-cent kitchen goods, and how much of the better-class goods."
"What then?" I inquired, still in the dark.
"If your big sales are on the cheaper goods, I would advise you to make a window display of half cheap and half good articles. Put a sign in the window to the effect that you have cheap articles to sell, and good ones to use. If you find your sales are mostly on the better-class goods, I would advise you to start an educational advertising campaign, if you can afford it."
"What is an educational advertising campaign?"
"It means advertising the better-class goods and giving reasons and facts why they are better than the cheaper ones. Advertise that you have the low-priced articles, but, if they want the cheapest, the best is the cheapest in the end. For instance, here is a ten-cent Dover egg-beater. I have one here, a glass affair, which sells at a dollar. Actually, I am selling almost as many of the dollar egg-beaters as I do of the ten-cent ones."
"Why?"
"Because I show them that the ten-cent egg-beaters cannot last very long—they can't expect a ten-cent article to do that—but this glass one will last indefinitely; it is more sanitary; the tinning on it is very heavy and it won't rust; it is cleaner, more serviceable, easier to work," and then he gave me half a dozen more facts about that dollar egg-beater which I would never have thought of. "If you were buying an egg-beater," he continued with a smile, "which would you buy now?"
"Buy the best one unquestionably, because I can see, after what you have told me, that the other isn't to be compared with it!"