"I'll take the hint," I said; then I left him.
I wondered what Barlow's real reason was in encouraging me to go into automobile supplies. I didn't think it was the profit he expected to make on gasoline. I was beginning to have more respect for Barlow than I ever had in my life, and, frankly, I was beginning to have less fear of Stigler.
Stigler's five-and-ten-cent store had been very slack the last few weeks, and really it was helping, rather than hindering, me, for, while he displayed cheap kitchen goods and was selling them just because they were low-price, cheap articles, I was displaying similar kinds of goods of real merit and quality, and selling them at a good profit. Any one, looking into his window and mine, could see no competition, for, while the goods were similar in kind, they were so different in quality as to preclude any possibility of comparison.
At the last meeting of our Merchants' Association, we had had a speaker who was the advertising manager for a chain drug-store organization. He had interested me very much in the need for increasing the amount of sales per customer. He said:
"I wonder if you people here know how much each customer spends on an average. For instance, our chain of drug stores must average thirty-five cents a customer; that is, excluding the soda counter. Have you ever added up the number of customers and divided them into the day's cash total, and found how much each customer averages in expenditure?
"Suppose you have an average of one hundred customers a day, and that, through good salesmanship, you increase the sale to each customer ten cents only. That means that, at the end of the week, by good salesmanship you have increased your sales sixty dollars without any increase in your expenses at all, with the possible exception of the supplies or delivery. Now, suppose your average gross profit on sales is twenty-five per cent.; your increase of ten cents per customer means that you make fifteen dollars a week of additional profit, or a profit of seven hundred and eighty dollars a year. All this profit is yours, if you will only increase the sale of each customer by ten cents!
"That is what it means every time you increase a sale: You increase total sales; you increase gross profits; you lower cost of doing business; you lower percentage of controllable expense; you lower percentage of advertising expense; you help cut down surplus stocks; you increase your turnover; you improve your service.
"All these things happen every time you increase a sale by as little as a dime."
I remembered particularly the way in which he had said, "Isn't it worth while, gentlemen, to encourage your sales people to sell every customer an extra dime's worth, over and above what they had intended to buy?"
Seven hundred and eighty dollars a year extra profit, by increasing the sale to every customer by ten cents. That certainly had got me going, and I intended to devise some ways and means of increasing the sale to each customer.