I thought this a good point for discussion at our next Monday's meeting. We had dropped them while Larsen was ill; but, as the dear old fellow was better again, though not quite well, we were to start them again on the next Monday.
When Larsen was first taken sick I had hired a young fellow, named Charlie Martin, to help out. Charlie was a college graduate, with a father who was quite well-to-do. After he graduated from a college of business administration, he had spent a year with a big chain cigar store organization, after which he had been six months in a department store in Detroit.
He and Fred Barlow had gone through college together and they were good pals. He happened to be visiting the old man Barlow when Larsen was taken sick, and it was through Barlow that he had come to me. Martin told me that he would be glad to get some small store experience, so I had hired him and he had been working like a Trojan at $8.00 a week. His father was a banker in New York, and I had heard that he had been a little bit disappointed in Charlie because he didn't take to banking; but Charlie said that what he liked best was retail merchandising, and he had spent a great deal of time and money preparing himself for such a career.
When Larsen came back I told Martin I didn't see how I could keep him, but he pointed out to me that our sales had been increasing, and that, as Larsen was not yet well, it would be putting too much of a burden on him, especially as we would really be short-handed. So I had kept him on and I was rather glad I had, for his college training certainly helped us at our Monday night meeting.
It surely had seemed good to get my small staff around me again at a Monday night meeting. Mater had taken over Betty's usual task, and sent in coffee and doughnuts, which quickly went the way that all good coffee and doughnuts should. It was really a treat to see Jimmie eat doughnuts. I didn't believe he did eat them; he just inhaled them.
Of course, Jimmie was there with all the importance of a young boy who had been taken into the confidence of his grown-ups. Jones and Larsen were there, as well as Martin. What a contrast there was between Martin and Larsen—Larsen sadly in need of a shave, in rough home-spun clothes, sitting in his shirt sleeves with the wristlets of a red woolen sweater showing underneath them; and Martin, who always looked like the last word off Fifth Avenue, in spotless linen, narrow sharp features, with the air of a regular debonair young man about town. These two people, the exact opposites of each other, had quickly grown to be good friends. The one had gained his knowledge through more than two-score years of rather bitter experience; the other had gained his through five years of specialized training. Martin, the trained man, had the keen analytical sense which only comes from training. Larsen, through intuition, backed by practical experience, blundered more or less after the more quick-thinking Martin. Yet theory and practice thought pretty much alike. It certainly showed to me the advantage of training, for Martin had mastered in five years all that Larsen had learned in forty.
The matter for discussion at our meeting had been, "How to increase the amount of sales to each customer?" Frankly, it was Martin who solved our problem for us, and six ways were developed whereby we could increase the sales of each customer.
The first was by applying the law of association. It was a simple thing to do, and yet it astonished me to find that, while we all knew about it, we had not been applying that law. For instance, only that morning Mrs. Wetherall had come in for a clothes line. Jones had got the line for her and had said, "Nothing else?" and she had said, "No, thank you," and walked out.
Martin asked Jones if he would allow him to make a suggestion relative to that sale. Jones was a pretty good scout, and he said he didn't mind.
"I don't think," said Martin, "we ever ought to say 'nothing else'? Because the natural thing for the customer to say is 'no.'"