Dawson Black: Retail Merchant

by Harold Whitehead

I shook my head dubiously. "We seem to have pushed those so much," I said, "I should think there would hardly be a novelty here now."

"There has not been one on display for a couple of months," he answered, "and we have about half a dozen in stock. Let's put those around the store in different parts and then put a little card over each one saying, 'Sharpen your pencil.' I will wager that every man who comes into the store will sharpen his pencil, and if he does—"

"And if he does," the irrepressible Jimmie broke in "good-by pencil sharpener, you're going to a new home!"

A thought had occurred to me which developed into the third method of increasing sales. I had remembered that, when Betty and I were in New York, she had lost her handkerchief, and we went into a store to get one. When Betty said she wanted one handkerchief, the girl brought out one and said, "Ten cents. Anything else?" I had thought at the time that she could have sold Betty half a dozen just as well as one, and, furthermore, if she had brought out one at twenty-five cents Betty would have bought it just as readily.

Then I remembered how often we did the same thing with our customers, to whom, when they came for a pocket-knife, for instance, we offered a twenty-five cent one when we might have sold a fifty-cent or a dollar one just as easily. I said to myself, "A number of our customers will go into a restaurant and spend two dollars for a meal and then they will come into our store and we will insult them by saying, 'Do you want the five-cent size or the ten-cent size?' In other words, we treat them like pikers."

So with this thought in mind, I suggested that another way to increase the amount of each sale is to suggest higher-priced goods than the customer has in mind. Yet another plan would be to suggest larger size packages. For instance, we sold both ten- and twenty-five-cent packages of some articles. Once a customer had come in and asked for a stick of shaving soap and Jones had brought down the ten-cent size and the customer put the ten cents down and walked away with the soap. He might just as easily have been sold the twenty-five-cent size.

So we decided that, when a customer asked for an article, if there was a larger size package, or a better quality, we would always show the largest or the best, taking care, however, in every case to show reasons why the better quality or larger package was best for the customer to buy.

From all this we finally developed three rules. One was to offer higher-priced articles, another to offer a larger size package, and another to offer a larger quantity.

Jimmie asked irreverently, "What's the diff between them last two?"

"Well, for instance, we sell scouring soaps for enamelware, and, as we have two sizes, we always want now to sell the larger package. If, however, a customer comes in for, say, seven pounds of nails, we want him to take twenty-eight pounds, or a keg, if we can."