was so great that General Grant once remarked to George W. Childs that Wanamaker would have been a great general if his lot had been that of army service.
Wanamaker used to buy goods of Stewart, and the New York merchant remarked to a friend: “If young Wanamaker lives, he will be a greater merchant than I ever was.”
Sometime in recent years, since Wanamaker bought the Stewart store, he said to Frank G. Carpenter:—
“A. T. Stewart was a genius. I have been surprised again and again as I have gone through the Broadway and Tenth Street building, to find what a knowledge he had of the needs of a mercantile establishment. Mr. Stewart put up a building which is to-day, I believe, better arranged than any of the modern structures. He seemed to know just what was needed.
“I met him often when I was a young man. I have reason to think that he took a liking to me. One day, I remember, I was in his woolen department buying some stuffs for my store here, when he came up to me and asked if I would be in the store for fifteen minutes longer. I replied that I would. At the end of fifteen minutes he returned and handed me a slip of paper, saying:—
“‘Young man, I understand that you have a mission school in Philadelphia; use that for it.’
“Before I could reply he had left. I looked down at the slip of paper. It was a check for one thousand dollars.”
Wanamaker early showed himself the peer of the greatest merchants. He created the combination or department store. He lifted the retail clothing business to a higher plane than it had ever before reached. In ten years from the time he began to do business for himself, he had absorbed the space of forty-five other tenants and become the leading merchant of his native city. Four years later, he had purchased, for $450,000, the freight depot of the Pennsylvania Railroad, covering the entire square where his present great store is located. The firm name became simply John Wanamaker. His lieutenants and business partners therein are his son Thomas B. Wanamaker, and Robert C. Ogden. Their two Philadelphia establishments alone do a business of between $30,000,000 and $40,000,000 annually. Mr. Wanamaker’s private fortune is one of the most substantial in America.
ATTENTION TO DETAILS
Yet in all these years he has been early and late at the store, as he was when a boy. He has always seen to it that customers have prompt and careful attention. He early made the rule that if a sale was missed, a written reason must be rendered by the salesman. There was no hap-hazard business in that store,—nothing of the happy-go-lucky style. Each man must be alert, wide-awake, attentive, or there was no place for him at Oak Hall.