Word: discount
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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From Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to Broadway in Los Angeles, the men who market the nation's goods were preparing for a knee-and-gouge brawl. On one side stood the avid discount sellers, who in the past six years have cornered nearly one-third of the nation's $14 billion-a-year department store trade; on the other were the old-line, fixed-price retailers. Hoping to juice up the sluggish trend in retail sales, each side is slashing into the other's territory as rarely before. In the process, the distinction between a discount house...
...with Service. The cut-rate operators have learned that, as Cincinnati Discounter Homer Brown says, "you've got to offer something besides lower prices." What they are promising is better service, though volume is still their stock in trade, and they sometimes seemed to be offering 25% off for rudeness. Big discounters such as the East's E. J. Korvette, Inc., New York's Friendly Frost chain, and Chicago-based Goodman's Community Discount Stores are opening new branches with piped-in music and fancier displays to shuck off "that warehouse look," adding such customer lures...
...retaliation, some department stores are going in more and more heavily for discounting. "We can't wish away discounting, and so we are moving into it," says the president of one of the nation's biggest department store chains. Of the 3,000 department stores in the U.S., 7% to 8% are currently opening discount branches, sometimes under different corporate names so that customers will not demand equal bargains in the parent stores. And virtually all traditional department stores are rapidly borrowing many of the discounters' methods. Old-line retailers such as Boston's Jordan Marsh...
Down with Markups. As they move onto each other's turf, both camps have to learn a lot. Department stores, which operate on a 39% markup, will have to snip off enough frills to make a profit on the usual discount markup of 19% to 24%. (One way would be to put a greater proportion of their employees to work at actual selling; fewer than five out of ten department store workers now are salespeople, v. eight out of ten discount house employees.) Discounters will have to learn how to buy, sell (as opposed to mere order taking...
...Discounters, I wish to emphasize, are no longer mere order takers. They are becoming skilled merchandisers. They will rapidly expand and force conventional retailers to adopt their techniques." So saying, Maxwell Henry Gluck, 61, announced that his 279-link Grayson-Robinson apparel and camera-supply chain (expected 1961 sales: more than $75 million) will open 25 new discount outlets, from Seattle to Miami, by year's end. Long since recovered from the trauma of his ambassadorship to Ceylon-he won derisive headlines in 1957 for his inability to remember at a Senate confirmation hearing the name of Ceylon...