Word: discounts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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COMBINATION refrigerator-freezer. Regularly $449.50. Now only $349.95." Such price-cutting ads, often phony, are among the fastest spreading evils of U.S. merchandising. Once only fly-by-nighters in dingy back streets offered fake bargains. Today, in trying to keep up with the discount houses, even old established merchants resort to price trickery. The problem is so bad that the Federal Trade Commission last month came out with a nine-point "Guides Against Deceptive Pricing," aimed at getting merchants and manufacturers to cooperate to force more honesty back into price advertising. Unless something is done, FTC Chairman John Gwynne told...
More and more customers are becoming suspicious of price cuts. A study by Pittsburgh's Duquesne University shows that buyers strongly suspect claims of price cuts above 27.5%. Polks, a large Chicago discount house, recently got a shipment of $49.95 record players that really had listed for that. But when it put them on sale at $18, it made no mention of the old price because: "the comparison would not have been believed." As a result, many stores are changing sales tactics. The J. L. Hudson Co., Detroit's top department store, no longer allows "was-is" advertising...
...Federal Reserve Board last week approved a discount-rate hike from 2% to 2½% for five of its district banks, but for reasons that had little to do with the threat of inflation. The hike was not designed to tighten credit, explained the Fed, but to bring the central bank rate in line with other short-term rates. Reason: the average yield on Treasury bills has been running three-quarters of 1% above the Fed's 2% discount rate, making it possible for commercial banks to borrow from the Fed at 2% and invest in Treasury bills that...
...single-minded consumer to buy a car or appliance that is practically custom-made-but he inevitably pays for the privilege. "Imagine the poor woman who walks into our refrigerator showroom to buy a refrigerator," says Maurice Leifler, executive sales director of Chicago's Polk Brothers discount chain. "She looks around and sees 55 different models. Where does she start?" The buyer is so baffled that she often does...
...emerging culture in fields as diverse as science, sociology, and the fine arts, he felt that its conflict with firmly entrenched traces of the old "sensate" culture could only point to more violent struggles in the future. As a result, in 1937 he was able to discount the optimistic hopes of many of his colleagues for a lasting universal peace, and instead said mankind must look forward to an age of "bigger and better wars." Sorokin noted that since that time his most severe critics have been banished to the "ash can of history," and their "apple sauce-sweet theories...