Word: gimbel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Manhattan's Gimbel Bros., Inc., thousands of people all but trampled one another last week to spend $12.50 each for a new fountain pen. The pen was made by Chicago's Reynolds International Pen Co. In full-page ads, Gimbel's modestly hailed it as the "fantastic, atomic era, miraculous pen." It had a tiny ball bearing instead of a point, was guaranteed to need refilling only once every two years, would write under water (handy for mermaids), on paper, cloth, plastic or blotters...
...Gimbel's, all these wonders seemed well worth a plunge. The store had placed an order for 50,000 pens (retail value: $625,000). At week's end, 30,000 pens (including 12,000 mail orders) had been sold. By selling the first ball-bearing pen in the U.S., it looked as if Gimbel's had pulled the neatest merchandising trick of the season...
...excitement over the pen was not limited to Gimbel's counters. A month ago, Thurman Wesley Arnold, hiring out his trust-busting talents to Reynolds, had filed suit in Wilmington's Federal Court for $1,000,000 (treble damages) against Eversharp Inc. and Eberhard Faber Corp. on a familiar Arnold charge: violation of the antitrust laws. The two defendants, Arnold claimed, had tried to "prevent mass distribution" of the Reynolds pen until they could 1) get rid of their own obsolete stocks, and 2) produce a ballbearing pen of their own on the basis of patent rights acquired...
Step Saver. In Gimbel Brothers' Philadelphia store shoppers will soon shop by television. Within a week, televised shows of merchandise from various departments will be run in the store's auditorium (seating capacity 500), and in 22 special "tele-sites" throughout the store. Thus shoppers, relaxing in easy chairs, can select merchandise, buy it when the show ends...
...self-congratulatory advertisements last week, Gimbel's Department Store in Manhattan announced a sale of Army DDT sprayers good for murdering anything from spiders to tsetse-flies. Modell's Sporting Goods Stores advertised Army sleeping bags ("warm as toast") for $5.95. From warehouses all over the U.S., $600,000,000 worth of war-hoarded Government goods were on their way to civilian stores. And these would be just a drop out of the enormous bucket...