Word: item
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Selling by Underselling. Though the bait advertisers' products differ, their methods are the same. Each offers an item at a ridiculously low price as a come-on, to get into the prospect's home or get the housewife into his store. Then the salesman tries to switch the prospect to a high-priced model. For example, in Cleveland last week, a housewife answered a TV ad for "a brand-new Free-Westinghouse* sewing machine for $50." When the friendly salesman turned on the machine, it made so much racket she thought it would scare her children. When...
Miles of Files. Easily the biggest item in Washington's paper problem is mail. Each working day the Government's typewriters and duplicating machines clack out 4,000,000 letters at the rate of 139 a second. In a year's time the flow swells to 1 billion letters. Average cost: $1 per letter. In the year 1912, the average Government worker wrote 55 official letters; in 1954 the average worker wrote 522. Some 750,000 U.S. employees do nothing but paper work...
Alert merchandisers are selling the U.S. books of the month, shows of the month, even fruit of the month. Latest item: disease of the month. Thought up by Boston Internist Mark Aisner, the new service offers a series of monthly booklets on the symptoms and care of interesting diseases (February selection: Essential Hypertension). The Disease-a-Month pamphlets are written by experts, distributed by Chicago's Year Book Publishers, Inc., and come with a handy orange-colored binder. They are designed for doctors, but subscribers (10,000 to date) presumably include a few lay hypochondriacs. Price per year...
...your Jan. 31 "Time Clock," the following item appeared: "Cannery merger may be in the works between Consolidated Foods Corp. and Libby, McNeill & Libby, two of the industry's giants. Combined yearly sales of the two companies, which operate 76 major canneries turning out everything from fish to nuts: $446 million...
...truce-talk delegation. Turner Joy had been most bitter about Washington's order to accept a November 1951 Communist proposal to fix the battleline at that time as an armistice line. This, he said, "would constitute an immediate cease-fire on the basis of agreement on one item only of the agenda. Thus, the Communists would be insured against effects of future military operations while other agenda items were being discussed...General Ridgway strongly requested reconsideration of Washington's instructions...