Word: retailing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Treading Water. Despite the slowdown, there was no general sense of gloom. But with retail sales lagging 6% below the scare-buying period of 1951, there was a feeling of caution, except where big bargains were offered (see below). The trouble was, said the Commerce Department, that people were unaccountably saving money at a record peacetime rate of $20 billion a year, instead of spending it. Said a Chicago businessman:"People are scared to move out and do things. There is too much insecurity over Korea and the election in people's minds. Everybody is buttoning...
...then shifted to chinchillas in 1948 because he knew "there was a lot of green stuff in it." Starting with two pairs of animals, he built up his herd to 1,500 in two years by buying and breeding. He put up an $8,000 laboratory, opened seven retail outlets, started a 15-minute weekly television show to plug sales of breeding pairs, and waited for the green stuff to come in. Last year, says Donovan, it came in to the extent...
...recession of 1920-21, when Ward was caught with top-heavy inventories, Wood found a way out. He persuaded the management to open retail stores, and within a year cleared out the inventories. That was enough to convince Wood that the real future for mail-order houses lay in expanding into the retail field. But Ward's management couldn't see it. "[They] regarded the retail outlets as funnels through which to drop the lemons from the mail-order inventory," Wood says. "I'm afraid I developed a profound contempt for [them]." Apparently, the contempt was mutual...
Every Man a Capitalist. Sears does more than help small capitalists. Says Wood: "The best way to make capitalism work is to make more capitalists. That's what we're doing at Sears." In the low-paying retailing industry, Sears pays clerks an average of $60 a week, considerably above the retail average. But the real device for making capitalists is Sears' profit-sharing plan, which was started by Rosenwald in 1916 and has become the wonder of the pension world. Thousands of Sears employees have retired with small fortunes. Sample: a woman clerk who never made...
...also boosted morale and given Sears a strong team ready to run the company when he retires. The two top men: 1) Fowler McConnell, 57, a University of Chicago graduate who joined Sears as a stock boy in 1916, worked his way up through both the mail-order and retail ends of the business, and has been president since 1946; and 2) Merchandising Vice President Theodore Houser, now 57, Wood's old assistant at Montgomery Ward, who moved to Sears when Wood became president and is regarded by him as "the greatest master of mass merchandising...