Word: retailing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Only a few years ago, requiems were being performed over the retail book trade in the U.S. Time-consuming TV and the faster pace of modern life, feared the booksellers, would pre-empt serious reading. The book clubs with their vast mail-order lists and, most of all, the price-cutting discount houses were challenging the conventional bookstore. Leonard Schwartz, president of Manhattan-based Brentano's, predicted that many booksellers would not survive discounting...
...Survival. Americans now buy books from some 165,000 retail outlets, ranging from Chicago's giant Kroch's & Brentano's, which lists 150,000 titles, to the corner drugstores with their paperback racks. Of these outlets, 2,062 are traditional bookshops that sell both hardbacks and paperbacks, 352 are quality paperback stores (which do an $18 million-a-year business) and 882 are discount houses, department stores and supermarkets ($52 million annually). In addition, some 130 book clubs run up sales of $145 million a year, a trifling $3,000,000 below the general booksellers. Total...
What are they buying? Cars, of course, and all the usual retail goods. But the U.S. consumer seems to keep finding new outlets for his buying urge: he has boosted the sales of electric guitars and banjos as part of the folk-rock trend, lifted the men's cosmetics industry to a $35 million business in recent years, is buying more jewelry than ever. He looks less at the price tag nowadays than at quality, fashion, style, color. The biggest new main-line item is the color-TV set. Stores are selling all they can get-and in some...
...Polaroid will broaden its distribution system, sell its cameras in drugstores and college book stores for the first time. Film Passes Cameras. The real significance of the Swinger, however is that it will greatly expand sales of Polaroid film. An eight-picture roll of film for the Swinger will retail at $1.99 (compared with $2.55 for black-and-white Polaroid packs and $5.19 for color Polaroid packs). Polaroid's strategy is to create lower-priced cameras in order to increase demand for its film. The company's after-tax profits run to a high 12½% of sales...
Above all, organized labor will have to become more attractive to the public. One experiment in that line, tried by the Retail Clerks, used low-keyed, soft-sell TV spots. But some of labor's public relations snags will take more than TV to solve. Union leaders have used their tremendous influence to fight Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, which permits states to enact right-of-work laws (its repeal was passed by the House, is now before the Senate). No doubt, union membership has been held down by 14(b), particularly in the South...