Word: salesman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...flat on its corn husks when it opened at the Majestic Theater. By Broadway standards, it is simpleminded and unsophisticated. It is also warmhearted, brilliantly performed and a lot of fun. The Music Man is Professor Harold Hill, a glib-tongued, fast-footed, woman-chasing rascal of a traveling salesman from Gary, Ind., who bursts into staid River City, charms a frozen-faced populace into digging into their cookie jars and mattresses to buy instruments and uniforms for a boys' marching band that will be led by Professor Hill himself. The show winds up with an enlivened townsfolk...
...rather three historical stages of her life. Laurents has put them all on the same temporal plane--the present--so that the three can converse and interact with themselves, with Virginia, and with the other characters in the play. This dangerous gimmick, adumbrated in Miller's Death of a Salesman, works beautifully here and the result is highly effective theatre...
...business out of shooting adrenalin into salesmen. The biggest is Dayton's E. F. MacDonald Co., which last year had a hand in triggering the sale of $1 billion worth of merchandise. MacDonald urges firms to award varied prizes, usually merchandise on a point scale, thus give every salesman some incentive to better his work. Incentive firms are also responsible for the newest gimmick in incentive selling: getting the entire company, from the president to the janitor, to take part in sales promotions. Denver's Ringsby Truck Lines brought all of its employees in on a campaign...
...Noisy Incentive. Many firms have gone a step farther, enlisted salesmen's families in ulcer-building campaigns to spur the breadwinner on. MacDonald regularly sends cards to the home showing the salesman's standing in a current company contest, gives wives tags to hang on furniture around the house to remind their husbands of the furnishings they can earn. Some firms have even sent buzzers and shrill whistles to a salesman's children; when dad asks what the noise is all about, the kids are instructed to tell him it's only a reminder to straighten...
Such constant pressure from home and office is bound to take its toll on even the strongest salesman. Many firms have learned that for best results incentive programs cannot be pushed constantly. Says Emmett H. Heitler, general manager of Denver's Shwayder Bros., Inc., makers of Samsonite luggage: "We don't have incentive programs more than twice a year because we don't want our men under the gun too often." "You can carry this business of pounding away at a salesman too far," says Republic Steel's General Sales Manager L. S. Hamaker...