Word: salesmanship
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Premise One was the unchallengeable statement by H. R. H. that 1,400,000 Britons are out of work. Premise Two consisted of the speaker's royal testimony that on his recent travels to every part of the Globe he has personally seen that British salesmanship and merchandizing methods overseas are still far behind the standard set by competition. (No one doubts that this was so, prior to 1914, when German salesmen were stealing British business from Siam to South America; but H. R. H. was bold indeed to charge that British salesmanship still lags behind...
...clearly defeated, after a two-year battle with "sales resistance" in Germany itself. The offensive began in 1926. Only 45,000 pianos had been sold to Germans in 1926, as against 60,000 in other years. The tycoons were scared. Therefore they organized an "American Campaign" of high-pressure salesmanship, something unprecedented in the Reich. Salesmen rambled through the countryside with trucks full of pianos, selling and delivering on the spot, selling on credit, shouting, pleading, browbeating...
...education, alas, so much is expected that the distracted modern university publishes a catalogue quite as alluring as Sears Roebuck's. Everett Dean Martin deplores an educational system which, pandering to a materialistic age, offers equal "credit" for a course in Aristotle's Ethics and another in High Power Salesmanship. But the fault lies not so much with the age as with the perennial lack of a consistent philosophy of education...
Softsoap. It was not difficult to persuade Mrs. Coolidge that she should not make her own soap. But 120 years ago, such persuasion was the chief problem of soap salesmanship. Soap making was a routine occupation of every household. The eighteenth century housewife thought of buying soap as the twentieth century housekeeper would think of buying fried eggs for breakfast. The first soap manufacturers had to be clever psychologists. They had to make it smart to buy soap...
Because "analysis of our sales shows that about 60% of the clerks' selling is practically automatic," and because, nevertheless, they wished to preserve certain flourishes of salesmanship, the United Cigar Stores Co. last week installed (in Manhattan) its first series of a new type of automatic cigaret machine. The customer inserts the required number of nickels in the proper machine; out drops his package of "Three Castles"; out pops a voice from the machine saying, "Thank you-corked tips protect the lips." It blares from a phonographic attachment. Or if he prefers "Barking Dogs" he hears, "Thank you-good...