Word: stores
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Benefits & Bargains. At a time when many businessmen glared at giving workers a say in working conditions, the brothers out-unioned the unionists in 1898 by launching the Filene's Cooperative Association: clerks and salesgirls were elected to the store's board of directors, were sole arbiters of the store hours and holidays. The employee-directors did not work out. But other benefits took firm hold: an employee restaurant, a clinic, a library, a clubhouse, a credit union. Profit-sharing, retirement benefits, summer Saturday closings, systematic job evaluations, even sending executives to the Harvard Business School-all were...
Bargains & Brahmins. Filene's Sons, as well as society, reaped the new riches. The first great discounter, the store had sales of $1,000,000 by the turn of the century, soon pushed them higher with a spectacular "automatic bargain basement." The Filenes stuffed their basement with discontinued lines, remainders, seconds that they bought far below original price. Then they passed on the savings: an automatic 25% off after twelve days, 50% after 18 days, 75% after 24 days, give it away to charity after 30 days. It rarely went that far. Only one-tenth...
Running the company alone, Lincoln helped build Federated Department Stores into what ranks (on first-quarter earnings) as the nation's biggest retailer, adding such stores as Columbus' F. & R. Lazarus Co. (1929), Brooklyn's Abraham & Straus (1929), Manhattan's Bloomingdale Bros. (1930), Houston's Foley Bros. (1949), Dallas' Sanger Bros. (1951). Yet he was never so busy selling that he forgot the workers and society around him. Filene was a leading spirit of the New England Industrial Development Corp. to encourage small businessmen, pumped hard for better schools, wrote three books...
...Second Point. In Columbus, Ohio, after police caught Eugene Vernon, 15, with $91 of the $100 he had stolen in a candy store by brandishing a pistol and threatening, "Give me every cent in that register or I'll blow your head off," he offered a conditional surrender: "It was all a joke, fellows. I'm willing to forget...
...proud townsmen had happily celebrated the opening of the first road to lead out of their community, and one civic orator had pompously puffed: "It will be no time at all until we feel the real impact of this development," thieves broke into the Hudson's Bay Co. store, lifted its safe and $4,500, escaped in a stolen truck on the new road...