The Redwood gazette. [volume] (Redwood Falls, Minn.) 1873-1940, 1922-05-17

i .;f Won people are going to stop buying until
prices reach the bottom you are going to stop
living, because the price line will go down for
thirty years You might Just as wen seaIe Dt tS
nrice Of labor which is so large proportion OF
ali costs, will keep failing, the value OF
the dollar will keep on coming up to meet them
In the meantime, however, we have to meet
greater sales resistance than ever before.
sMost Of the selling in America is done OF
course by retail salespeople 1t isn't done by
highly skilled specially statesmen And those
salespeople look upon the proposition OF Great
ing desire and concentrating It upon !, certain
goods as work Human nature naturally fees
from work and retail salespeope IN the past
four or five years have not had to sell goods.
Their time has been taken up explaining why
they couldn't deliver them or in merely deliver
ing them I imagine that condition has been
universal. AS result we find today that we
are obliged to meet an increased resistance with
a very much lowered pressure.
sdThere are just two phases of business in
America, if we make the division general, name
ly, production and distribution presume most
Of you are more interested in distribution than
in production so let consider distribution.
like to compare the process OF distribution to
the creation Of vast pipeline leading from
great tank into which the producer pours his
manufactured article. The first link in the pipe
line of distribution is the merchandise broker
Then there is point of transportation, carry
ing on to the second link, the wholesale house.
Another joint of transportation carries that link
on to the great jobbing house, and again there
is joint of transportation which carries on to
the last link in the pipe line, which is the re-
taller Now any manufacturer who thinks that
he has made sale because he has moved his
merchandise out of this tank along to one or
the other links of that pipe is making great
mistake. Brokers, wholesalers, jobbers and re-
tailers do not use merchandise; they merely
handle it. Let manufacturer move a thousand
cases Of his merchandise into the warehouse
e l1.l
moves along the pipeline Of distribution to the
ultimate consumer, the only effect is to clog
the pipeline at that point
"The only sale that really counts is a sale
made to the person who will wear the stuff out
or eat it or in some way render the reproduction
of that merchandise necessary The merchandise
must pass clear out through the end of the
pipe before the sale has really been completely
made. At the end of the last link in this pipe
Of distribution, we have a tap, and through that
tap, ninety-odd percent of all merchandise sold
in America must pass and does pass into the
hands of the ultimate consumer. That tap is
the retail sales person behind the counter.
Experiments made recently have shown US lin
the Of our experiments at least) that this
tap is just forty-ive percent open today; that
|ffty-fve out of 100 sales made by advertising
are killed by saespeople. Advertising seldom
sells goods. Advertising does not sell goods
except in the case Of the great mail order
houses, perhaps, and the companies that deal
directly with the customer All that advertis-
ing may do for most of us is to bring custom
ers into stores where salespeople may either sell
them goods kill the sales, they did in SIS
percent of the cases of our test.
''In a recent issue Of the Saturday Evening
Post noticed story about the great department
stores of the country in which mention was made
of one store wishing to know how many people
it had to handle on its main floor in the course
of day. 1t put checkers at the doors and dis
covered that 100000 people passed into that
store in one day. That same article mention
| ed that 10000 individual sales made that
day-an enormous volume of sales-but the
striking point was the fact that 100000 people
had walked out of that store without buying.
Seventy percent of the chances to sell offered
to the salespeople in that store were rejected,
and the potential customers came out without
buying. Allowing for larger percentage of
pure showcase shoppers" in a department store,
the example checks up experience that fifty
five out of 100 potential customers, brought in
as result of advertising go out without buy
ing. And when l speak of advertising | mean
local advertising of all types just as much as
national advertising. The success failure of
advertising conducted by local store depends
as much upon the sales ability of the salesper
son as does the success of any of the great ad-
vertising campaigns. Advertising brings Gus
toners in to buy the goods from saespeople,
and yet we have done little nationwide
scale to help them to become better salespeope
and so overcome this present increased resist
ence to the buying impulse on the part of our
DuylIS puDHC, anu dlSO W uelp US lake duVdHt-
age to the fullest possible degree of all our adj
vertising. 1t is true that the great stores to-
Iday putting in educational departments.
They have educational directors who go into
each department of the store and take little
groups of employees at time and instruct them
definitely in the best possible way to overcome
sales resistance; but nothing, comparatively, has
been done for the smaller stores in the large
cities and for the stores in the smaller cities:
and yet the Agricultural Publishers Association
assures us, as result of very careful investiga-
ton, that So percent of all merchandise sold in
America is sold in towns of less than $4,000
population
To-day, we have come to realize that no
article is worth advertising that will not sell it
self if the full facts about it thoroughly
understood, because the most advertising do
is to make the full facts thoroughly understood.
That is why to my mind all intelligent merch-
ants have long passed the point where they need
coercion in the matter of truth advertising,
because advertising is simply attempt to de-
scribe merchandise people will come into
stores and see if the goods square with the de-
scription. If not they don't buy, if they do,
they go back home and test the articles in the