The Birmingham age-herald., 1922-03-26

1a s s SSs
 CHARL ES H. MACINTOSH retailers must estimate their possible market mors closely than ever before. We don't have to talk to persuade the retailer to underbuy; in fact, probably 97 per cent of the retailers today are underbuying. They are afraid they may not be able to sell. It is not so easy to sell today be- cause this very same thought that restraints Il @ merchants from stock Ing up Is rt straining customers from stocking up.
 There never was a buyers strike Buyers st ike" was a clever term, but what re ally happened was the in dividual himself or herself stopped to think. sayiag, Prices are falling fast; they will probably reach the bottom in couple of months" and put off buying until the bottom was reached.
 So I say tho best message you can send out to your customers is, If you people are going to stop buying un- til prices reach the bottom, you are going to stop living. because the price line will go down for 30 years
  ing right now because while prices, including tie price of labor, which is so large p proportion of all costs, will keep on falling and 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. For example, let me give an actual experience. Some friends of mine in Chicago in 1919 wanted to buy furniture for an apart ment, but there was some chance they would have to go to California to live at the end of year, so they were saying, Shall we buy this fur niture?" They decided to buy because the prices ot furriture were going up so fast they thought they could prob ably sell the furniture at secondhand for as much as they paid and that turned out to be true. Prices were going up so rapidly it was possible to do that very thing, Considering the purchase of furniture today. don't you know their mental Erocess would be precisely thu reverseY
 What havs we. the merchants of America, with which to offset this in- creased resi- stance to the buying im- pulse? What we have Is purely nega- tive-practically a total loss of the ability to sell, Those of you who play golf or billiards or tennis or any game requi cing skill. know what happens to you when you stop play ing the game for four or five years. When you come back on the links again, to your disgust, you discover you are worse than an amateur. That fe a1 vet nYa arfSaIU ha zif n is prevailing throughout all phases of selling today. We have come back to the task of meeting a heightened resistance to buying impulse and our skill in selling has evaporated from non-use in the past four or five years.
 Most of the selling in America Is done of course by retail salespeople. It isn't done by highly skilled special ty salesmen. And those salespepole look upon the proposition of creat- Ing desire and concentrating it upon certain goods as work. Human na- ture naturally flees from work and retail salespeople in the past four or five years have not had to sell goods. their time has been taken up explain ing why they couldn't deliver them or in merely delivering them. mag inc that condition has been universal. As a result we find today that we are obliged to meet an increased re- sistance with a very much lowered pressure.
 like to lift simile from the eiec- trical industry. The electrical people have law they call Ohm's Law. Ohm's Law tells us that volume al- ways equals pressure divided by re- sstance. Now Ohm's law of cleo trical intensity applies just as thor oughly to selling. does it not? Sales volume always must equal sales pres sure divided sales resistance.
 Two Phases of Business
 There are just two phases of busi- ness in America, if we make the divi- sion general. namely. production and distribution. I presume most of you are more interested In distribution than in production so let us consider distribution. l like to compare the process of distribution to the crea- ton of a vast pipeline leading from great tank into which the producer pours his manufactured article. The first link in the pipe line of distribu- ton is the merchandise broker. Then there is a point of transportation, car rying on to the second link, the wholesale house. Another joint oi transportation carries that link no to the great jobbing house, and again tnere IS 1oint or transportation which carries on to the last link il the pipe line which Is the retailer.
 Now any manufacturer who thinks that he has made a sale because he has moved his merchandise out of this tank along to one or the other links of that pipe Is making great mis- take. Brokers, wholesalers, jobbers and retailers do not use merchandise they merely handle 1t. Let manu- facturer move a thousand cases of his merchandise into the warehouse of a wholesaler and until that merchan- disc woves along the pipeline of dis tribution 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 oi 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