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Show K El, LEY TALKS ADVERTISING A few weeks before my birthday, which was several years ago, my wife handed me a good-sized bunch j of letters one morning, the letters being addressed and stamped, suggested sug-gested that I drop them in the mall box on my way to the office. I wore my raincoat that, morning, as it happened hap-pened to-be raining, so I slipped the :i iters1 in the pocket of the coat, and, : ,ipon arriving at the olfice, I placed :!ic coat in my locker, and forgot all iibout the letters. 1 did not wear that same coat again for several weeks, nad that's where my trouble started. These letters happened to be invitations invi-tations to my fortieth birthday party. The evening of the party came, the stage was all set. The dinner was supposed to be at 6 p. m., but nobody showed up. We waited until seven, but my friends failed to arrive, then i !o and behold, my wife said to me. "Do you recall a morning some few weeks ago when I gave you those letters let-ters to mail? They were the invitations invita-tions to your party." Immediately the thought struck me. "By golly, those letters are in the pocket of my raincoat at the office." j That incident reminds me of an old friend of mine who was in to see me the other day. He told me about a motor trip he had taken, driving from Minneapolis up North for a few hundred miles. It happened to be on a Saturday. He visited several towns on this trip, calling in at many stores and he remarked to me. "Do you know there were about two chain stores in each one of the towns I went through, and they were the only on-ly stores that were busy the other stores didn't appear to be doing much of anything." That caused him to investigate, just as a matter of curiosity, so I asked him the names of the towns he visited. I then wrote to the newspapers in each of the towns and requested that they send me their papers of Thursday and Friday, two days before the Saturday when my friend called at these stores Upon receipt of these newspapers I found that In four out of five papers, all the store advertising that had been done was by the chain stores. That solved the problem. The retail merchants in the towns where my friend visited had failed to advertise in the newspapers, inviting in-viting the public to their stores that Saturday, and the public not receiving receiv-ing an invitation, did not come, but the chain stores haad invited them with a neat, effective ad, attractive style and chuck full of common sense, and naturally, that is where they went. Pr the stores th:-t failed to -eeeive ; their friends were like my birthday party the ci'"d didn't come. I venture to s,iy in all the failures of retail merchants the last three years not twenty per cent of thesu I same merchants advertised religiously religious-ly in newspapers, whereas, if they had. their investment in newspaper advertising would have brought sufficient suf-ficient trade to nrevent a great amount am-ount of their losses. A . |