Ogden Standard-Examiner | 1922-12-02 | Page 4 | When You Buy

I j WHEN YOU BUY. . I I 1 There's one retail store for every H I I 40 families In Amcrloa. William G. I I Shepherd tells this to a convention of V" 1 sdvertialnjf men, ftT; I I One rroceryman in 20 fa.Ua each HBe"; j year. H In tho long run, according to John Jff'J Wanamaker, only one man In 26 who Ofcjt,) go Into any kind of merchandising Sjffit makes a success of It m i A fine thing to he in business for WgLft f oursolf your own boss, But do a lot Bggj of thinking before you try it, HkvI If you, later 6n, start a store, what Hfeifj Hoe of goods should you select, to BHggjl' you the most money? This la your first thought, and an important one. But the number of dollars taken in by a merchant does not always determine deter-mine how much money he can make. On the average, saa Shepherd, to run a stora lakea 17 cents out of each dollar received by the grocer. Simi lar figures are: 19 cents on l for butchers. 25 cents for hardware dealers. deal-ers. 24 cents for clothing sellers and 26 cents for shoe dealers. The figures vary, according to the amount of sales. As a business grows, overhead expense Is carried on tho shoulders of an increasing number of dollars. This means, less overhead I for each dollar to carry -provided uverbcad doesn't increase at a faster rate than gross sales, which it often does. Shepherd calls America 'a nation of counter Jumpers." Ono worker in each 10 is engaged in selling some thing. And two-thirds of these 3.000.000 sales clerks are engaged in selling food and clothing. For each three farmers, there's one person behind a counter. For each 'four factory employes there's a store clerk or a store manager or a store owner, selling the things produced. The trend seems to be toward a point, where every one will be distributing distrib-uting commodities, nobody producing j That point, of course, never will be reached. But the tendency toward It 1.1b strong enough to emphasize that lour greatest problem of economics is one of distribution rather than pro- ductlon. I