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Show J. C. Penney To Address Group At Provo Store Manager M. L. Baird and his associates of the J. C. Penney Company Com-pany will go to Provo April 29th to attend a meeting presided over by the founder of their Company, Mr. J. C. Penney. Mr. Penney is visiting a number of Penney stores in Utah to renew his personal contacts with Penney managers and their associates, mingle min-gle with the shopping crowds, and make a personal study of retail trends in this section. To those not acquainted with Mr. Penney's aims and his methods of achieving them, it might seem that this is an unusual procedure for the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the largest retail department store organization in the United States. But there is nothing unusual about it to those who know Mr. Penney. Each individual Penney store is a source of personal pride and interest to him. Each one is a means to an end a means of rendering a necessary neces-sary service, and of doing it well. He has often said, "A merchant will not last long who loses sight of the true relationship between himself and his customers, and sees money as first and last instead of seeing it as a byproduct by-product of performing an essential service." Mr. Penney is an idealist, but a very practical one. He opened his first store in the tiny mining town of Kemmerer, Wyoming, with a total capital of $500. The hard working miners and their families soon discovered dis-covered that Mr. Penney's little 20x 40 store carried just the things they wanted, and that he and that young fellow Sams who worked for him were about as fair and square as they came. The business grew. The business has continued to grow, and today the Penney Company Com-pany operates nearly 1500 stores, located lo-cated in every state in the Union. Observers of department store operations op-erations in this country attribute much of the Company's success to its rigid adherence to Mr. Penney's original plan of vesting full merchandise merch-andise control of each store in the hands of a local manager who is in a position to study the wants and needs of the people of his own community, com-munity, as Mr. Penney and young Sams (who is now President of the Penney Company) did in Kemmerer. |