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Show The Storekeepers Those of us who are past middle age can remmber when the kindly neighbor whose job it was to sell us the necessities of life was known as a storkeepr. The name was quite appropriate. ap-propriate. He bought a stock of goods, hung out a sign, sometimes, and waited for his neighbors and friends to drop in and buy. Later on, his son inherited the business, busi-ness, if it had not gone to the wall, adopted a slightly more aggressive attitude at-titude toward the securing of trade, and called himself a merchant. Here and there a venturesome soul began to really study business methods and actually plan for grater volume and a wider trade radius. Some became real business men and reaped rich rewards. Later still, the department store and mail order house came into existence, ex-istence, recently followed by the chain stores, which now seem to menace the small merchant, and even threaten to drive him out of business. In spite of these revolutionary developments, de-velopments, howver, thousands of independent in-dependent mrchants are making money today. They ar doing it through adopting scientific methods of buying and selling, through the employment of systematic accounting, through a study of their customers' requirements, and through advertising. But a great many scorn such new- ' fangled ideas, and stay in the rut in which their forefathers ran their course. They are headed for bankruptcy bank-ruptcy and don't know why. But to anyone with a fundamental knowledge of modern business practices the reason rea-son is quite plain. These failures are not business men, nor even merch-1 ants they are only storekeepers I ' I |