Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922. Excerpt: ... Chapter XXIV INTERDEPENDENCE OF THE CLASSES 1. New type of business.--The year 1843 marked a new departure in business, because an innovation was introduced which has raised the relation between buyer and seller to a new and higher level. Some time during that year Alexander T. Stewart introduced the system of plainly marked prices in his New York store. The age-long custom has always been to ask one price, and take another. Dickering, haggling, bargaining were as old as buying and selling, or rather as old as the exchange of goods by barter. No one could possibly imagine how business might be carried on by any other method except the chaffering of the market. Yet here was a man who defied the past and the present by having the selling price plainly marked, so that the customer knew exactly how much he had to pay, and--there was no variation from that price. It was the same to the regular or to the occasional customer. You might like the goods at that price, and buy, or leave them alone. There was, however, no waste of time by haggling. An age-old custom had received its death blow. Needless to say, the innovation was received with derision by Stewart's competitors. Half the pleasure of buying consisted in the matching of wits; the customers would refuse to go to a place where they had to say yes or no without a chance of beating down prices. But Stewart was the better psychologist, and on the principle of fixed prices, he built the most enormous business success of his generation. Many of his competitors were driven out of business, owing to their incapacity to read the new signs of the times; others imitated the practice and saved themselves, and a few hired out to Stewart, after they had sold out at great loss. This incident has been referred to at som...
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