BASEMENT STORES FOR THRIFTY CUSTOMERS o¢7 
rack. An ordinary store demands the correct assortment 
of sizes and pays the price. The Filene basement takes 
what sizes there are and gets bargains. It does not have 
regular stocks; it has bargain merchandise and just whatever 
it may happen to have. A customer may get an article 
today and not be able to duplicate it at the price, or at 
any price, in the basement tomorrow. 
It is the regular experience to have a whole stock of goods 
disappear off the selling floor, sold, within a few minutes 
after they are placed on sale. Customers are always waiting 
outside each basement door before the store opens to get 
first choice of some new lot. One morning very recently an 
executive for his own amusement timed a rush on a good- 
sized stock of fur coats. Within three: minutes after the 
doors were opened, the racks were bare. And within five 
more minutes a group of porters was removing the racks 
and bringing in “bargain squares,” flat tables, full of an 
entirely different class of merchandise to make profitable 
use of the space for the rest of the day. In fact, porters are 
continuously during store hours expanding one selling area 
and bringing new goods of a wholly different sort to take the 
place of some stock that has disappeared as if by magic. 
When the basement opened, it was planned that it might 
serve in part as a clearing house for mark-down lots from the 
upstairs departments. Such lots do come to the basement at 
intervals, but they form less than 1 per cent of the total 
merchandise disposed of there. 
Here is an important point to remember about the auto- 
matic bargain basement, namely, if the rules are observed, 
unless the first price made is a real bargain price, the auto- 
matic reductions come along in 12 days and cause heavy 
losses. That works in two ways: first, it benefits customers; 
second, it benefits the store. It insures correct bargain 
prices, and it guarantees the right kind of buying. 
If the buyers are not wise enough to get what the people 
want at the low prices they want to pay in the bargain base- 
ment, then the goods are quickly and regularly marked down 
until customers do get them at the prices they want to pay.