168

THE MODEL STOCK PLAN

1. Newspaper advertising makes people set out with the
intention of coming to our store,
2. Competitors are bringing to the retail district other
people who intend to go to theirsfores. When these people
pass our windows, we get an extra opportunity to divert
them from their original intention and so bring them into
our store.

3. Whether customers are brought in by our newspaper
advertising or our window displays, or whether they come
in of their own initiative to make purchases or to shop, we
have the problem of bringing them to the point of looking
at the merchandise in the departments. This is where
interior display has its opportunity to make the sales and
also to suggest still other items to the customers. Obviously,
we cannot afford to slight the interior display. Yet, in
general, because its full importance seems somehow to have
impressed most merchants insufficiently and it is, therefore,
not under the control of a single competent display expert,
it is, as a whole, far less effective than newspaper advertising
or window display.
It takes equally good window display and interior store
display added to good newspaper advertising to make the
greatest total profits for our store. In other words, a wellrounded
 use of publicity. While it is generally accepted
that window display and interior display are valuable, we
do not yet know the true greatness of their value, for the
scientific investigation of the most effective methods and
principles of display is just now getting well started under the
direction of the more competent display executives.
In previous chapters we have seen that the size of the
Model Stock can be mathematically determined. Muliiplying
 the departmental stock units by the required rates of turnover
gives us, therefore, the volume of annual sales required to mainlain
 the Model Stock and yield us the greatest total profit.
It is childish to keep our stocks too small because we are
not selling enough to make larger, adequate stocks turn profitably.
 This only results in a whole crop of failures to sell.
By applying sounder selling methods, which in large measure