172 THE MODEL STOCK PLAN

The time is coming reasonably soon when the departmentstore
 chains and voluntary chains of individual stores will
use the Model Stock Plan intensively. They will be forced
to it, because the single-line chains will eventually begin
to advertise that on account of their concentration on single
lines they can give customers better values. Then the other
centralized chains and the voluntary chains will have to
show that by their organization they are just as effectively
concentrated on each single line as are the single-line chains.
These other chains will advertise, too, the advantage to the
customer of being able to find in their complete stocks not
only as good values as, or better values than the goods that
the single-line chains offer but also complete stocks at equally
attractive prices of the same kind of goods at other standardized
 prices and in every desirable style.
The eventual outcome will probably be that the singleline
 chains will get together and will do business in what are
essentially department-store buildings.! The exceptions,
of course, will be those single-line chains such as chain groceries,
 which do practically all their business in convenience
goods best adapted to small stores in neighborhood trading
centers.
Our purpose in following our declared advertising policy
is definite. We shall strengthen the conviction of our regular
customers that ours is the best store in town for them to
trade with. Our prices and our complete stocks of wanted
merchandise will stand squarely behind our claim. No
stores have yet been able to advertise truthfully that all of
their stocks every day have the right styles at the right
prices.
Our advertising will, it is plain, often be distinctly of the
kind known as ‘“institutional” advertising as contrasted
with advertising intended to make sales only of the merchandise
 mentioned in the advertising. Under the Model Stock
Plan even our price or special novelty and style goods advertising
 will, in effect, be institutional advertising resulting

raiser EET

lL See also Chapter XI, p. 162.