THE MODEL STOCK PLAN 
in either men’s or women’s shoes.! If the retailer tries to 
keep a complete stock at too many price levels or too many 
styles, the difficulties catch him both coming and going. 
This is proved in some of the departments of even the most 
successful stores, where the profits shown at stock taking 
are found to be in goods instead of money, and these goods 
are mostly the odds and ends of too many styles and too 
many price lines. 
When we build a Model Stock, we lose few sales for lack of 
merchandise. Also we have few leftovers. We shall see in 
this book that the Model Stock Plan gives us our profits in 
cash instead of in obsolete goods. 
Moreover, it builds goodwill, the greatest asset of any 
business. When a successful going concern changes hands 
or offers its stock on the market, the goodwill generally can 
be sold for more than the tangible assets. Goodwill is 
defined by Webster as “the advantage in custom which the 
business has acquired beyond the mere value of what it sells.” 
For the practical business man we have a far simpler, more 
profitable, and more easily understood definition of goodwill: 
the customers’ feeling that they had rather deal with us. 
Here is the first essential of goodwill: No matter how 
pleasant we may be, no matter how attractive may be all 
the other features of our store, we cannot have any profitable 
goodwill unless we have the goods the customers wish. A 
store filled with desirable free services but containing no 
goods could have no salable goodwill. 
In less degree this condition of no goods—at least not what 
the customer wants in colors, styles, materials, sizes—is 
essentially what has been happening too often in every store 
operated by the old methods. If, in natural defense of his 
store, any retailer in reading thus far resents or opposes this 
statement, let me ask him for a moment mentally to take 
L A good instance is a stock of women’s shoes in new styles. Unless such 
a stock is bought scientifically, substituting facts for opinions, the store is 
caught on one of the horns of a dilemma, Either the store cannot supply all 
the lengths and widths called for in the new styles, or, if it can supply them, 
numetous lots and sizes and lengths which are not in sufficient demand will 
Fail to sell out completely before the styles have gone out of date.