CHOOSING PRICE LEVELS TO INCREASE SALES 27 
The answer to this is that we could not do business in 
bulk at four full-line prices without adding another class of 
customers. To follow through with the illustration of 
women’s hats: if we wish to do business in bulk with cus- 
tomers for whom $3 is the usual price they can afford to pay 
for a hat, we must add for them a more inexpensive hat at 
$2 or at $1.50. 
Experience has shown that no retailer in a large com- 
munity can cater to too broad a section of the economic 
scale, because people of such widely different income levels 
will not trade in large numbers at the same store. Either 
the additional line will fail to sell in sufficient quantities to 
make it profitable as a fourth full line, or—what is more 
probable—the demand at $15 will fall off and $3, $5, and $10 
will become the three full-line prices instead of $s, $10, and 
$15; in other words, there will be a definite shifting to a 
lower-priced class of trade. 
_ If $20 were the added fourth full-line price, the likelihood 
is still greater that the fourth full line will fail, because it is 
much easier to trade down than to trade up. 
A merchandise executive who had followed the three-full- 
line plan without absorbing its basic principles once told me 
that he thought “best-selling full line” a misnomer, men- 
tioning a department in which the largest sales volume was 
in the cheapest full line, and the so-called “best-selling full 
line” was actually second best. From the very definition of 
the best-selling full line, it cannot be overshadowed in sales 
volume by another price line unless some factor has been 
given a wrong value. In the department in question either 
the line prices were incorrectly established—probably the 
buyer was trying to trade too high and should make his 
Present cheapest full line his best-selling full line, with a new 
cheapest full line below it—or his stock in the best-selling 
full line was so weak that the store’s possible customers were 
buying best-selling full-line merchandise of his competitors. 
The starting point for buying a line of merchandise 
scientifically—and the backbone of the Model Stock Plan— 
1s determining the prices at which, at a given time, the