230 THE MODEL STOCK PLAN
that we can successfully and profitably carry a complete
stock.
The most important job in distribution—assuming that
we have grasped and put to work the right principles of
buying—is selling. This does not conflict with the previous
statement that our primary function is buying for the cus-
tomer. Buying for the customer is our primary function
because it makes possible the right kind of mass selling.
This has a direct bearing on the duties of the merchant
and of the buyers to whom, in a large store, he delegates the
actual merchandising work. It leads straight to a shift of
emphasis. The department head—and the best department
head is the buyer—can best afford to put his attention pri-
marily on selling and to turn over to assistants much of the
actual buying which, under traditional methods, he now
considers the most important part of his job.
Even though it is admittedly more arduous work to get
out on the selling floor than to handle a buyer’s job in the
traditional way, it is very much to the buyer's interest.
It is bound to increase the total profits of his department,
and, after all, the biggest salaries for buyers can only come
permanently out of large total profits. ‘The bigger the total
profits of his department the bigger the buyer’s income.
The working arrangement, which will bring the largest
salary to the buyer and the largest total profits to the store,
is one under which the department head the greater part of
the time—at an estimate, go per cent of the time—is himself
on the selling floor with the purpose of discovering how cus-
tomers may be best served.
Here his duty is to see that every customer buys, to sell
her what she came in for, to salvage from any lost sale the
reason why she did not buy; in a word, to get at first hand the
information that will enable him to buy and keep in stock
all the items required to meet every reasonable demand of
customers.
He will find out in person where his stock is inadequate
much more quickly and much more graphically than even
a well-devised callsslip system can give him the same facts.
