THE MORE-PROFIT TIME TO SELL 133 
we shall have little need to worry. We can then count on 
making ours the fastest growing store in the community and 
earning much greater total profits. Happily, a complete 
stock is not necessarily a large stock. A right Model Stock 
is, in fact, likely to be a smaller stock than the same store 
carried before. But a Model Stock must be a more complete 
stock; and such a complete stock pays us greater total profits. 
Suppose that before we adopt the Model Stock Plan we 
carry five price levels in a class of goods; mind you, most 
stores carry far more than this. There are also five style 
divisions in this class of goods, five colors, and five materials. 
Then the total possible combinations would be 5 X 5 X 5 X 
5, which is 625. If each of these 625 items must be carried 
in a full assortment of sizes, no store in the world has the 
resources or the trade to make such a full stock sell quickly 
enough, turn often enough to avoid obsolescence, and show a 
net profit. 
By reducing the price lines to 3, we cut the possible 
varieties to 375 before size variations, which leaves a theoreti- 
cally complete stock still beyond our reach. So, in actual 
practice, neither we nor any other retailers can carry a 
theoretically complete stock. Instead, we strive for what 
might be termed a “commercially” complete stock; that is, 
we select from a theoretically complete stock those items 
which we have reason to believe will best fit our customers’ 
requirements and carry those numbers in stock. 
It is impossible to do business on only one style, one color, 
one price, one material to suit every taste in dresses.! But 
the closer we can approach this situation the better. When 
1 Perhaps the closest approximation in the field of women’s clothing is any 
one of the so-called “sample dress shops,”? which confine their operations to 
a misses’ size 16 and women’s sizes 36 and 38—the three sizes at which the 
largest number of sales can be made. These shops cheerfully forego all 
sales to women of other sizes for the sake of doing business on smaller, fast- 
moving stocks. Women’s or men’s hats at a single price but with a wide 
variety in sizes and styles is another form of the same thing. And the post 
few years have witnessed a startling growth of chain stores that retail all 
their suits and overcoats at a single price. The Richman chain of men’s 
clothing stores is the outstanding example, selling at $22.50 topcoats, ulsters, 
all types of overcoats, sack suits, tuxedo suits, full-dress suits, cutaway coats 
with striped trousers—all for the single price, resulting in extraordinary 
total profits and steadily growing sales volume year after year.