206 THE MODEL STOCK PLAN
merchant customers, of adjusting his costs and expenses and
prices to coordinate with the Model Stock’s rule for three
fixed prices with no in-between prices.
Under the Model Stock Plan the manufacturer knows
exactly what the buyer can afford to pay. This puts the
whole transaction on a basis of the greatest value attainable
at this known price, eliminating one of the big variables in
the problem for both the manufacturer and the buyer.
Working to the three full-line prices in goods at far higher
price levels than are available in the range of the big, fixed-
price chains, such as Woolworth’s and Grant’s, the producer
has open to him a field that offers far larger opportunities
for total profits than are possible in five-cent, ten-cent, and
dollar items.
When the manufacturer is working along the lines of the
Model Stock Plan, he is also working by the basic principles
of the method by which Ford made his great success and his
enormous fortune. He is working in profitable cooperation
with his customers to produce goods at the prices where the
greatest quantities of goods can be sold. The greatest total
profit for retailers, and also for the competent manufacturer,
is in encouraging to the utmost the manufacturer who wants
to eliminate waste, reduce costs, and, thereby, sell in greater
and greater quantities, as he will be helped to do if he manu-
factures to the three full-line prices of the Model Stock Plan.
Another respect in which the Model Stock Plan might be
made to function to the mutual profit of producers and
retailers is in the field of style novelties. I have shown
several manufacturers of style goods that they can attain
mass production on such goods. To accomplish this best,
the manufacturer would have to build up a staff of nationally
or even internationally known experts in style and applied
art.
The manufacturer must arrange that his experts shall
produce an attractive style novelty every month, perhaps
even more frequently in some lines. Then the manufacturer
can send his salesmen to retailers to say: “I want your order
for a fixed quantity of our newest item each month. We
