GREATER PROFITS FOR EVERY BUSINESS 219 
business will continue to earn satisfactory profits or even that 
it will continue to exist. Many a neighborhood grocer whose 
productive life had been spent in building up a small, 
modestly profitable store learned this lesson forcefully, and 
to his sorrow, when the grocery chains invaded his street, 
offered better values than he could see any possible way to 
meet, and took away from him practically all that part 
of his trade which had cash to spend for its groceries. 
If the small stores are to survive, they must combine in 
ways to meet competition. This is exactly what has 
happened in a good many instances in the grocery field. 
When the chain stores became too great a danger to be longer 
ignored, buying groups and voluntary chains sprang up in 
various parts of the country. In one instance, more than 
9,000 grocery stores have united with huge success to buy 
centrally, although retaining individual ownership.! There 
are many manifestations of this in the drug field, starting a 
good many years ago with the stores under: the Liggett 
management. 
All types of group buying by individually owned units 
which do not use the Model Stock Plan meet one great diffi- 
culty: the different viewpoints of the buyers as to the selling 
price of the goods they must buy together in order to make 
the savings that come from mass purchasing. The Model 
Stock Plan standardizes prices and thus makes profitable 
combined buying because all the stores want goods at these 
best-selling prices. Also, as we know, the Model Stock 
Plan draws into its three full-line prices practically all the 
goods that producers plan for in-between prices. In con- 
sequence of the economies that result—as we have seen, it is 
this process applied to five- and ten-cent prices that gives 
Woolworth’s such exceptional values—the Model Stock Plan 
A elie eed det 
1 In March, 1939, The Independent Grocers? Alliance of America, which 
was organized by J. Frank Grimes, reported that they had between 9,000 and 
10,000 retail stores, and that there were in addition between 3,000 and 5,000 
‘ndividual merchants who had signed agreements and whose stores were being 
remodelled as rapidly as possible. As soon as these stores are remodelled 
and have had their big opening sale, they become full-fledged members. 
[ile the chain stores. the I. G. A. now broadcasts weekly radio programs.