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
