CHOOSING PRICE LEVELS TO INCREASE SALES 31 
The highest full-line price is probably best set by a process 
of reasoning altogether outside store statistics: 
1. It cannot be a price at which a Rolls-Royce is sold.* 
2. It depends on the average income level of our type of 
customers? By the very definition of the highest-priced 
full line it is clear they cannot buy the bulk of their needs at 
this level. Especially in a store catering to the higher- 
income trade, care is needed to avoid “trading up” beyond 
the greatest total-profit limit, the point where the greatest 
number of sales and the greatest dollar volume should be 
attained. 
3. Experience enters importantly. More mistakes are 
made by deductions from undigested experience than from 
any other single source, for experience may be based on 
results that are mot at all indicative of the truth. But, in 
general, there has been built up in the experience of any 
store a broad knowledge of what are the highest prices that 
1 Especially in the larger cities there is, of course, room for the profitable 
Operation of stores confining their business to luxury goods. In his natural 
desire to gratify his personal preference for running a high-quality store, 
however, a merchant must be careful not to overrate the volume of this 
business that can be done in his particular community or with his particular 
clientele, The greatest inherent virtue in merchandising is not in selling 
highest-grade, high-priced articles but rather in performing the maximum 
service for customers, which is to sell them the right goods at the prices they 
can pay and still keep their budgets in balance. We must always keep in 
mind these diametrically opposed considerations: (1) pseudosocial recognition 
associated with dealing in the very top-quality merchandise; (2) real social 
service in serving the masses. Fortunately, the latter brings by far the 
greatest total profits. . . 
% Government statistics show that the average wage earner’s income in the 
United States and the income set as a minimum subsistence level for a wage 
earner’s family of five persons are very close indeed. The average income 18 
not high enough to allow these people, the mass-buying power of our com- 
munity, to buy all goods at the highest-priced full line. But a great many 
of these customers from time to time buy an article from the highest-priced 
full line, Unless, then, our store draws its custom almost exclusively from 
the higher-income group of people, we know perfectly well that our customers 
cannot buy on a mass-purchasing basis at prices too high to be compatible 
with their incomes. It is worth remembering in this connection that the 
greatest of American businesses and fortunes have been built from catering to 
mass demand at prices the masses can pay. Such total profits as Ford's and 
Woolworth’s could not have been made on products above most people's 
ability to pay. General Motors has consistently made far larger total 
profits from Chevrolets than irom Cadillacs. Fortunately, the Model Stock 
Plan will make it far easier and far more profitable to sell very high-priced 
goods in the de luxe departments {see p. 69).