72 
THE MODEL STOCK PLAN 
makes for the greatest total profits in any department that 
must depend primarily on the sale of quantities of popular 
styles or staples at popular prices. 
There are some other very real advantages on the side of 
the specialty shop. Let us consider a women’s apparel 
shop of this type. In such a shop, alone of all retail establish- 
ments with any pretense to style leadership, the owner per- 
sonally buys all the goods. He, or she, buys not only the 
dresses but also the hats, gloves, shoes, hose, handbags, 
everything. Consequently, the stock in the shop has a 
uniform standard of taste. 
The customer who buys here all the different parts of an 
ensemble attains a harmony of costume, because all the goods 
were, in the first place, chosen for the shop by one person. 
Even if the shop owner has taste that deserves only a 75 
per cent rating, at least everything in the store achieves 
75 per cent of perfection, and the shop gets and satisfies an 
adequate number of customers who are better suited by 
75 per cent taste than by 100 per cent. 
Contrast with this a department store where the dress 
buyer perhaps merits an 85 per cent rating on taste, the hat 
buyer 65 per cent, the shoe buyer only 50 per cent. The 
customer who tries to buy an ensemble here emerges with a 
first-rate dress, a mediocre hat, and questionable shoes. 
Since the same variations may be true of buying ability as 
well as of taste, the difference between specialty shop and 
large store is further magnified. 
Yet any store large enough to make a bid for the de luxe 
trade has definite reasons for wanting this trade. The 
most obvious, although ultimately not the most important, 
is the volume of sales it represents. De luxe customers 
are the high-income individuals who buy very high-priced 
merchandise in liberal quantities. Not only do they spend 
more money per article purchased but also they purchase 
more articles per capita. Half a dozen such wealthy cus- 
tomers, if we can hold their regular trade, may spend more 
money with us than do 25 or 50 of our average customers who 
buy principally at the best-selling full-line prices. And