180 THE MODEL STOCK PLAN
in the United States, the higher-grade hotels have display
cases from outside shops; the shops are glad to pay high
prices for these displays. The Hotel Ritz, in Paris, has a
very long corridor with cases and samples and salespeople.
Certainly if such displays are profitable, downstairs displays
of our own upstairs departments will be far more effective.
If we are to use interior display in this way throughout our
store in order to permit the Model Stock Plan to yield its
greatest total profits, we should value all interior display
space and charge the department for it just as newspapers
charge for their space and many department stores charge
for their window space.
While we are on the subject of interior store display, let
me call attention to a means it offers of strengthening our
Model Stock Plan advertising message. In every depart-
ment we should have posted prominently, so that the cus-
tomers and salespeople cannot miss them, two vital messages:
1. You can, as a rule, find extraordinarily desirable styles
and desirable materials in each of our three price lines.
2. Practically all of our goods are at all times better values
than can be found in stores not operated on the Model Stock
Plan.
Repeatedly we have said, in general terms, that there are
manifestly serious, costly defects in current practices of
retail advertising. It is time that we support these assertions
with something specific.
Of course, not all of the current retail advertising is defec-
tive. Some stores have built much of their goodwill through
good advertising backed by the goods, the prices, the service
they offer their customers. But the drawing power of any
good advertising is seriously impaired if the store also uses
advertising that is basically wrong, even if such advertising
is commonly used by its competitors. Almost every good-
sized store that I have studied in this respect uses at least
some demonstrably wrong advertising.
Usually it is bargain advertising that goes directly contrary
to the principles of sound merchandising for the greatest
total profit. How does bargain advertising so often merit
