BASEMENT STORES FOR THRIFTY CUSTOMERS 99
a really good buy, not a single piece should be marked down.
A buyer who has made only a fair purchase will have a few
pieces to mark down. But if he makes a very doubtful
purchase, he will get a 25 per cent mark-down and the chance
for profits vanishes or a 5o per cent mark-down, which,
of course, means an appreciable loss. Inevitably, such mis-
takes are made occasionally.
It might be supposed that a great many people would
wait for the mark-downs. They do, if the first price is not
a bargain price. But if it is a bargain price, there are enough
people who do not wait; and they get the bargains.
When the automatic bargain basement was opened, the
store faced frankly the possibility that it might not make
any money for several months. The first few months it
lost thousands of dollars; the public did not as yet thoroughly
understand the idea, and the buyers were probably not yet
sufficiently expert in buying automatic basement bargains.
Subsequently, the basement business yielded a satisfactory
rate of profit on a volume running into many millions of
dollars a year. This was accomplished only because the
store gained people’s confidence by doing exactly what was
promised.
The automatic bargain basement store is to all intents
and purposes an almost entirely separate store. To sum
up, the striking features of it are these:
1. Prices are reduced automatically and drastically at
stated fixed intervals.
2. Buyers are forced to find and sell only real bargains.
3. By eliminating all unnecessary costs of doing business,
the savings that accrue from advantageous buying are kept
for customers.
4. The store attains a very rapid rate of turnover, with
all the benefits which that brings.
5. Goods are carried in all price ranges, provided that at
the price offered they are bargains.
6. There is no guarantee that stocks will be full in all
sizes and styles; the goods are not on hand at all unless the
buyers can obtain them at prices which will make them bar-
gains for customers.
