Page 183 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

open a store. Can you render a useful service to the town, community or
neighborhood to which you will look for your patronage? Will you offer the
people of your community some service they need, or want, but are not now
enjoying? Or will your store merely attempt to duplicate some service which
is already being well performed? Will your store simply become another unit
in an already overcrowded field?

There are in the United States, as this is being written,

532,010 food stores
56,697 drug stores
26,996 hardware stores
28,709 dry goods stores
18,967 shoe stores
9,568 millinery stores 13,198 men’s furnishing stores 32,555 meat markets
11,741 variety stores
17,043 furniture stores
21,975 women’s ready-to-wear 12,447 jewelry stores

Between the time this is written and the time you will read it, thousands of
these stores will have gone bankrupt, changed hands, merged, moved or
made some other change which indicates that the owners are making little, if
any, profit. From this summary it may seem to you as if storekeeping is a bad
business; but it isn’t. It is a fundamental necessity. Retail business suffers
less, as a whole, than any other type of business during a period of
depression. Of course, a depression clears out the unfit, the lazy, the slovenly
and careless retailers. But the good ones carry on year in and year out, during
good times and bad, with as great a degree of stability as is found in any other
type of business.

In spite of the dismal record of failures, you may want to open a store. What
kind of store? The chains have made it increasingly difficult to make a profit
out of a grocery, drug, cigar, hat or shoe store. There are plenty of these
stores, anyway, so why pick a field in which you must compete with the most
astute merchandisers in the country? Because of factors over which no
individual has any control, discussion of the ordinary types of stores such as