Page 189 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

buy more.” In buying your opening stock keep in mind that the manufacturers
are scarcely going to stop making merchandise that is in demand. In opening
your store don’t tie up more than half of your capital stock. Save some of it
for unexpected expenses, for tiding you over a dull season, or for stock to
replace slow selling merchandise mistakenly purchased when opening.

Keep Merchandise Moving

Successful merchants aren’t afraid to sacrifice merchandise that is not
moving. After you have kept merchandise more than a few weeks it has
begun to “eat its head off.” It should be sacrificed at any reasonable price just
to get your money out of it, so you can put money into something that will
turn and make profits. No matter how much merchandise costs, it is worth
only what you can get for it.

Successful merchants have always gone slowly in committing themselves for
heavy time-payments on costly equipment. Don’t make the same mistake one
merchant did who had an $800 stock of variety goods and a $750 cash
register! While good equipment is essential, don’t tie yourself up for
payments on fixtures, scales, registers and signs. Even if you do a good
business monthly installments on equipment will take all the ready cash you
can obtain.

Last, but not least, move heaven and earth to satisfy your customers, and
keep them coming back. If a customer buys only once, telephone him, see
him, write him a letter, if you even suspect that he is buying elsewhere. Find
out why he didn’t repeat. Make any errors right. Make him understand that
you are striving to please him. It is by such tactics that successful
storekeepers are made.

Starting a Stamp Shop

T

HE intense interest which has developed in stamp collecting led Phillip
Carpenter, retired from the postal service at the age of sixtyfive, to sell the