Page 229 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

with his back to the wall, made that initial appropriation for advertising, what
might have happened to his business. But he did make it.

How $150 a Month Advertising Built
a$10,000,000Business

B

ACK in 1905, M. G. Gibbs opened a drug store in Washington, D. C. His
friends told him he was foolish; that there were already too many drug stores
in Washington, and that there was no money to be made in the drug business
anyway.

But Gibbs figured that there was always room at the top regardless of how
crowded the field might be. He believed that if a business had distinctive
policies and kept telling people about them, day in and day out, it was bound
to be successful.

So he took his capital of $9,000 and set $2,000 of it aside for an all-year
advertising program. This gave him $150 a month for his advertising. Then
he took the remainder and bought fixtures and stock with it. Perhaps the fact
that Gibbs was the son of a small-town publisher had something to do with
the faith he had in advertising. But he stuck to his plan in spite of all
discouragements, and when the year closed his sales totaled $ 22,000. Not a
bad first year’s business back in 1905.

Today the Peoples Drug Stores are as well known in Washington as the
White House. They do a volume in excess of $10,000,000 annually and their
credit rating stands ace high in Dun & Bradstreet. Druggists from all over the
country come to Washington to study the Gibbs methods. But the real secret
of the success, according to an interview which Mr. Gibbs gave to Printers’
Ink, is his year-in-and-year-out policy of plowing back 2 per cent of his sales
into advertising. “It is inconceivable to me,” he said, “that any retailer would
attempt to operate without a consistent plan of advertising year in and year
out.”