Page 45 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

It is possible for anyone who will really work to make a good profit
supplying the hotels, restaurants, lunchrooms, cigar stores, drug stores, barber
shops, and billiard halls with this sales plan. By making about twenty calls on
prospects daily, Winton averages over nineteen dollars a day when he is
working.

A Storeless Shoe Business

W

HEN J. W. Hawkins, of Cleveland, Ohio, who had been representing a
wholesale shoe company for twenty years, had his territory taken away from
him, he decided to turn his knowledge of the shoe business to his own
advantage. He made a connection selling shoes direct to the wearer and five
months later he had earned a thousand dollars.

“I simply took advantage of a situation with which the trade is familiar,”
Hawkins said. “Every experienced shoe salesman knows people have only a
vague idea of the size of their shoes. You’d be surprised to know how many
times the average person buys ill-fitting shoes in his lifetime, believing he is
properly fitted. That’s because it’s impossible for a shoe store to keep a
complete stock of sizes, widths, styles and colors of the lines it handles, all of
the time. When the store is out of the proper size, the clerk substitutes a size
close to it, and the average person doesn’t know the difference.

“I have trained myself to tell at a glance if a person is properly fitted.
Prospects, wearing ill-fitting shoes, usually complain of being hard to fit and
doubt that I can give them shoe satisfaction. I tell them: ‘I guarantee the fit. If
they don’t fit, you don’t pay.’ Shipment is made C.O.D. but I make certain to
call up my customers about the time their shoes arrive. I know there won’t be
a substitution as my orders are filled at a wholesale warehouse.”

It took about four weeks before people became fully aware that the shoes
Hawkins sells would actually be better fitting than store shoes. He sold his
first order to an engineer of a railroad, and the engineer was so pleased that
he told his fireman. When Hawkins called back upon the railroad man, he had