Store News

P: You cannot purchase a deck of playing cards at Wanamaker's, because the late founder John Wanamaker disapproved of gambling and the store still carries out his wishes.

P:Macy's is pledged with the Women's Christian Temperance Union never to advertise beverage shakers in any way to be confused with cocktails or alcoholic drinks.

P: Flaming red bathing suits lead all other colors, this summer.

P:. The practice of serving free tea in department stores is winning customers in Brooklyn, making big tips for waitresses.

P: Italians and Harlem Negroes buy more player pianos than any other group.

P: The sale of radios reaches its peak just before a prize fight (women buy on instructions from men).

P: John McCormack, tenor, frequently orders a new set of his own phonograph records.

P: Rainy days mean good business for second-hand bookshops.

Such items as these would be found in a daily newspaper column about shops and department stores. Such items together with shrewd bits of advice for merchants and customers would interest the thousands who work for stores and the daily millions who visit them. But such a column, now appearing daily in the New York Telegram (Scripps-Howard), signed by a young woman named Alice Hughes,* is unique in modern metropolitan journalism. Ethically inconsistent, U. S. dailies consume tons of paper in chatting about automobiles, amusements, radio, real estate, banks, all of which advertise heavily; but they have hitherto refused to give publicity to local stores which are the biggest source of advertising revenue.

The Hughes-Telegram column is still experimental. It is extremely diffident in its advice to shoppers, but then no daily automobile editor has ever dared to say anything but equally nice things about each and every automobile that was ever offered for sale. Miss Hughes' advice to storekeepers is much more specific. To date, however, her best work has been to acquaint the buying millions with quaint details. Some of her paragraphs:

P:"Add to the list of useless, though amusing, gifts for men, particularly if they are inclined to do a very little friendly betting, a gold piece the exact size and gold content of a $20 gold currency piece, even to being milled around the edge. Instead of the insignia, however, there appears enameled on one side the word 'Head' and on the other 'Tail.' "

P: "Roller skating is encouraged in the stock rooms of large stores that occupy vast areas. Errand and stock boys and girls are equipped with skates, and besides getting around faster, think of the fun! Marshall Field in Chicago started this. In New York we hear it is done at Altman's and at Macy's."

P: "Serenades are given once a week at Arnold, Constable's to the department that has exceeded its week's quota of sales. A small rolling piano and several professional singers invade the department leading in sales for the week and proceed to sing its praises in terms of popular songs. Unfortunately customers are not in on this; it takes place in the morning, just before the store opens."

P:. "A sale in London is called 'a push.' ... In one of their six-day January 'pushes' Harrod's sold 52,000 pounds of marmalade. A not infrequent item in the London Times society columns is: 'The Queen of England [or Norway, or some other country] accompanied by her lady-in-waiting, shopped in Harrod's yesterday.' "

P: "Probably at this moment your goldfish are swimming in a glass bowl made in the shape of an elephant. Your handkerchief, likely as not, has an elephant embroidered in a corner; the jewelled ornament on your hat is a rhinestone studded elephant. Toilet accessories, soap, carpets, book ends, tapestries, place cards, dress fabrics, lingerie trimmings, all these things and dozens of others are now being made in the shape of elephants.

"The reason for this is simple--and for storekeepers very profitable. The elephant is a symbol of good luck. . . ."

* Graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1921, she has edited manuscripts for Detective Story Magazine and Western Stories.