Retailers

From smartshops, from bargain basements, from stores great & small, some 5,000 leading merchants of the land assembled in Manhattan last week for the annual convention of the National Retail Dry Goods Association. With the Christmas rush behind them, the Easter season dimly distant, the retailers took a full week off, stayed for a five-day meeting which included no less than 35 sessions, 170 speeches. Between sessions some retailers managed to squeeze in visits to spring furniture shows, lamp shows, corset shows. Attendance at Manhattan hotspots during the week showed a considerable bulge. For most of the retailers, however, the convention was serious business, coming under the auspicious heading of "Solving 1937 Problems of Retailing in the Public Interest." No more altruistic as a group than the National Association of Manufacturers or the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, the retailers tend to demonstrate a self-interest that is more enlightened, more realistic. Close to the public, the retailers were long aware of the socio-economic tremors which it required a Roosevelt landslide to jar into the consciousness of manufacturers. Months before the subject reached the floor of Congress, organized retailing was thumping for Social Security. Pensions and benefits swell the public's purchasing power, hence are fine for merchants--and they happened to be popular with the electorate. Popular with part of the electorate are consumer co-operatives but there the retailers draw the line. The idea of private property without profit has given them the jitters, particularly since the New Deal took enough interest in co-operatives to dispatch a commission to Europe to study them in their lushest environment (TIME, July 13). Treading close to the line of downright condemnation, Colonel Clarence Osborne Sherrill, head of the potent American Retail Federation and onetime city manager of Cincinnati, told the convention last week that the only thing the merchant had to fear was Government-subsidized cooperatives. Subsidies, cried Col.

Sherrill, "might also allow the de-velopment of a form of dangerous racketeering in the promotion of consumer co-operatives at the hands of unscrupulous and skillful demagogs." Another "public interest" discussed by the retailers was the rapid rise in installment selling. While total dry goods sales last year were up about 12%, time sales were up a whacking 33%. Seconding the storm warning raised by other speakers, Accountant E. H.

Scull (Scull Co.) suggested: "Because we are going through the most rapid expansion in credit business that retailing has ever experienced, are we not headed for serious trouble at the next downward curve of the vicious cycle and would it not be well to remember as the credit sales mount to an ever higher peak that beyond the highest peak there is always a valley?" Not daunted by this notion was Joseph L. Fowler, of Boston's Jordan Marsh, who urged the end of the dunning letters, proposed for delinquent accounts notices that were "mild in tone, neat in appearance, impersonal in nature." An outside suggestion carne from President Frederic Arlington Williams of Cannon Mills (towels) who said his company once "seriously considered discontinuing our efforts to sell to department stores." Taking a dig at Manhattan's R. H. Macy & Co. and its perennial price wars with Bloomingdale's and Gimbel's, Towelman Williams declared: "No sane manufacturer likes to have his merchandise used as a football and crowd-getter. Nor does he enjoy the disorderly competition brought about by two and sometimes more stores in a town starting a feud and vowing they will not be undersold. It always seemed to me that is one way to go nowhere fast." Not price-cutting but price-raising disturbed Jay D. Runkle of Marshall Field's New York Office. In prices the merchant's interest is close to that of the customer, opposed to that of the manufacturer. The lower the price the easier it is to sell the goods. In viewing with alarm the commodity boom, Retailer Runkle opined: "It would be a serious thing for all of us if prices got out of bounds." Something the retail leaders wanted to keep in bounds quite as much as prices was internal opposition to the "little NRA" outlined by the Dry Goods Association directors at Atlantic City last autumn (TIME, Dec. 7). Put up to the membership last week, the proposed platform called for minimum wages, maximum hours, fair trade provisions and a ban on child labor--all on a voluntary basis buttressed by State statutes. Coming as it did right after the election, the proposal looked -ike a shrewd attempt to head off Federal regulation along the same lines. When presented to the assembled retailers for approval, it raised a terrific ruckus. "We don't want a repetition of NRA," stormed Fred Lazarus Jr. of Columbus, Ohio.

"I don't propose to submit to any proposition which I do not understand," grumbled John C. Watson of John G.

Meyers Co. (Albany, N. Y.), asserting that adoption of the platform would "change the form of distribution in this country for the next 50 years." Yet Harry Schachter of Kaufman-Straus Co. (Louisville, Ky.) flatly announced that the merchants of his city were behind the platform "100%." After this confused reception, the platform was hastily shoved underground into the hands of the resolutions committee. Most of the merchants felt they were being pushed into something about which they knew very little. And among some the conviction was growing that after all uniform Federal regulation for industry as a whole might be better than a hodge-podge of State laws or special-interest Federal laws like the Robinson-Patman Anti-Price Discrimination Act aimed directly at retailing.

Over that much-de-bated law Brooklyn's Major Benjamin H.

Namm raged last week: "The only reason or excuse for this measure was to enable smaller and less efficient merchants to compete on equal terms with their larger and more successful competitors. . . . The Robinson-Patman bill would have been beaten to a frazzle if these stores had enlisted the aid of their customers." When the Dry Goods platform finally emerged from the resolutions committee on the fourth day of the convention, it had become a pious resolution approving "the objective toward which the general principles are directed." This was approved unanimously. Having thus sidestepped the issue completely, they turned the platform over to a committee for further study, and many a shrewd merchant privately declared that that would be the last ever heard of it. Even then the retailers did not go home. On the next day they witnessed the distribution of prizes in a "better-selling contest" conducted by the New York Uni-versity School of Retailing. On hand to present the prizes was one of the contest's judges, Chairman Samuel Wallace Reyburn of Associated Dry Goods Corp. (not to be confused with the Texas Congressman, Sam Rayburn).

Embarrassed was Mr. Reyburn to find that both the first and second prize winners were his own employes--in Manhattan's Lord & Taylor, an Associated subsidiary. Mr. Reyburn, grand old man of retailing, admitted to the beaming audience that his secretary had warned him without telling why that it might all look "dangerously like racketeering."

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