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This principle of price-control was as vital to the Drug Code and the Food Code as it was to the Retail Code. Solidly behind it were six national associations of retailers, the nation's dealers in drygoods, furniture, hardware, clothes, shoes and the Mail Order Association of America. Their voice during the two-month wrangle over the controversial "stop-loss" section has been the curly-headed owner of Brooklyn's Namm Store.
As chairman of the Fair Practice Committee of the combined retail trade associations, Major Benjamin Harrison Namm has constantly on his tongue the phrase "predatory price-cutting." Major Namm was dead intent on stopping the practice of cutting prices on a few articles ("loss leaders'') to give the impression that all articles in the store are priced on the same basis. The "price-control clause of the retail code, argued Major Namm & friends. would end vicious price wars which do nobody any good, often drive retailers bankrupt and always dry up the market for months afterwards. The 10% mark-up would not cover the overhead of even the most efficient retailer ; its only purpose was to stabilize gyrating retail prices, perhaps lengthen the life of the average retailer, now only seven years. In the last four years 400,000 retailers have gone to the wall.
But there were several conspicuous breaks in the solid rank of U. S. merchants who had written into the heart of the Retail Code this article which they believed would be their salvation. There were Kauffmann's of Pittsburgh, Marshall Field of Chicago and the biggest store in all the world, R. H. Macy & Co. The voice of the opposition was the voice of Macy's President Percy Selden Straus. who took a stand reminiscent of Henry Ford's embattled stand against the Automobile Code. But Mr. Straus's stand was not quite such rugged individualism as Henry Ford's. Rather, it was an inherited shrewdness.
"We Do Our Very Prettiest" From the day in 1858 when a hard-bitten shipmaster from Nantucket became a "dealer in Dry Goods. Carpets. Oil Cloths, Matting, etc.," Macy's has been a cash store. By 1859 Captain Rowland Hussey Macy was publishing such sprightly advertisements as this:
Ladies, ladies,
We want your money!
You Want Our Goods!
We Keep the Very Best!
We Do Our Very Prettiest
To Buy Low and Sell Cheap.
Clever publicity men have highly developed Captain Macy's technique of talking brightly to the-masses, but Macy's fundamental policies were well solidified before Lazarus Straus and his three sons moved up from Georgia at the end of the Civil War to start a crockery store in Chambers Street.