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Dayton's has fully computerized its B. Dalton operation to keep track of fastand slow-moving titles, meanwhile taking pains to make the chain seem like a group of friendly neighborhood booksellers. Most B. Dalton ads use the first person to proclaim "I am having a sale," or "I see a growing interest in the occult." Mixing mechanization with the personal touch is a Dayton's hallmark that has paid off for the company as a whole. Last year Dayton's had sales of $265,507,000 and profits of $9,587,000, a gain of some 17% over the previous year. It expects to increase its sales by $100 million during fiscal 1968.
Exciting Adventure. Although it became publicly held last fall, Dayton's is still largely a family affair, with six Day tons holding down management positions. To keep them straight, employees customarily refer to the company president as "Mr. Bruce," to Edward Dayton, the 28-year-old general manager of the bookstore division, as "Mr. Edward," and so on. What links all of them besides blood ties is the conviction, as Executive Vice President "Mr. Ken" puts it, that "shopping is the great American pastime and should be an exciting adventure."
To help make it so, Dayton's joined with other Minneapolis merchants last fall to develop a downtown shopping mall, graced it with a "mobile-stabile" Alexander Calder sculpture and remodeled its main store so that passersby could look directly into colorful boutiques rather than at mere window-display manikins. For the past two Christmases, it has outfitted the store's 12,000-sq.-ft. auditorium with a $250,000 "Dickens Village," complete with two-story, thatched-roof buildings and animated figures of Scrooge, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. It recently staged an extravaganza for college-age youths, featuring computers that analyzed their handwriting, phrenologists who measured their skulls, fortunetellers who gazed into their futures and rah-rah cheerleaders who simply looked attractive. There were also karate lessons, instructions on how to pack a suitcase and the sounds of 15 rock bands. The affair drew 12,000 young people, one of whom made off with the door prize of a live horse.