Getting more drug store business

Chapter X Selling Dental Supplies 78-84

What dentists use. Letter to dentists. Getting the dentists' support and commendation for goods. Dentifrices.

Chapter XI pages

Selling Olive Oil 85-91

Its food value. Widespread sale. Styles of packages. Care of stock. Advertising and window displays suggested.

Chapter XVI Who Will Sell the Sundries ? 120-125

Catalogue competition inevitable. How shall you fight it? Your advantage over the mail order house. Specimen of advertisement. Manufacturer's help.

s

Chapter XVII pages

Making Disinfectants Sell 126-134

Disinfectants profitable. The best sellers. Free advertising matter. Featuring the " Prevention " idea. Use of bulletins on prevalent diseases. Physicians' cooperation. When to put on the campaign. Samples of advertising.

Chapter XVIII

Making the Fountain Successful .... 135-146 Little things that count. How to serve straws. The back bar and mirror. Keeping up the stock. Care of ice cream. Appearance of soda clerks. Music. The school children's trade. Pertinent paragraphs on the business.

Chapter XXIV A Chapter for Clerks 184-194

Salesmanship. How to make customers feel friendly. Shaking hands. How to spend time to advantage. Dress. Which goods to push. " I don't know."

A Catechism for Druggists 195

" What is a druggist ? "

CHAPTER I Bringing in New Customers

The druggist who counts his trade safe and sure because a large number of people are steady, dependable customers, will be surprised in due time. No matter how many families there are trading at a store regularly, coming there for everything they need in the way of drug store goods, no matter how much they like that store or how willing they are to give it all their patronage, the store cannot subsist indefinitely upon their business.

Any druggist can discover the necessity for securing new trade, for adding new families to his list, by a very simple process. By making a memorandum at the beginning of the year of a hundred good customers, taking them as they run, either by alphabetical plan or by streets, and then at the end of twelve months going over his list and eliminating those who have dropped out for unavoidable reasons — death, removal, change of store, etc. — a very fair idea may be gained of the length of time that any one line of customers will last.

Out of that hundred it will be surprising if less than 15 or 20 per cent, drop out. A loss of ten out of the hundred is probably a very conservative estimate in the average town. That means that the business of the store would endure just ten years without the addition of new trade.

Of course, there are many things that might occur to reduce the number of customers in a much faster ratio, and the store that developed no new trade and secured no transient business, in all probability would not last more than a very few years.

This should mean something to every druggist who is looking into the future and hoping for greater things. It should mean that there is a constant need for hustling after the new people who come to town and after the trade that is now going to other stores.

Of course, the old customers are important. Without picking out individual instances it cannot be said that the trade of a new customer is any more important than that of an old one. A customer is a customer.

But a rather different line of work is needed to secure new trade from that used for holding the old customers in line. And in order that a business may grow it requires new people to be coming in with their money every day.

There is no trade that is any easier to get than that of newcomers in town. It is easy because the newcomer is without fear or prejudice and is ready to trade, or to start trading at least, wherever inclination calls, and that is likely to be wherever the first invitation comes from. It is often true, however, that the competitor with the least reputation, the fewest scruples and perhaps the poorest stock has as good a chance of getting it as the oldest and most successful store.

This shows that while stock, reputation, ability, caution and precaution all help to hold old customers, they have little to do directly with getting new ones from among the newcomers in town. They do help. Everything helps. But the outside appearance of the store and the methods used to call the newcomer's attention to the store are what get him in first.

In any town of ordinary size the druggist ought to have a method of obtaining and listing the names of the people who are coming into the town to live. This may be best carried out perhaps by studying the local newspapers and making note of the names of families moving in, of workmen, clerks, employees of all sorts, school teachers, of any one who is coming to the town to stay for any length of time.

Then there should be prepared a stock form of circular or folder attractively made up, calling attention to the advantages of the store and giving its location, together with information as to the lines of goods carried and an offer to deliver at once anything needed or to call and get any order the party might wish to give. By keeping these folders ready to mail, it would be but a small task to address them and mail them promptly as new names are added to the list.

The new family in town is in a position to appreciate any little attention or courtesy that may be shown, and in many instances the little things that a dealer is expected to do and is willing to do for any regular customer, simply as a matter of advertising or business, will be accepted as something more if done for a stranger.

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The interest thus shown in strangers should be endowed with something more than a mere financial quality. The new family or the new individual may well be given a welcome hand by the druggist as a representative member of a community that is glad to see new people coming in. He should feel a human interest in any stranger just as a matter of humanity, and the fact that it will prove profitable to his pocketbook ought to make it a pretty easy thing to do.

It is not difficult to learn to know the newcomer. If the proprietor cannot get a sight of the head of the new family, let him give the clerks the job of getting to know that person by sight, with instructions to give to any one in the store selling him goods, his name when he comes in, so that he can be called by it and feel that he already has an established identity.

It is a safe bet that when a man goes to a new town to live, if he is called by name in the first drug store he enters, he will do his trading at that store ever after, unless caused to leave by strong and specific reasons. There is something about calling a man by name in a town where he feels lost and alone that gets him right away. If he drops into a drug store and makes a small purchase and before he leaves is addressed by name, he will go out feeling two inches taller every time.

No customer, whether stranger or friend and acquaintance, should be regarded by the druggist as a mere animated pocket-book. That is not good hospitality, and moreover, it is mighty poor business.

Of course getting new trade is not all getting the trade of strangers in town. There is the trade the other stores already have and there is the trade that nobody has been getting, trade that can be had by stimulating the demand for such goods as people have been using but little or not at all.

All the kinds of advertising that are used to hold the trade already secured have a tendency to help get other trade, but special inducements are usually necessary in order to draw in rauch business from the competing stores.

These inducements may take the form of special sales, of premium giving and other schemes. It should be remembered, however, that such schemes must be made to bring in new customers or else they will amount to a simple paying of a premium for business that would have belonged to the store anyway. If any kind of a premium scheme is adopted for use for any length of time, it ought to be well considered in advance and its cost calculated, and the percentage it will add to the cost of doing business figured very closely. If the scheme will not produce enough new business to enable the druggist to pay its cost out of the additional profits and leave a good additional margin, it is a waste of time and money. And it must not only do this this year, but it must continue to do it. It is rarely that a premium or gift scheme is necessary to help hold the old trade, and it is not profitable if its costs has

Gettino More Drug Store Business

to come out of the profits of the business as it was before the plan was adopted.

As long as there is more trade to be had, a premium plan is a good working way of getting it — if it is worked properly. One great trouble with premium plans, though, is that after being put in operation they are simply allowed to run themselves. No effort is made to bring them to the attention of new people, and they soon simmer down to a point where they are used only by the steady customers of the store, and here it distinctly does not pay. A premium plan needs plenty of advertising, continuous advertising, just as much as if it were a business of itself.

One of the cleanest ways of increasing a business is that of developing wholly new trade. There are all the while coming on the market new goods or improved goods which take the place of some established article or which cater to a brand new taste.

The bicycle is an instance of this. The automobile is another. The safety razor is still another. These articles have developed into big businesses without a corresponding loss by any other business. They have made places for themselves and created a new demand. Along with these have also been created demands for supplies to go with them. These remarkable successful instances point out an idea.

It has been said that there is nothing new under the sun, but this does not apply to our case, for there is scarcely a month that something new may not be found in the advertising pages of the magazines and trade papers, too, which should prove a good business getter in the pharmacy, and which will not have to displace anything else in order to create a demand for itself.

These new things may easily be discovered by the live, wide awake druggist, and while he perhaps may not care to invest much money in such things, he can still afford to take a chance and stock them a little and push them a good deal. The vacuum bottle was just such an item, and the dealer who first stocked these novelties and pushed them in most towns succeeded in getting the cream of the trade on them, and in many instances was able in this way to get into his store people who had never been there before, but who came to see or to buy something they could not get elsewhere.

It is a big start on getting the trade of a new customer if that customer can be lured into the store once. It requires ingenious advertising and clever planning to get people in who are not regular patrons, but when they are once in it is easy to treat them well and to make them want to come again. It is easy, but it is not done by every druggist. As a rule, the things that are easy to do are the things that we do not do. If we are assigned a difficult method of producing a certain result we are more likely to go ahead with it than if we are shown a way so easy that it does not seem worth trying.

CHAPTER II The Neighborhood Drug Store

One thing the drug store in the business section of the town does not have to worry about. It does not have to find ways to get people to come to that vicinity to buy, because that is where the most of the people do a considerable portion of their shopping.

The neighborhood drug store is up against a different proposition. No great number of people pass its doors in the natural course of their daily travels. There is perhaps no other store near by to help draw people that way. The druggist so situated has to play pretty nearly a lone hand.

And yet a good many young druggists just starting in business cannot afford to rent stores in the busiest part of the town because rents are high there and the stores are in a more expensive class. Many young men must be satisfied with a neighborhood drug store or none.

The side street situation offers a fairly good sized store, usually with a nice enough front, at a rent that is within the means of the man with little means. The trade is distributed through the day evenly, without rush hours, thus enabling the handling of it with a minimum of help.

When the druggist opens his neighborhood store, however, he is at once confronted with the problem of how to get people to come there. Not enough perhaps pass by the store to make a profitable business if he secured their trade altogether. He must bring people his way from all parts of the adjacent neighborhood.

It is easy enough to say that the neighborhood druggist may offer price inducements to get the trade, but that is not the answer. Mere price cutting is never the road to a business success, and anyway, there are stores enough in town already where prices are cut to the bone, and the neighborhood druggist needs a profit on his goods, perhaps more profit than the downtown store instead of less, because he has a small turnover.

Still, by reducing the variety of stock, as may be done in the store located where the demands are less diverse, and by buying with care to keep the stock as low as it can be kept and yet supply the trade, expenses can be kept down to where the neighborhood store will be able to sell cheaply, and pernaps can handle some side lines at prices lower ^han competitors.

At all events, if the neighborhood druggist is to undersell or try to undersell other stores, he should make his price just enough lower to effect a saving of a cent or two, and avoid cutting enough to attract attention. The bigger downtown stores will not pay any attention to one neighborhood druggist cutting a cent or two off from the price of a dollar article, but that cent lower figure may be capitalized just as well with the neighborhood trade as a ten cent saving could be.

Every little saving that is effected should be brought to the attention of the customers by telling them personally when they make the purchase or by putting a little slip of white paper in the parcel, writing on it with a blue pencil, " You are buying this two cents cheaper than the downtown price/ '

A constant reiteration of little price savings will inevitably have its effect in impressing the neighborhood people with the fact that they can buy as well near home as they can downtown.

The neighborhood druggist always has the opportunity of writing letters to his possible customers. To this end he ought to accumulate a list of the families around him, including all possible customers. This list ought to be classified as to mothers, school children, society folks, motor owners, smokers, young men, young ladies, etc. It ought to reach out to all people who live near the store and to all who do and might go and come by that street.

Time may be taken to write a few letters every day, writing them in long hand if no typewriter is available, and making them actual personal business letters. Suppose the druggist writes a letter, something like the one below, to as many people each day as he has time. In a year he would reach hundreds of possible customers.

Dear Madam : — You no doubt realize that there is money to be saved on household expenses by buying carefully.

That means that if you will take pains to find out where you can buy to the best advantage you can make your money go farther and get more with it.

It costs us less to run our store than it would if we had a big place down on Broadway. Of course, we can sell a little cheaper on that account.

You have been paying ..c for white castile soap if you have bought it downtown lately. We are able to sell you the same good white castile for . .c.

How about moth preventives for keeping the woolens and furs not in use ? The best thing we know of for that purpose

is and we price this at . . c, which saves you a

little money over any reliable article of a similar sort sold downtown.

It is not our practice to make leaders of a few well known articles and make up the difference on others. We know what it costs us to do business and we base our charges on that cost.

We are not running a freak or a cut rate store, but we are here to give you the kind of goods you want and sell them as cheaply as we can afford to do.

Isn't it a convenience to have a good drug store right in the neighborhood ? We are here to serve you in any way we can and to save you money and time and carfare.

Come by our store when you can conveniently do so and you will nearly always see in our windows some money saving suggestion.

Yours very truly,

People will come out of their way to trade with the druggist who makes it an object for them to do so. It is not necessary that it always be a financial object.

You who run the neighborhood drug store do much of the selling yourself. You have not reached the stage where you sit back in an office chair behind a wire fence and leave it to others to meet your customers. With you a customer is a personal visitor whom you meet at the door when you can and with whom you part at the door. Did you ever stop to think that that is just what most buyers like ?

When you go into a store to purchase, don't you like best to do business with one of the firm instead of with a clerk. Well, there probably isn't a housewife in your neighborhood who wouldn't be willing to take a few extra steps to buy in a drug store where she would always do business with the proprietor. She knows he will take a greater personal interest in her purchases, and she will buy of him in preference to patronizing a big downtown store, where she is unknown to the clerks.

The personal element is today getting and holding trade in thousands of neighborhood stores and suburban shops, while the big stores are trying to fight this condition with more elaborate displays, more expensive delivery systems and deeper price slashing.

If you make a personal friend of the customer, that customer will come out of the way several blocks to buy from you, and she will tell her friends about your store, and bring them with her when she comes. The personal element is the best business getting proposition the small store can develop. If you are a crabbed, uncongenial cuss, a poor mixer and a business-is-business chap with no real interest in your fellow human beings, you have not in you the making of a success in a store around the corner, or in a small store anywhere. The only place for you is in some business where you do not come into contact with folks at all, but do your work with machines.

I said it is not always the financial side of the matter that brings people out of their way to patronize a store. Service is the big word nowadays in merchandising, and service is something you can give.

You can give the customer the personal attention she wants. You can see that the clerk gives each individual that attention too, because the clerk is working right under your nose. You can see that every parcel that goes out is properly wrapped and tied. You can see that goods that are not exactly in perfect condition are sold for just what they are. You can meet the automobile customer at the curb, and you can carry her parcels out for her. You can provide a chair for the tired woman, and you can pass out a cigar to the man you want to favor. You can make yourself to a degree a professional adviser of the families who patronize you. You can put yourself in a position not very far removed from that of family physician if you like. You can make people see that conferring with you about their drug store purchases means to save money on them in one way or another.

If you think you can start in a neighborhood store and develop a business on the waiting basis, you are doomed to disappointment. The old saying that " Everything comes to him who waits/' does not apply to building up a business in a neighborhood drug store. You will have to go after the trade, and since you cannot afford to go after it with costly advertising, since the newspapers are not available for a neighborhood store, you will have to use other means. Use your personality, your windows, your ability to write letters, and add to those all the helps the makers of well-known goods will give you — because you will have to have such goods if you are going to get or hold the trade of people intelligent enough to know its standard.

CHAPTER III Department Store Competition

The competition of the department store affords one of the most perplexing problems with which the druggist in many places has to contend.

Many department stores carry large stocks of a great variety of the lines stocked also by the druggists. They specialize in perfumes and toilet goods, rubber goods, stationery, all sorts of druggists' sundries. These lines they advertise in such a way as to convey the impression that they can undersell the druggist, and they even go so far at times as to intimate that the druggist asks exorbitant profits.

This is scarcely fair and square competition, but we cannot ignore a competitor merely because he does not play fair. He may seriously undermine public confidence in our business if we let him go his way undefied.

The druggist finds the department store offering two kinds of competition, both based on price. The first is the cut price on the standard advertised article, which everybody recognizes and knows is a bargain. The second is the price on the article of unknown quality, so described to make it appear to be the same quality for which the druggist asks a higher price.

The effect of such advertising of cut prices in discrediting the druggist with his patrons has to be considered. The situation cannot be dismissed with a simple condemnation of the department store man as a fraud. If the Big Store is doing its best to make the druggist appear a robber when it comes to prices on lines carried by both, something must be done to offset that sort of work.

They say paper will lie still while you print anything on it. It is an easy matter for a department store to advertise hot-water bottles, as specially priced at 98 cents, value $1.75, and, as far as the public is concerned, they may get away with the exaggerated value. A conscienceless department store, and let us be thankful these are becoming less frequent, can give any kind of values it likes in the druggists' sundries line without fear of the people in general knowing much about the truthfulness of the proposition. The public cannot tell the difference in hot-water bottles, tooth brushes, hair and nail brushes, fountain syringes, and countless other things, until it is probably too late to complain.

A druggist who was troubled with a particularly virulent kind of department-store competition, which was constantly trying to make it appear that the druggist was a robber, came right out into the open with a little plan of his own which had a tendency to draw the claws of this competitor.

He devoted one large show case to meeting this competition. He put a sign above it, " Competition Department." Throughout the case he used little cards reading, "We Challenge Competition/ ' "We Undersell Department Stores/' " Our Prices as Low as Anybody's," etc.

In this show case was carried a constantly changing stock of such goods as the department store was advertising, priced at their prices or lower. These were goods of the department-store class, bought cheap to enable the druggist to compete with that form of competition on an even basis.

Whenever the department store advertised a special value, the druggist was right there with what he showed to be a better value, a similar article at an even lower price. He went the department store one better on price on all the cheap-quality goods. He met them on standard goods. He advertised that the goods in that case were sold on the department-store plan — anything to make the price look cheap. This kind of work had a strong tendency to discredit the department-store methods, and even to give the department-store a black eye. His newspaper advertisements saying that he had a " department where goods were sold on the department-store plan " began to get under the belt of the department-store people, though there was no chance to complain publicly of the method of getting even with them. The result was a gradual discontinuance of the objectionable competition. Of course, the big store tried to head off that kind of advertising, and one local newspaper was influenced to refuse to allow the druggist to run such advertisements as ha was using, but this only made matters worse for the department-store, because the druggist gave full publicity to the complaint, and the department store was blamed for trying to "muzzle the press. "

The druggist who finds the department-stores getting his business, needs, first of all, to set about developing on the part of the public a confidence in his store that cannot be felt in the drug-store department of the big store. The druggist is a professional man, and as such is a reliable individual whose statements about his goods bear the stamp of knowledge and reliability.

The druggist is an expert in his line of goods, and he is qualified to tell his customers more about them than any department-store salesperson can tell. We all know how much the average, or the above-theaverage salesperson in the department store knows about the quality of bristle goods and rubber goods. In the department store little or no attention is paid to the technical side of the goods — everything is commercial. If a customer wants to know why English brushes are the best, why the best bristles come from Russia, why Japanese brushes are cheap in quality, why a red hot-water bottle may be or may not be better than a black one, can that customer find out in the department store ? Verily not. (Unfortunately, there are many drug stores where he cannot find out, either.)

The department-store salesperson cannot tell much about the goods, except the price and such other facts as are obvious upon the surface. There is really very little inducement save the price for buying such goods in a department store.

The odds are all in favor of your store when it comes to the better class of trade. The department-store druggists' sundries department gets trade in two instances. It gets some trade from people who happen to be passing through the department and buy because they see something they want. It gets some more trade from people who think they can buy the same goods there more cheaply than elsewhere. The former class of trade will naturally come to you except when occasional purchases are made simply from being where the goods are seen. The latter class you must get by showing them through your advertising and displays that you can sell as cheaply as anyone, quality for quality. Of course, when you get the customer into your store, you are in a position to give a service that they cannot get in the department stores. You ought to be able to hold the trade, once it comes your way.

In addition to advertising your goods, advertise that which no department store can advertise, because it does not possess it — the qualifications for giving the public the services of graduate pharmacists in all that they buy in the pharmacy. The average drug-store customer knows little or nothing about the goods he is buying except what he is told. He possesses himself no technical knowledge. He buys on the say-so of the seller. Can't you make it plain to the people that it is worth while for them to seek the store where they can find out anything they want to know about what they are buying, where they can be certain that the goods are guaranteed on a basis of understanding, and that all adjustments will be made with intelligence?