Chapter 10
Opening New Stores
I don’t remember exactly at what point we started to open new stores, but during the time that I was in the Boise office we did open seven new stores. Six of them were in the state of Washington. We opened one at Spokane, Tacoma, Everett, Yakima, Walla Walla, and Bellingham. All of these stores are now branches of The Bon Marche in Seattle. I’ve often wondered why The Bon didn’t do it in the first place, but for some reason, at that particular time they had our office buy and open these stores. We also bought and reopened the Paris at Great Falls, Montana. As you can imagine, doing these new stores made our work much heavier, but it was a great deal of fun.
It was a very exciting experience to be part of opening a new store. Before we did anything, all of the public relations work had been done by management. They had been in the town and surveyed the stores and made all of the contacts with the Chamber of Commerce and so on, and made their decision as to whether or not they wanted the store. Once all of the details had been taken care of and they had arranged for the store, then it was our job it go in and decide what merchandise should be bought and in what quantities. It would mean that we would go into a town and go into the store and get acquainted with the people in the departments and see what stock they carried, and what they had so far as quantities were concerned in relation to their sales, to see what brands of merchandise they carried, whether or not they were the same brands that we carried, or whether or not we would have to make new contacts in the market for them. It was also our job to go out and survey the other stores in the town and see what they did in relation to the store that we were buying and to see what lines of merchandise they were carrying also, so that we would know what our competition would be and whether we would be duplicating the things that they had, to compare their prices and to observe what type of customers they had in their stores, and also in the store that we were going to buy. We spent many hours in the library in the town looking over the advertising for both the store that we were opening and also for the other stores in the town, to see what had been advertised and what appeared to be the general method of operating these various stores in the city as nearly as we could. All of this was necessary for us to know what type of a store we wanted ours to be, and what place in the community we could best fill in order to be the most profitable to us and to make the best contribution in the community in which we were going. I won’t attempt to tell you what we did in each one of these stores. I think if I just tell you about one or two of them it will be representative of all of them, because we had very much the same experiences in all of them except for a few peculiar things that we ran into.
One of the most interesting of all of the stores we opened was at Richland, Washington. This was a new store that we built and opened completely from scratch, and it was opened for the benefit of the people who worked at the nuclear plant at Hanford, Washington, up where part of the work on the atomic bomb was done, and where a lot of the work on plastic was done. This store was peculiar in every sense of the word. It had complete government priorities. For the Richland store we could buy anything that we wanted to, in any quantities that we wanted to. If we went into a manufacturer to buy anything for that store, it had a government priority and we would get it. It was a nice little store. It wasn’t large, but it was a nice building. We had such fun with a store where everything was brand new. You didn’t have any old things that were left over from the old store that you bought, or that you had to get rid of some way; just everything was brand, spanking new.
There was also a very peculiar sensation in the town. It was a very heavily guarded town. Not that you would observe it or know, and that was part of the thing about it that made it just a little bit spooky. You didn’t know who the guy next to you was. The girls who worked in the store told us that very often when they would go back to their rooms at night, they would be able to tell that the drawers in their dressers and their rooms had been completely searched throughout the day. It was a very guarded place. At that particular time, no one knew what was being built or made over at the Hanford Plant. I heard a senator in Minnesota give a talk and tell what was going on there as if he knew, and I think he thought he did know, and I thought I was very well informed and later discovered that he had it all wrong, and nothing that he said was correct about what was being built. I guess that was one of the best-guarded secrets of the war. I don’t even know if it could be guarded that well now, the way the press gets hold of everything so quickly. It just simply was not known, really, nothing very definite about the atomic bomb until it landed on Hiroshima.
It was fascinating though, and we knew that something very hush-hush was going on in that particular little town. It wasn’t very far from Yakima. The people who worked in the store and lived anywhere except right in Richland had to have clearance to come into Richland every day and to leave, and when we made visits to the store, we had to have clearance to come into that little town and out again.
I guess we had more trouble with the Spokane store than any other store that we opened. It wasn’t the first store; I think we opened both Tacoma and Everett before we did Spokane. We built a new building at Spokane. It was an old store that we bought, but we didn’t open on that site at all; we built new. We did have some merchandise that we had to take from the old store. The problems we had were mainly with the unions. Spokane was an extremely unionized town. We had trouble with the electric union, and we had trouble with the bricklayers union, and just about the time we would think we were almost ready to open, somebody would go on strike and delay us for several weeks. We actually bought the inventory for that store completely at least twice, and some fashion items, dresses and things that had to be in and out of stock in a hurry, were bought at least three times. We would get stock in there and then there would be a delay, and so we would ship it out into the other stores as they needed it, and we would buy again for Spokane.
This saved the day for us in the Walla Walla store. I think it was one of the funniest stores we opened of all. It was an old, old store. I don’t know who the owner had been. As I remember, he was an elderly man, and he had the funniest idea of running a store. None of his merchandise was “departmentized” by age or anything but classification. All the sweaters were together, from the tiniest infant sweater to the adult sweaters. All the stockings, from the tiniest infant stocking to the ladies’ stockings, all of the underwear from the infants’ underwear to the women’s underwear, everything was stocked together in that manner. They didn’t have a children’s department at all. The children’s dresses were in with the women’s dresses. It was rather disturbing to me when I went in and found out I didn’t have any department, because all of the merchandise was mixed in with the other merchandise of its class.
About the first thing I did was start my department. There was a balcony that had had the beauty parlor on it, and I remember Ed Karren and I worked all one night there. We cleaned out that balcony, we even mopped it ourselves, scrubbed it on our knees and cleaned it up, and we got tables from everywhere we could find them all through the store, and then we went all through the stock and pulled out all of the infants’ wear that we could find, the sweaters and shirts and everything of the infants’ wear, and arranged them on these tables. Very early in the evening we could tell that we weren’t going to have nearly enough merchandise to make a respectable looking infants’ wear department at all, and that most of what we did have was quite old.
We hurried and dispatched a truck to Spokane to load up infants’ and children’s outings, little boys’ overalls and shirts, girls’ dresses, and so on, to bring back to Walla Walla. They got into Walla Walla probably, oh, 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning. We had pretty well pulled out everything that was in the store for our new department and got it arranged there on the balcony when the truck arrived, and it was unloaded, and we proceeded to get all this new merchandise out and build an infants’ wear department. We got through barely in time to go back to the hotel and get a bath and get cleaned up and eat our breakfast and get back to the store when the store opened, but it opened with an infants’ and children’s department.
It was just fantastic that day, the amount of business that we did up on that balcony. To start with, we didn’t even have a cash register, but we found a cash register and a table to put it on. They didn’t have any clerk, because they had had no department, so I was the clerk and Ed Karren worked right along with me, and I think we did borrow a girl from some other department. We sold several hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise that day in our brand new infants’ and children’s department.
That’s the sort of thing that we did in some of these new stores that we opened. In the Walla Walla store, in the shoe department, we found old-fashioned, high-heeled, high-top, lace shoes, women’s shoes, and much of the oldest old-fashioned merchandise that you can imagine. We brought a lot of it back to Boise and made a little antique gallery out of it. It wasn’t merchandise that we could possibly ever have sold. I don’t know why he had never gotten rid of it, unless it was for sentimental reasons.
You can imagine that I was pretty tired at 6 o’clock on that opening day at Walla Walla, and I had been watching the clock pretty well for the last couple of hours. But I wasn’t through by any means. The department was a shambles; all the merchandise was unfolded and just in a heap. We quickly got a bite to eat, and then we started getting it back into order for the following morning. Some of the merchandise had to be filled in, and all of the counters had to be straightened, and everything had to be so that we could work the next morning. It must have been close to midnight when Mable Nye and I went back to the hotel. She had had the same type of problem in her hosiery department. I guess all of us had had trouble, but I think she and I were about the last two that finished up, or maybe we were the first, but for some reason we went back to the hotel alone.
Who should we meet in the lobby but Mr. Hinshaw, the president of the company, and a man from New York that they had sent out for the opening of the store. They immediately grabbed us and we were to go up to their room for a drink. It’s a little bit hard to be rude to the president of the company and to visitors from New York, and I could see that Mable wanted to go, so I said, “Well, just for a few minutes.” I was awfully tired.
We went up to the room, and after they had had a couple of drinks and I had had all the ginger ale I could hold, I said, “I think I’m going to go to bed.” I could tell immediately that Mr. Hinshaw was not going to be pleased. He was set for a long evening. Well, he hadn’t worked all day like the rest of us had, with no sleep the night before. He had observed what was going on and gloated over our success, but he hadn’t done very much work. Of course if I left, that meant Mable had to leave; she couldn’t very well be left with these two men. I suppose that I should have stayed, but I felt like it was going to be rather something I didn’t care to be a part of, and anyway, I was just too darn tired.
I started to leave, and Mr. Hinshaw, I remember, eased over by me and said, “You leave and I’ll fire you in the morning.” I was so mad at that, because I felt he should have realized how hard we had worked those days, all night long, because they had all talked about it—what a job we had had to get that children’s department ready.
I was just mad enough that I said, “Okay! I’ll see you at breakfast,” and I went to my room, and instead of worrying about it, I went sound asleep immediately. The next morning I went down to breakfast. Mr. Hinshaw wasn’t there, but he arrived before I finished breakfast and left to go over to the store. He didn’t say anything about the previous night and I didn’t either, and it was never mentioned again. We had a very successful day the next day and a very successful opening at Walla Walla, and I lived to open a few more stores.
Nylon hose were just becoming popular during the time that I was in the Boise office, and I remember that when we would go out to a store, we would often take, oh, three or four dozen pairs of nylon hose. They were very scarce, and women would just be begging for nylon hose. We would have a hard time getting them, but we’d get a bunch in to the warehouse and we’d parcel them out to the stores a few dozen at a time. It was a funny thing how people could possibly know, but I’ll swear that we couldn’t hit the parking lot of a store and get inside, but what that store would immediately fill up with women coming, hoping that we had brought nylon hose. I remember that happening once in Idaho Falls, and we hadn’t even gotten into the store when the front doors opened and women just flocked in. We had brought a few dozen hose and they were gone before you could hardly bat an eye.
I bought foundation garments about that time and I’ve often thought it took me quite a while to figure out what my mistake was. The lady in Idaho Falls was always writing me, very upset because I was buying her too many heavy garments. She always had too many heavy foundation garments on hand, and would I please not buy them? About fifteen miles away in Blackfoot, Idaho, where we also had a store, the lady was always writing to me: would I please send more heavy foundation garments, why did I send her all these little light things that nobody wanted? I hadn’t been down to those two stores for quite a while, as we had been so busy up in Washington opening our new stores, so I really couldn’t understand the situation. Why in that fifteen mile radius should there be such a difference in the kind of foundation garments that they would need? Finally I got a chance to go down and visit those two stores, and then I saw the reason. The lady in Idaho Falls was a cute, little, trim woman about as big as a minute, who wore a very light foundation garment and who attracted to her that type of customer, apparently, who wore the same type of things that she did. The lady over at Blackfoot was a large, quite buxom woman who wore heavy foundation garments and seemed to attract that type of customer to her. That was a great lesson to me, that we do have a tendency to sell the type of merchandise that we like. I always used that as an illustration in trying to teach girls in selling after that to not think of themselves or what they liked, but to remember that it was the customer they were waiting on that should be pleased. Both of those women could have brought trade into their stores that they missed because they thought too much about their own preference and not enough about the customers.
That reminds me of when we opened a store in Ogden, and little Elva Stokes came tearing back to my office and said, “I’ve got a lady on the phone who wants two cheap, white wool blankets, and the cheapest ones we’ve got in stock are $25.”
I said, “How do you know that to her $25 isn’t cheap? Perhaps she’s a doctor’s wife or someone who has plenty of money and $25 doesn’t sound expensive to her. It does to you and it does to me; it sounds like quite a bit of money, but to her maybe that is a cheap blanket. Why don’t you just go back and tell her that we have two nice ones and that they are $25 each?”
She did, and the lady said, “That’s fine, that’s just about the price I’d like to pay,” and she took them both. After that I had no trouble with Elva Stokes. She became one of the best sales people I have ever known. She could line up every doctor’s wife, or every well-to-do woman in town would wait for her to buy from, because she always showed them the type of merchandise that they appreciated and that they liked. It would just absolutely flabbergast her, the things that they would buy, but she would always come back and say, “I just figured maybe they would think it was cheap, like you told me about those white blankets.” She never forgot that story.
Perhaps I’ve told you enough to let you know something about how busy we were during those War years. I remember one time keeping track—I kept an apartment in Boise in order to have a place to keep the wardrobe I wasn’t carrying with me, and I figured out that I spent two and a half months of the year in my apartment. It did get used some by my relatives. I remember once when I was in New York, being awakened about 3 o’clock in the morning by a telephone call from Frank, announcing that he was going to be married, and that since he and Marge were, perhaps not broke, but not feeling very affluent, they wondered if they might just go up and use my apartment for a week for their honeymoon. I told them where to get the key and they used my apartment.
Opening the Paris store in Great Falls, Montana gave me the reason for my first airplane ride. A lot of the girls had traveled on planes before that time, before the Second World War. It seemed that they had rather luxurious planes. They were rather slow, slow enough that they had sleeping compartments on them, because it took them that long to get to New York. I never did see any of those. I went up to Great Falls in the train, and getting to Great Falls on the train was really quite hard. You had to come down from Boise to Pocatello, and then you waited for the Union Pacific to come up from Salt Lake to Pocatello, and then it went on to Idaho Falls and up through St. Anthony and on up into Montana. I had left Boise early in the morning, and I got into Great Falls between 3 and 4 o’clock the following morning. It was a rule that no matter when you got into a town, you always got to a store when it opened. I had rather a short night.
When I got to the store, I found that Ed Karren and one of the fellows who bought hard lines had arrived there from Chicago. We worked the store that day, and Ed was going to stay for a few days, but the other fellow was flying back to Boise, and he insisted that I should fly back with him: why take the train? It would be so much simpler to fly; they had flown in from Chicago, and he had thoroughly enjoyed the flight, and it was just great. They had come in on a regular sized plane, and I think it had been his first ride. When we got out to the airport (I decided finally, after some persuasion, that I would go with him), we discovered that we were going to fly to Pocatello in a little one-engine, two-passenger plane. That didn’t make any difference to me, and apparently at the time it didn’t make any difference to him, so we started for Pocatello.
It was a beautiful ride. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. We flew like a bird, and I really mean like a bird. We dipped down into the canyons and up onto the tops of the mountains, and barely skimmed the trees oftentimes as we went sailing over the forests. It was just beautiful country. I don’t remember what time of year it was, but it was so pretty. The mountains were very heavily wooded, and being such a small plane, it was flying very low. It was just what I had imagined flying would be, ever since I saw my first airplane back in Myton when I was a young girl, just floating along with all the ups and downs that a bird would have while flying.
I noticed that this fellow was getting a little bit pale, but I thought, well, he was tired. We really had had a long day the day before. All of a sudden, I noticed that there was a fair-sized round cardboard carton, about a pint size, fastened to the seat in front of us, which was the pilot’s seat, and I said, “Oh, they’ve even brought us our lunch.”
The pilot laughed and said, “No, that’s where you put your lunch when you can’t hold it down any longer.”
That was all it took for that poor guy. He was so sick, and he just was so miserable all of the rest of the way home.
But I had a glorious time and thought it was a very delightful experience. Then when I did fly in a large plane, it seemed rather dull, because as all of you who are used to flying know, you just sit there and don’t feel like you’re going anywhere. You have no sense of movement unless you happen to be in turbulence of some sort, and the only way you can tell you’re moving is to sit by a window and look down and see the things on the ground moving along. I’ll never forget that first experience.
I never experienced airsickness, so I have no idea how miserable people are who have it, but they certainly look like they’re going through a lot. I wasn’t afraid of flying and I enjoyed it, though not as much as the leisurely train trips that we had had earlier.
I did have a couple of times that I could have been glad to be safely on the ground. One of them was coming down from Minneapolis one time. We had just left Minneapolis, and we landed in Milwaukee and then we were going to land again in Buffalo, New York, across the lake [Lake Michigan]. I don’t know how far out onto the lake we had gotten (it was a two-engine plane and I was sitting in a window seat), and I looked out, I had been reading and as I looked out, to my astonishment, the propeller wasn’t going around. I thought, Well, that’s sort of funny. I really didn’t get too alarmed until in a few minutes the hostess came bringing us our coats and told us all to put our coats on. Then I knew that we were having trouble and I wondered about that cold water down below. It wasn’t long until we landed, and it wasn’t until I got into the airport that I discovered that we had landed in Chicago. I suppose it had been closer than to go back to Milwaukee, and so the pilot had headed straight for Chicago. They put us on another plane and we proceeded to New York.
Another time, coming home from New York, I had an experience that I have never forgotten, and that I’ve really learned a good lesson from. I was sitting next to a fellow who was just coming from Iceland or Greenland, rather a rough fellow, but very nice, a gentlemanly fellow. We had visited quite a bit during the flight. It had started to storm just after we left New York, and it seemed like the storm got worse and worse. There was a great deal of turbulence and they weren’t able to serve us our meal and it was just generally quite a wild flight.
When we got into Chicago, the pilot announced to us that we were not going to be able to land immediately, because they had such a pileup of planes waiting to land in Chicago. At that time, O’Hare had not yet been built and all of the planes had to land at Midway, which is a smaller airport. Chicago was always a main place for planes to land going in all directions, east and west or north and south, and it can get pretty hairy at times. We were flying round and round and round and round in a circle in this storm, really a terrible storm. The lightning was flashing and I just felt sure it hit the wings several times.
I guess I began showing my nervousness, and this fellow whom I had been talking with spoke to me very calmly and said, “You know, you have to remember something.” He said, “When you got on this plane, you made the commitment that you were going to get on it and you knew what the chances were, and so you have to live with that commitment.” He continued talking to me and said, “I learned that a long time ago through various things that have happened to me, that whenever I start to do something, once I’ve made the commitment, I know I must live with it.” He talked that way to me very calmly and he helped me a great deal.
Eventually we were able to land, but not until after the pilot had announced that we were almost out of gas and that they had to let us come down because we didn’t have enough gas to get us anywhere else, to any other landing field. But that idea the man told me has stayed with me and has helped me many times, and I’m sure it saved me from making some mistakes in my life when I had thought that once I do this, I have made the commitment and I must live with it, so I’d better think it through and know that’s what I want to live with before I go ahead and do it.
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Go to Part 20 here.
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