Deja News
By Maria Weiskott -- Gifts & Decorative Accessories, 1/1/2007
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I was reminded of this adage while leafing through the fragile and now yellowed premiere issue of The Gift and Art Shop, predecessor to Gifts & Decorative Accessories. The issue was from January 1917 — nearly a century ago.
In reading the articles from that issue and others throughout the magazine's inaugural year, it was striking how similar they were — barring fancy language and gender preference, of course — to what we write today.
For example: "Feeling competition, gift shops must keep on progressing and hustling for their share of the business. The gift department idea for the retail store is thoroughly sound and has made good. There is a small gift shop in many big retail establishments today. The gift shop keeper should take cognizance of this practice and recognize it as strong competition. Of course it is clean and legitimate competition, but it is competition just the same and must be reckoned with in due season. More and more the gift shop keeper must put on special stunts to get people in the neighborhood to come in and look over his stock."
Hustling for business and putting on "stunts" (events?) to bring in customers. Sounds familiar. Though we might argue with the "clean and legitimate" competition statement.
And how about this piece of advice from 1917: "No retail dealer can expect to get all the possibilities out of his business until he has looked at his store from the outside and viewed his counters from the front."
Or this one: "More sales is the greatest retail demand in America today." Amazing!
And yet another: "Never think of attempting to run [a gift shop] without a cost accounting system which would enable the proprietor to know definitely and accurately whether he was making or losing money and how much. With such a system he would be able to tell at any time if a certain line of goods was paying or not. He could tell if prices were adequate to yield a real profit, or whether he was failing to take into adequate account the overhead expense."
Like we said: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
