Business profits and human nature Author:Fred C. Kelly Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III CASHING IN ON FOOTSTEPS To a man owning a store with things in it that he wishes to sell, nothing could be much more important than footsteps. ... more »The more footsteps that pass his door, the more chance he has to do a satisfactory business. This is all obvious enough, and yet it is only within comparatively recent years that business men have been really taking footsteps seriously. It used to be that a man would rent a store location and rather trust to luck that there would be more footsteps there than at some other available place. To-day he is likely to count the footsteps in advance, before deciding where his store shall be. A famous cigar company has made a phenomenal business success by doing that very thing. Each one of the twelve hundred or more prosperous stores that they operate is dedicated to the principle that footsteps are the most vital item in retail trade. By counting footsteps, this company has discovered, more than once, that where they might rent a room for five hundred dollars a month on one side of a street, and lose money, they might rent a similarroom right across the street at one thousand dollars a month, and make a profit. It all depends on how many pairs of feet pass the store. Whether it is cigar stores or apple stores, it is possible to operate them with almost mathematical certainty. A definite number of men and women out of every hundred, or out of every thousand, on the average, will buy apples if they pass by where apples are temptingly offered. If men are more inclined to buy apples than women, then one can afford to pay more for a location where men's footsteps predominate. It is on that basis that the best place for a cigar store in the whole United States happens to be at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, in New York City...« less