VOL. XXII.

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CO

URIOSITY killed the cat. Bad Bad for the cat but good for curiosity. Curiosity has a big death roll to its credit. Curiosity kills dejection, misery, depression, worry and troubles of all kinds and sizes.

Curiosity is worth making friends with. Why? Because it helps us forget the heavy weights of time, trouble, worry and kindred "ailments." Curiosity creates and stimulates interest. Interest is the soul of life. Interest keeps us awake, helps us along, stimulates ambition. Ambition is a goal. Interest and curiosity help us reach our goal with the least energy and fatigue.

We are now in a new period of life, marked

No. 4

as 1916. Let us start at once and cultivate the friendship of curiosity. Let curiosity help us see things in the brightest light. Let it help make our work pleasure, our trouble air bubbles. Let it help us radiate cheerfulness and delight to all we come in contact with. But how?

Be curious of all we do in business or pleasure, not in the sense of always prying, ferreting and asking questions, but in our own minds. The dollars and cents in our till at the day's end represent fruits of our scheming, buying, advertising and salesmanship. The figures in our books are not merely cold-blooded numerals, representing nothing but ink on paper. They represent many, many things if only we will be curious to find why. Effect has a cause. Let us find the cause. Let us not be content in knowing our profits are up or down. us find out why. Let us find out why the other fellow is glum or bright, why that line will not sell, why our lighting bill is higher than usual, why the clock ticks, why one assistant is better than another. There must be a cause. It is interesting and stimulating to know why.

Let

Too many of us are given to believing anything we see or hear or dismissing as petty or unnecessary, other peoples views. A wise man can learn from a fool.

Too many of us read our trade papers without thinking over what we read; we are either too busy to give the articles proper consideration or we believe we have something more important on hand and we thus miss ideas and opportunities which may be worth fortunes. In the modern business rush we want to do too much, but surely there is opportunity after work is finished or during business hours to read, mark, have and inwardly digest the impressions given us by others. What is one man's meat is another man's poison. To use the knowledge we get we must mentally chew

and extract what will suit our own particular requirements. The best of suggestions and knowledge is useless unless we adapt it to suit our needs. Therefore let us think over what we hear and see and ask ourselves why these things are so. Let curiosity rule, create and stimulate thought and action and we will be the better for it.

Let us start at once with THE SPATULA, giving proper consideration to what we read. Whether we get actual results or not, we certainly will derive mental exercise and consequent creation of beneficial mind broadening ideas resulting in our using as a motto "Curiosity Creates and Stimulates."-W. H. Magnusson.

Of all forms of business suicide, probably the most direct is to deliberately fool your customers. A not uncommon way of taking this step is to advertise some article at a great bargain; for instance, offering from 9 o'clock to II A. M., some morning, two five-cent cakes of soap for a nickel, and then, when the women arrive to take advantage of the bargain, to tell

them that each customer can make but one purchase at the reduced rate. Sometimes this. is varied by running out of the goods when the time is about half over. In such a case every woman who is fooled will march straight off

to the other store to make the balance of her

purchases, and, ten to one, she will keep going to that other store. You can't blame her, either. If you are going to advertise a bargain don't put a string on it.

The Modern Way.

The up-to-date drug store will find a typewriter a well-nigh indispensable part of its

equipment. Its uses are innumerable. Typewritten labels look neater, can be more easily read, and are appreciated by customers. It makes possible timely personal letters to a select mailing list. The small store that could not afford the expense of a printed catalogue may get out typewritten lists of staples and specialties in spare hours. Such a list placed in the homes of the people who live out of town in the adjacent territory will invariably bring business of the most desirable sort. Orders that come in for things that you list and your competitor does not will usually be accompanied by orders for other goods seen looking for the main item.

Tactful Selling.

The clever salesman never scares his customers out by naming the price on the goods the first thing. Lots of times you can sell to the prospective buyer goods twenty-five per cent better than he came to buy by a little judicious talk and a withholding of the price until the quality is made perfectly apparent. A high-priced article sprung upon such a customer suddenly when he is looking for something cheap is pretty likely to end in a disastrous failure. Get out the inexpensive goods, and then make apparent the difference between them and the good ones before quoting the price at all. It doesn't take a great deal of tact to manage this successfully even when the customer asks the price at once. Some Day.

The most overworked day in the entire year, although it occupies no place in the calendar, is "some day." There are more engagements for that day than for any other, and for the most part they are disagreeable engagements. Most druggists have in mind a series of store changes that they vaguely expect to make "some day," with no very definite notion of What is the just when that day will come.

matter with making them now? The time to develop business is now. There really is no time like the present, and the sooner you get those plans of yours working the sooner there will be results from them. If you can't do it all right away, do what you can. The trouble is that most of us do not feel an unquenchable

yearning to go ahead and do the best we can without waiting until we can do it all, just as we have dreamed of doing it "some day." We see great things ahead, and when we get to it we are going to spring some surprises upon the public that will make them open their eyes.

A Winter Problem.

With January thaws and midwinter rains, the matter of keeping the store floor in any. thing approaching a presentable condition is a problem indeed. An effective doormat is yet to be invented, and the trail of mud from the sidewalk is the despair of the druggist who prides himself on a neat, attractive store. "Prevention is better than cure," however, and more attention given to cleaning a wide area of sidewalk in the early morning and at intervals throughout the day should help to mitigate the evil. It is also important that people should be able to cross the street in front of your store and do it dry shod. If there is no crosswalk right by your store, see that a path is shoveled through the snow in winter and the pavement swept in summer. If there is a crosswalk near you, keep it the cleanest one on the street. Women will remember the place where the crosswalk is always clean and go a block to cross the street there in muddy weather. If they do that, they are bound to get into your store once in a while. Natural Allies.

The physicians are the natural allies of the druggist, and there should be close and reciprocal relations existing between them. You can do much to keep your allies in theory your allies in fact by the simple and inexpensive method of mailing a little market report in the form of a typewritten or mimeographed letter the first of each month to every doctor within reach of your store. Tell them of important changes in prices of goods they use. Tell them of good new things in the way of pharmaceuticals and make them an inviting price on some leader of your own every time. Show them that you recognize their existence and would like to be friends. You will surely get results. Get together. Crucify your little petty jealousies and meet on a level plain,

which you can do if you are as good a pharmacist or M.D. as you ought to be to hold a job or case in this day and age. Window Allurements.

Pictures have come to be a necessity in advertising, and their possibilities for the retailer are almost as great as for the manufacturer. Every window display can be made more alluring by placing therein a picture or two. People will stop to look at a picture in one corner of the window when the goods in the window would not have attracted attention at all. Local views, photographs with titles appended, are about the best, and they will draw the public better than anything short of a moving object. You can use pictures to good advantage in your other advertising - your booklets, folders and newspaper ads - and they will help the ads to draw if the pictures are appropriate and good. Don't spoil otherwise good ads with poor cuts.