Haberdashery

“ He had forgotten the dead past in his present vision, which was of a luxurious room in a spacious mansion, and a tired man of affairs coming quietly into that room—from a conference at which he had consolidated the haberdashery trade of the world—and sinking noiselessly upon a rich divan, while a beautiful woman in a dress of brown and tan, her hair slightly silvered, played to him through the twilight upon a grand piano, the only other sound in the great house being the softly murmurous voices of perfectly trained children being put to bed in a distant nursery upstairs. ”

“ Her husband had that day returned from sea with money, and she, after months of stint, indulged in an orgie of haberdashery at the nearest shop. Mrs. Munsey was reassured. Trade was increasing; perhaps an assistant would be needed soon, in addition to the two girls.
Only the younger of the girls, by the bye, had as yet taken any active interest in the business: Emma, the elder, spending much of her time in a bedroom, making herself unpresentable by inordinate blubbering. This was because of Mrs. Munsey's prohibition of more company-keeping with Jack Page. ”

“ The sale of such articles is not generally carried on alone, and a “haberdashery counter” usually forms a department of drapers’ shops. The word, found in Chaucer, and even earlier (1311) , is of obscure origin; the suggestion that it is connected with an Icelandic haprtask, “haversack,” is, according to the New English Dictionary, impossible. Hapertas occurs in an early Anglo-French customs list, which includes articles such as were sold by haberdashers, but this word may itself have been a misspelling of “haberdash.” ”

“ He is messenger boy, train dispatcher, department buyer, credit man, actor, lawyer and politician—all under one hat!
By "salesman" I do not mean the man who stands behind the counter and lets the customer who comes to him and wants to buy a necktie slip away because the spots on the silk are blue instead of green; nor do I mean the man who wraps up a collar, size 16, and calls "cash;" I mean the man who takes his grip or sample trunks and goes to hunt his customer—the traveling salesman. Certainly there are salesmen behind the counter, and he has much in common with the man on the road. ”

“ Thus the church throws her dead weight into the scale of commerce, and the law gives up the cause of contention: but there is nothing more disgraceful, except thieving, in other places. “I am told,” says an elderly gentleman, as he amused himself in a pitiful bookseller’s shop in a wretched market town, “that you are a stocking-maker by trade!” The humble bookseller, half confused, and wholly ashamed, could not deny the charge. “Ah,” cried the senior, whose features were modelled between the sneer and the smile, “there is neither honour nor profit in changing the trade you were bred to. ”

“ I had always thought myself honest, believing that business expediency made it necessary to give a few people the inside over others; but I am going to make a frank confession to you—I can say that I have not been honest. "'I feel like a certain clothing manufacturer felt for a long time. I was talking with him at luncheon the other day; he is a man who marks his goods in plain figures. If the salesman, by mistake, sold a ten dollar suit for eleven dollars, the goods when shipped out are billed at ten dollars. ”

“ All of our mercantile cities are overrun with young men who have been bred for the counter or desk, and thousands of these genteel young gents find it any thing but an easy matter to find bread or situations half their time, in these crowded marts of men and merchandise. An advertisement in a New York or New Orleans paper, for a clerk or salesman, rarely fails to "turn up" a hundred needy and greedy applicants, in the course of a morning! ”

“ Dealers had erected booths and stalls on the pavement, and overspread them with scanty awnings, beneath which they stood, vociferously crying their merchandise; such as shoes, hats and caps, yarn stockings, cheap jewelry and cutlery, books, chiefly little volumes of a religious Character, and a few French novels; toys, tinware, old iron, cloth, rosaries of beads, crucifixes, cakes, biscuits, sugar-plums, and innumerable little odds and ends, which we see no object in advertising. Baskets of grapes, figs, and pears stood on the ground. ”

“ The rest of the trade are content to take their refuse, with which, and the fresh scum of the press, they furnish one side of a shop, which serves for the sign of a bookseller, rather than a real one; but, instead of selling, dealing as factors, and procure what the country divines and gentry send for; of whom each hath his book factor, and, when wanting any thing, writes to his bookseller, and pays his bill. ”

“ There are shops for the sale of second-hand clothes on either side of all the narrow thoroughfares, but the bulk of the business is done by those dealers who bear their goods about with them, slung over their shoulders or hugged in their arms, and who push and drive through the mob with the rest, screeching out with all the strength of their lungs what it is they have got to dispose of, and what the price of it is. ”

“ Luck stopped across the street and looked the bank over, and saw how the sun would shine in at the door and through the wide windows during the greater part of the afternoon, and hoped that the cashier was a human being and would not object to a fake robbery. Not liking suspense, he stepped off the pavement and dodged a jitney, and hurried over to interview the cashier.
You never know what secret ambitions hide behind the impassive courtesy of the average business man. This cashier, for instance, wore a green eyeshade whenever his hat was not on his head. ”

“ If you have ever passed through any of the above-enumerated experiences—and what man or woman has not—forget it; deliverance is at hand. The hour of the hastily impressed newspaper, the borrowed umbrella, or the painfully extracted cash loan from the hotel clerk or elevator boy is to bob up unserenely no more, for the paper raincoat has taken its place alongside the egg sandwich, chewing gum, and insurance policies placed before the public in vending machines. ”

“ The male or female adventurers, launching with their bag of letters for all their merchandise on the social sea, understand well the potent value, beyond bills of exchange, of the sheets they bear. They may have taken them as an equivalent for some service they have rendered, in discharge of some actual or apparent obligation in the great market limited to no quarter of our towns and no description of articles, but running through every section of human life. ”

“ If they are engaged, as now is not unfrequently the case, in talking politics, or reading a newspaper, or perhaps only enjoying a cool seat in the back of their shop, they will often say they have not the article enquired for, rather than rise to fetch it; and if the customer persists and points it out in the shop, he is coolly desired to get it for himself, and lay down the money. ”

“ The current of our daily life, the springs of our activity or fortitude, may be supplied as well from hope as fear, from ‘cheerful and confident thoughts’ as the apparition of famine stalking just behind us. The merchant attends to his business, settles his accounts, and answers his correspondents as diligently and punctually as the shop-keeper. The shop-keeper minds his customers, and puffs off his goods, tells more lies, is a greater drudge, and gets less for his pains than the merchant. ”

“ When you buy a new suit of clothes, you pay the dealer, say, one hundred dollars; but can you figure what you are paid for being immaculately dressed, for having just the right kind of tie, just the right kind of accent, just the right manner of asserting your own importance and securing your own place at the banquet-table of Big Business? ”

“ Every shouting dealer collects around him a crowd of listeners; these, however, are circumspect purchasers, and don't permit themselves to be decoyed. Now and then, a handkerchief, a paper of buttons, a hank of thread, flies into the embrace of a peasant woman or girl, and whilst they thoughtfully examine the wares, and slowly reach for their small coin, the dealer has turned himself to other customers, in perfect security that he will be paid. He who shouts the loudest, and makes the most violent gesticulations, attracts the greatest number of people around him. ”

“ The surly salesman who goes around carrying with him a big chunk of London fog does himself harm. If the sun does not wish to shine upon him—if he is having a little run of hard luck—he should turn on himself, even with the greatest effort, a little limelight. He should carry a small sunshine generator in his pocket always. The salesman who approaches his customer with a frown or a blank look upon his face, is doomed right at the start to do no business. ”

“ Here, likewise—the germ of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, careworn merchant—we have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste of traffic as a wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures in his master’s ships, when he had better be sailing mimic boats upon a mill-pond. ”

“ And as it seems prudent to guard against accident by death, as well as that the Company be secured against the neglect & misconduct of its servants in this business, I do hereby, for myself and my house, here guarantee the safety of the houses named as above, for the execution of this business, and also that such bills of exchange, as they shall remit on the above account, shall be good.
The agents in this business hope to be indulged with giving their ships in the trade the freight of the tea out, in preference to others. ”

“ He nodded pleasantly to the two delivery drivers loading their wagons for the first trip of the morning, and cast upward the inevitable, complacent glance at the sign that ran across the front of the building--CHILDS' CASH STORE. The lettering, not too large, was of dignified black and gold, suggestive of noble spices, aristocratic condiments, and everything of the best (which was no more than to be expected of a scale of prices ten per cent. higher than any other grocery in town) . ”

“ The business of the market over, they invade the shops and restaurants, not as our peasants do, who look timidly about them with an air of asking leave to enter, but with the look and bearing of persons who know themselves to be welcome. ”

“ As I said, the shops are almost entirely devoted to the sale of articles of luxury, for the Frenchman, acute being that he is, discovered thousands of years ago, that a profit of five hundred per cent. may be made upon articles of fancy; while the dealer in things essential, which may not be dispensed with—articles of prime necessity—obtains a beggarly ten or twenty. He learned centuries since that Madame will pay any price for a hat that pleases her taste, and do it without question, while she will haggle an hour over the price of twenty pounds of sugar or a cut of beef. ”

“ There are some days when I believe all the food in the shops is made of painted cardboard like a doll’s-house dinner-party, because, although there appears to be an endless variety, there is, in fact, nothing that can be bought and eaten by ordinary people. If you examine each item separately, this will become evident. All the things in the windows are frauds, for the reasons described in Mrs. Globe’s shop, and therefore there is nothing for it but to have just the usual; to return up the street again to the butcher. ”

“ You know I'd have starved, or have taken a job as a waiter in a restaurant, before I'd have gone to Ken Howarth to help me out with ten dollars, because I knew him rowing; but I went to him a couple of weeks ago on that introduction 'and to-night, because he knew me rowing, I have his order. That's business. ”

“ The advertisement in the daily or weekly papers, the placard on the walls or boardings, the perambulating vans and banner-men, and the doomed hosts of bottle-imps and extinguishers, however successful each may be in attracting the gaze and securing the patronage of the multitude, fail, for the most part, of enlisting the confidence of a certain order of customers, who, having plenty of money to spend, and a considerable share of vanity to work upon, are among the most hopeful fish that fall into the shopkeeper's net. ”

“ You may purchase our books of any news agent, aboard every passenger train in the United States, Canada, England and Australia, carrying a "news butcher." At depot and other news stands and all up-to-date news and book stores. If residing far in the country, your store keeper, always willing to handsomely add to his income, may get our titles for you by requesting us to furnish him the address of the nearest jobber. ”

“ The up-to-date merchant shows his knowledge of the power of suggestion for customers by his fascinating show-windows and display of merchandise.
The restaurant keeper knows the power of suggestion of delicious viands upon the appetite, and we often see tempting dishes and articles of food displayed in the window or in the restaurant where the eye will carry the magic suggestion to the brain.
A person who has been reared in luxury and refinement would be so affected by the suggestion of uncleanliness and disorderliness in a cheap Bowery eating-place that he would lose the keenest appetite. ”

“ Carts creaking under the load of merchandise, the flourish with which the goods and wares were exposed for sale, fashionable gentlemen in their fanciful evening costumes walking to and fro, the troublesome hawkers that stand by the roadside questioning every one as to what they would buy, and several other things interested him, and for a time made him somewhat proud even, that he ruled over such a rich country. ”