AMAZING DRESS SHOP

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 92, 12 January 1935, Page 17

AMAZING DRESS SHOP

Bargains in New York The fashion expert ot the "Daily Mail” writes of the most amazing dress shop in New York —or even in the whole of the United States.

It is so unusual, states the writer, that even New Yorkers cannot quite believe it, and they talk to you about it as though it were one of the city’s institutions like the Statue of Liberty or the Rockefeller Centre, or something like that.

It was started in one small room 28 years ago by a little man with a mania for work and a perpetual siniie, who is in bis own words, "without any ambition whatever.”

The founder i.s still sole owner of his shop, but his annual volume ot business has leaped to £5,000,000. and an army of 100,000 women daily storm the buildings which contain the miles of racks on which hang his stock of dresses, suits, and coats. He sells hats and coffee, too, but be regards these as mere sidelines. I heard of this shop in England, and I have since met rich Americans whose wives dress there —only their wives don’t know I know, . For tliis shop sells clothes to the poorest little typists anxious to make a good show on their meagre salary, as well as to many famous women whose names are "front page” news. You can get a dress for 4/- or pay £5O for a fur-trimmed coat. But if you know a good frock when

you gee one there is no need to pay more than £2 for it unless you want a wedding outfit in real satin in which case you might pay £2/10/-. Enormous Crowds. Inside, the crowd is enormous and the noise prodigious. There are hundreds of women on this floor alone, feverishly searching through racks on which garments are carefully graded in the meticulous sizes demanded by all feminine America, so that the outsize woman can find something as easily as the school girl. There are no assistants, no carpets, nothing, in fact, whicli will add one cent more to the cost of these clothes. For the man at the top prides himself on the fact that his overhead costs on his enormous turnover amount only to 16 per cent. Having found what she wants, a customer may choose six garments to try on. A woman will yank them off their racks and race for one' of the great bare dressing-rooms. And here among half a hundred others she tries on her selection before a mirror while a friend holds her own garments and her bandbag. A friend is an essential part of this transaction. Women who have forgotten this precaution may find themselves marooned in their underclothes. But not much “borrowing” or shoplifting goes on. Only about £20,000 worth of goods is lost every year. It is a little difficult to conceal a dress when perched high on rostrums all round the dressing-room are keeneyed young women who, immediately they see any furtive action, call to it the attention of the world in general and the delinquent in particular in a high nasal voice. .But just to make quite sure, the walls are placarded with ingenious and slightly naive notices, depicting a gloomy young woman behind prison bars with the following phrases in five languages printed bene'ath: — “Dishonesty means prison”; "Do not disgrace your family”; and “Our detectives are always on the watch; it pays to be honest. Added to this there are at the main doors of the store men dressed in police clothes, although they do not belong to the New York police force; they are there “just for the moral effect.” Mounted Policeman. Usually there are also a mounted policeman or two outside, for there are wild goings on during a sale, and thousands of bargain-maddened women have to be dealt with as gently as possible. If when a customer has found what she wants she discovers that the buttons are missing or the belt has disappeared from her dress, she takes it to a counter where, with the most charming of smiles and truly awful efficiency, the right buttons are hunted up or the belt Is found, and even minor deficiencies in. the dress are pointed out. The motto is, “Give your customer what she wants, even though she only spends 4/-.’’ And the owner believes in his own maxim so thoroughly that he willingly refunds, without any question whatever, the money on anything purchased if it is returned within live days. This is why more manufactured women’s wear Is sold here in a year than in all the department stores in New York put together. The organisation is remarkable; he has perfected a system which gives him a twice-daily inventory of his enormous stocks. If a dress is in its place more than a fortnight the price is ruthlessly and his stock is turned over 25 times a year. He studies his clientele as carefully as the highest-priced store could do, and having given them what they want when they want it and at the price they want it at, “I stand outside,” says the proprietor, “and watch them go in. “I look at the expression on their faces when they come out carrying my little boxes, and I put up notices in the store asking them to tell me how I can improve it. Did you notice those?” When there is a sale due women seem to know by some .sixth sense, and that is when the police are really busy controlling traffic in New York.