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There is no investment a business man can make that will pay him a greater per cent, than patience and amiability. Good humor will sell the most goods. John Wanamaker's clerks have been heard to say: "We can work better for a week after a pleasant 'Good morning' from Mr. Wanamaker."
Armour and Cudahy and Swift made the packing business; Marshall Field built up a business in Chicago rivalling Wanamaker's; August Belmont, William C. Whitney, Levi Leiter, Robert Goelet, Pierre Lorillard, and a hundred others, amassed great fortunes. Yet there was nothing in their career different to those of the men already considered in this chapter. They had a genius for money-making.
The Waldorf-Astoria alone tops all residential buildings with eleven hundred and twenty telephones and five hundred thousand calls a year; while merely the Christmas Eve orders that flash into Marshall Field's store, or John Wanamaker's, have risen as high as the three thousand mark.
Then he went to Wanamaker's, and spent an hour in the teapot section trying one pattern after the other, patiently pouring water, provided by a tipped but languid and supercilious assistant, out of each different make of teapot into cups. They all dribbled. Then Mr. Twist went home and sat down and thought.
"Cis never could dance with One-Eye, and not jus' 'cause he wears spurs, neither. No, she thinks One-Eye's too homely to dance, or go callin', or take t' Wanamaker's. But, oh, she says you're jus' fine! Maybe not as grand as the Prince of Wales, she says, but then she's awful silly about him." More steady looking; more blinking. "Well, er what did you say the little girl's name is?"
Pa looked as innocent as John Wanamaker's picture addressing a Sunday school, the giant saw the dogs and started for a tall tree, and the fat lady said she couldn't find any hole big enough to hide in, and "the idea," if there were not men enough to protect a lady.
Then he went out and sat down again, and another lady passed him of a different form, of different complexion, with a different shape and color of bonnet. "Now," said he, "put such a bonnet as that in the show window." He did not fill his show-window up town with a lot of hats and bonnets to drive people away, and then sit on the back stairs and bawl because people went to Wanamaker's to trade.
Indeed, he laughed at none of Johnnie's ideas, and would listen in the gravest fashion as the boy described a new think-bicycle which had arrived from Wanamaker's just that minute accompanied by a knife with three blades and a can opener. The Father agreed that there were points in favor of a bicycle which took up no room in so small a flat, and required no oiling.
On this particular Saturday of ninety-seven, the shopping multitude was already pouring from the Scylla of Simpson, Crawford & Simpson's on Sixth Avenue and its Charybdis of the Big Store past the jungles of Altman's, Ehrich's and O'Neill's to dash feebly upon the buttressed corner of Macy's, and then die away in refluent, diverted waves, lost in the fastnesses of McCreery's and Wanamaker's, far down Broadway.
I knew just how happy it made her to be able to give me such a present, for I remembered what pleasure I had in sending Jack the watch-fob that I had earned all myself. "Then we went to Wanamaker's and by that time it was so late she said we'd better go up stairs and take lunch there. There wouldn't be time to go home and prepare it ourselves.
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