* * * * *

The opposite type is known as the Deliberate Customer.  She walks slowly and in a dignified manner.  Her facial expression is calm and poised.  “Gestures are uncommon, but if existing tend to be slow and inconspicuous.”  She can wait.

Then there is the Vacillating or Indecisive Customer, the Confident or Decisive Customer (this one should be treated with subtle flattery and agreement with all her views), The Talkative or Friendly Customer, and the Silent or Indifferent one.  All these have their little weaknesses, and the perfect salesperson will learn to know these and play to them.

There seems to be only one thing left for the customer to do in order to meet this concerted attack upon his personality.  That is, to hire some expert like Mr. Ivey to study the different types of sales men and women and formulate methods of meeting their offensive.  Thus, if I am of the type designated as the Vacillating or Indecisive Customer, I ought to know what to do when confronted by a salesman of the Aristocratic, Scornful type, so that I may not be bulldozed into buying something I do not want.

If I could only find such a book of instructions I would go tomorrow and order a black cotton engineer’s shirt from that sandy-mustached salesman and bawl him out if he raised his eyebrows.  But not having the book, I shall go in and, without a murmur, buy a $3 silk shirt for $18 and slink out feeling that if I had been any kind of sport at all I would also have bought that cork helmet in the showcase.

LIV

“YOU!”

In the window of the grocery store to which I used to be sent after a pound of Mocha and Java mixed and a dozen of your best oranges, there was a cardboard figure of a clerk in a white coat pointing his finger at the passers-by.  As I remember, he was accusing you of not taking home a bottle of Moxie, and pretty guilty it made you feel too.

This man was, I believe, the pioneer in what has since become a great literary movement.  He founded the “You, Mr. Business-Man!” school of direct appeal.  It is strictly an advertising property and has long been used to sell merchandise to people who never can resist the flattery of being addressed personally.  When used as an advertisement it is usually accompanied by an illustration built along the lines of the pioneer grocery-clerk, pointing a virile finger at you from the page of the magazine, and putting the whole thing on a personal basis by addressing you as “You, Mr. Rider-in-the-Open-Cars!” or “You, Mr. Wearer-of-141/2-Shirts!” The appeal is instantaneous.

In straight reading-matter, bound in book form and sold as literature, this Moxie talk becomes a volume of inspirational sermonizing, and instead of selling cooling drinks or warming applications, it throws dynamic paragraph after dynamic paragraph into the fight for efficiency, concentration, self-confidence and personality on the part of our body politic.  A homely virtue such as was taught us at our mother’s knee (or across our mother’s knees) at the age of four, in a dozen or so simple words, is taken and blown up into a book in which it is stated very impressively in a series of short, snappy sentences, all saying the same thing.