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38
February, 1932
each regular employee whether he works twenty, thirty or forty hours is paid for forty hours every week. The company advances the pay for the shortage of hours less than forty, the employee makes this up at time and one-half.
Working hand in hand, these operating changes and the Seven Catalog Program vastly increased the vol' ume of business and produced a level of efficiency unheard of in the early 1920's.
Concurrently with these improvements in operating procedure, Sears developed its own electronic machine for maintenance of its mailing list — a machine that handles its millions of mailing stencils bearing customer names and addresses. Each stencil is punched for volume of purchase, fre' quency of purchase, and "recency". Webster's dictionary has no such word as "recency" — but Sears has it, and it means: "How recently has a customer made a mail-order purchase?" Unless you are a consistent customer, making purchases at frequent intervals in volume profitable to Sears, your name disappears electronically from the list of people to whom they send their beautiful catalogs!
BECAUSE of these catalogs, no business executive is more widely known throughout the Kansas City trade territory than Marion Reno. More than a million mail-order customers receive one of the Sears catalogs from him several times a year. Quite often the opening page of the catalog is a personal letter from Reno to his customers. His picture many
times appears on the fly-leaf of catalogs and on the heading of letters. Daily, hundreds of personal letters reach his desk from customers who have special needs, who want a catalog, who want special service, who have a complaint to make. They send him birthday cards and cakes — even ask advice about their personal problems. "The Customer is our Boss," says Reno, "and I feel flattered when they write me about their personal problems, or ask help in finding a doctor or dentist for their community.
"I suppose more of my time and thinking is given to our customers than to any other single phase of our business," continues Reno. "Our competition is very keen and we must \now our customers— what they buy, when they buy, how they buy, how much they will pay. In today's market the customer is free to spend his money where and when he wishes; and he is a shrewd buyer! We will get our share of his business only when we give him better values and better service."
Selling by catalog to a million customers each year is a big and complex job, ranging from buying the millions of dollars of consumer goods
"Sb-bl He thinks it's some sort of » gamel" — Russ T^elson