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OCTOBER 9,
1920
THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW
11
ST. LOUIS PIANO DEALERS REPORT VARIABLE BUSINESS
^
Local Demand Fluctuates With the Weather, Say Piano Men—Small Grands in Unusual Demand 1
—E. M.
Alch
With
Famous & of Barr
Co.—To
Feature
ST. LOUIS,
MO.,
October
4.—Extremes
weather
in the
parlors Welte
sales Reproducing
are effected Pianos
with a great I
conditions during the past week brought extremes deal less difficulty than they are on the broad
of business conditions. The first part of the week open floor.
was unseasonably warm, but it had been that way
E. M. Alch, for the past five years with the
throughout most of the month and people had Conroy Piano Co. and before that with the Bald-
got used to it and honored the piano men with win Piano Co. and the Bollman Bros. Piano Co.,
considerable patronage in spite of it. The latter and one of the best known salesmen in St. Louis,
part of the week brought the first severe Autumn has taken a position with the Famous & Barr Co.
cold snap and business was frost-bitten. St. piano department.
Louis people are peculiar in that way. Any sud-
Longfellow has been drawn upon for a senti-
den change of weather conditions upsets the ment suitable for the remodeled piano department
orderly procedure of their lives and business feels of the Stix, Baer & Fuller Dry Goods Co. Above
the effects of it. For the month as a whole busi- the passage between the piano and talking ma-
ness was pretty good in dollars and cents in gen- chine department is the following appropriate bit
eral and particularly good in that respect in of poetry:
spots. On quantity of merchandise sold the
"And the night shall be filled with music,
month was off, but on volume of business done it
And the cares that infest the day
compared very favorably with the same month
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs
last year, some houses reporting a very good in-
And as silently steal away."
crease over September, 1919.
Manager Dockstader's sellers are a cheerful
Grands and reproducing instruments continue crew. Not only did they run away from their
to crowd the upright pianos and ordinary players quota for anniversary week, but they have man-
out of the way. Dealers are bending all their aged to stave off the slump which usually comes
energies to get all the small grands that they can. the week after.
The Famous & Barr Co. music salon, for in-
Albert Price, of Price & Teeple, Chicago,
stance, has six lines of grands. Manager J. F. passed through St. Louis Thursday on his way
Ditzell is not going to get caught short on back to Chicago from a trip through the South.
grands if he can help, and his way of helping it
The Kieselhorst Piano Co. broke into the roto-
is to have such a lot of manufacturers working gravure section of the Post-Dispatch last Sunday
for him that if one falls down he can fall back with an announcement of grands and reproducing
on the others. In one of the parlors of his re- grands. The illustration, a lady at the piano and
arranged salon he has a display of grands, a gentleman with a violin, was in keeping with
among them being the Chickering, the Stein- the high artistic quality of the rotogravure sec-
ert, the Boardman & Gray, the McPhail and the tion.
Kranich & Bach lines.
Manager Elam, of the Scruggs, Vandervoort &
Most of the pianos in Manager Ditzell's depart- Barney piano department, will feature Welte re-
ment are in the parlors. Formerly most of them producing instruments in his October advertising
were on the open floor. They made a more im- campaign. He says that the September business
pressive general exhibit than they make now, of the department more than doubled that of
but the conditions for selling were not so good. September of last year.
Another drawback to the old arrangement was
that it formed a broad avenue connecting the
SCHAFF FACTORY RUSHED
North and South elevators, and salesmen had a
hard time determining whether the persons who Output of Schaff Instruments Being Main-
tained at Top Notch—C. S. Miller Views Out-
wandered through were looking for pianos.
look for the Future With Optimism
Under the new arrangement, with the department
out of the beaten path of travel, everyone who
HUNTINGTON, IND., October 4.—Business at
enters it is presumed to want something, and the
work of the salesmen is greatly simplified. And the factory of Schaff Bros. Co., located here,
would indicate that the much-discussed "gen-
eral depression" has not yet laid its blighting
finger on the piano industry. The factory is
working at maximum capacity, and it is said
that the orders on hand will keep the plant work-
ing for many months to come.
Curtis S. Miller, vice-president and sales man-
With 3 sounding boards
ager of the company, said, after attending a
in each (Patented) nave the
convention of piano dealers at Youngstown: "I
greatest talking points in
was temporarily touched with pessimism, but
the trade.
after carefully thinking over conditions in the
piano industry I have become convinced that
il is in excellent shape.
"It is only natural that automobile manufac-
turers, because of their excessive price increases,
must make radical decreases. The piano busi-
ness, however, is different and quotations on
materials entering into pianos have not dropped,
and if they do drop it will be so slight that
it will make slight difference in the cost of the
finished instrument. Lumber for pianos and
lumber for buildings are two different things,
and piano strings and piano felts are not like
steel or oil.
^ , 1 jjnnmii
"It is noticeable that all the automobile manu-
OTBTTOS.
facturers
who are decreasing prices are continu-
tea
taanloJUNt
ing to pay well for labor, and to my notion this
is a fine thing for a piano salesman to remember.
The laboring man is still, and will for a long
We fix " o n e p r i c e " —
time to come, be buying pianos. The dealer
wholesale and retail.
who waits for a decrease in prices and delays
to order his holiday stocks may not have any
stock. Crops are fine all over the country, and
if there is any great readjustment the country
was never better fixed physically to face such
PHILADELPHIA, PA.
a change."
3 Great Pianos
The Heppe Piano Co.
DON'T YOU CASH IN ON A
Golden Opportunity
and make more
$
$
$
than anyone else in your |
community by selling
Seeburg's
Style "E"
It's a wonderful little money-
making instrument—a combina-
tion of electrically-driven auto-
matic Player-Piano, Flute and
Mandolin—that appeals strongly
to the owners of
Restaurants
Cabarets
Theatres
Dancing
Pavilions
Candy and
Ice Cream
Parlors
It has Sold Itself for
others-why not for you ?
Just put one on your
floor and let them come
in to hear it. Write us
today and we'll let you
in on more secrets.
J. P. Seeburg
Piano Company
Leaders in the Automatic
Field
419 West Erie Street
Chicago, 111.