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WESTERN COMMENT
Is a Piano "Merchandise "?
REVIEW OFFICE, CHICAGO, I I I . , February 25, 1929.
ONE of the most interesting and useful practices is that one, un-
happily much neglected, of thinking out the words one uses, of
pausing from time to time to ask whether a form
What
of language customarily used actually does mean
wnat one
Is
^ a s been supposing or accepting it to
Merchandise?
mean. Frequently the results of a little thought
in this direction are astonishing. Consider, for instance, the simple
and innocent word "merchandise." It connotes anything offered
for sale. Webster defines it as "whatever is usually bought or sold
in trade or by merchants," and the definition is good for all or-
dinary purposes. Yet, within that one little simple word, as in the
definition of it by the great lexicographer, more than one pitfall
lies hidden. Strictly speaking, a piano, as something bought or
sold in trade, is "merchandise"; but in the common current ac-
ceptation of the term a piano is nothing of the sort. For the mod-
ern world, engrossed in business as no past generation was ever
engrossed, has come to think of "merchandise" and "merchandis-
ing" as the objects and the technique respectively of large-scale
commerce. To-day we speak of "merchandising" and its technique
when we are thinking of the art of distributing goods on a very
large scale, in enormous quantities and at great rapidity. The
dry-goods store, whether enlarged into a great departmental estab-
lishment or strung on a string as one of a chain with links all over
the land, has come to be the symbol and the type of "merchandising"
in its current sense. The quantity of the retail transactions taking
place all over the country each day is so stupendous as to over-
shadow all rivals; so that the latter have found themselves borrow-
ing the trappings, the methods, the very trade slang of the dry-
goods store. Words like "turnover," "mass-selling" and a dozen
others have embedded themselves in the mosaic of modern business
discussion so deeply as to color the whole pattern, so that it appears
to be almost impossible to get business men, in any line of com-
merce at all, to talk or think save in terms of the special kind of
merchandising displayed in the rapid turnovers of stock, the vast
volume of individually small transactions which characterize the
daily work of the department store. Automobile merchants talk-
in 1 dry-goods terms. So do sellers of hardware, of paints, of fence
wire; and of pianos. The practice is universal. But is it correct?
Is it correct as applied to pianos.-
Is the piano merchandise? The question is not asked in a spirit of
levity or in an attempt at smart writing. I am not beating the air
in the effort to find a clever-sounding topic for
"Goods"
discussion. I am, on the contrary, asking a plain
or
and simple, a serious and a significant, question.
Culture?
Is the piano "merchandise," using the word
"merchandise" h? the sense of that kind of goods which can properly
be handled on modern principles of merchandising? Is it possible,
or at least is it correct, to apply to the particular kind of business
which deals in pianos and other high-class musical instruments the
principles which have been successfully applied to the handling of
the innumerable small retail transactions of the dry-goods business?
And I think that there can be only one possible answer to any or
all of these questions. I think that in each case the answer must
be decisively No. The piano is not merchandise, in the common
contemporary (not Webster's) sense of the term. The piano can-
not be sold upon the assumption that the American people inevi-
tably will consume just so many pianos each year, just as they inevi-
tably will consume no fewer than so many oranges, or so much
flour or even so many theatre tickets. The piano to-day, whatever
may once have been the case, is then not "merchandise" in any
current sense.
THE piano to-day is an implement of culture. It can only be sold
on the principles which guide in the sale of high-class books, high-
class etchings, subscriptions to the Encyclopaedia
The
Britannica and so on. In other words, the piano can
One
only be sold on the understanding that it is neither
Principle
furniture nor transportation, but is the medium
through which music is made in the home by persons technically
able to handle its keyboard. Who was the clever man who said to
the editor of The Review over a luncheon table the other day that
the most serious obstacle to large selling of fine pianos, straight or
reproducing, lies in the fact that one cannot leave his beautiful
grand outside the house parked at the curb for the neighbors to
admire? In a word, the piano is an instrument of culture and not
a public sign of wealth. Why, to-day, should anybody buy a
piano? For no reason at all, save only the reason that a piano in
the home is the means to music in the home, made by someone who
is part of that home, and not merely tolerated at times as
something caught from the outer air. A piano to-day is bought be-
cause the buyer plays, or has some one at home who plays.
Now, if this be true, it is perfectly ridiculous any longer to talk
about merchandising methods for the piano based upon the prin-
ciples or the practices of other trades. The piano
What
is not a rapid turnover article. It is sold singly
to
to individuals or to family groups, for cultural
Do
purposes. Dry-goods principles are thus to piano
selling no more than a delusion and a snare. But this does not
mean that piano selling cannot be built up on sane principles or
carried out in satisfactory volume. It does mean, of course, that
any such successful principles or practice must be built up on an
impartial and unprejudiced study of the facts as they exist to-day.
For the piano industry is dealing with a serious situation. Changes
in the domestic life of the people, brought about by mechanical in-
ventions and by deep movements in social thinking, which twenty
years ago would have been- considered incredible, have upset the
simple basis on which piano selling once rested. Never until now
has it, in fact, been necessary for a music merchant to think of the
piano as primarily a musical instrument. To-day this must be done
at the first, before anything else is done. To-day and henceforth,
the piano is to be considered as something for those who play, who
wish to play, or who wish at home to hear played, piano music;
music actually made at home and not merely poured in artificially.
That the demand for pianos, based on these facts and conditions,
should be great enough to keep the piano industry on a prosperous
basis, can hardly be doubted by anyone who knows the musical
situation of the country. On the other hand, there cannot be the
least doubt that the selling of the general run of pianos (not of the
few which have definite name value of their own) will henceforth
tend more and more to be only part of the activity of the music
merchant. The combination music store is not a thing of the future
but of the present, and is only following the lines laid down already
in other competing and successful lines. Merchants will put their
efforts into selling pianos just precisely in so far as piano selling
may appear to be a practicable and profitable way of spending time.
Manufacturers will have therefore to put themselves first to the
task of building up a public sense of the desirability of the piano
more acute than now exists; and merchants will have to co-operate
with them. Every study of the present situation indicates that
merchants who are keeping in touch with the musical sense of their
communities, who are viewing pianos as musical'instruments and
who are basing their sales work on the principle behind that view,
are selling successfully. Not "merchandise," then, but "music."
.
W. B. W.