Music Trade Review

Music Trade Review -- © mbsi.org, arcade-museum.com -- digitized with support from namm.org
February, 1945
Established 1879
Vol. 104, No. 3
THE
PIONEER
REVIE
PUBLICATION
OF
THE
2782nd Issue
MUSIC
INDUSTRY
Conserve Your Capital Now;
Keep it Liquid for the Future
by LOUIS G. LaMAIR
President of Lyon & Healy, Inc., Chicago, 111.
HERE are two thoughts I would like to get before the group.
One of the greatest services I think that we as individuals,
or we as an association can render, is to drive home to our
own business associates and to our own local merchants,
whether they be in the music business or any other business,
the idea that conducting a retail business is not now and will
not he, with or without OPA, with or without any kind
of government regulation, a simple task. The cost of doing
business in all retail stores, in all kinds of business, has been rising. We have
been on an escalator, and without even recognizing the fact that the escalator
was going up, it has been going up. New kinds of expenses have been saddled
onto us, expenses such as employment insurance, federal old age benefits. Real
estate taxes have risen. It is expressed either in your bill from (the tax
collector or in your bill from your landlord. The costs of rendering all kinds
of service in your establishment have been increasing, whether it is the night
cleaner, whom you used to employ for six hours a night for $55 to $60 a month,
and whose wages now are $90 to $95. whether it is the personal property tax
bill—whatever form it takes. All of these costs have been increasing, some
of them slowly, some of them rapidly, but continuously going in only one
direction.
i] ?
In the case of the department store,
the music merchant, or any other kind
of business, with the narrowing of
income on one side and an increase
of expenses on the other, whether we
get it from OPA or from any other
source, the squeeze is on, so that if
we are going to survive as merchants,
we are going to have to become better
business men than we have ever been
in the past.
I have heard stories of the old days
in this business where piano mer-
chants would buy carloads of pianos
at $95 apiece, ship them four hundred
miles away from Chicago, and go out
and sell them in the countryside for
prices ranging anywhere from
THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW, MARCH, 1945
In an informal discussion of industry
and association problems at the mid-
ear meeting of the Board of Con-
trol of the National Association of
Music Merchants, L. G. LaMair, Pres-
ident of Lyon & Healy, Inc., and
Vice President of the Association,
called attention to the necessity of
anticipating postwar capital require-
ments NOW. So much interest was
shown in the subject by those pres-
ent, it was decided to make the in-
formation available to the member-
ship. The statement herewith and
the discussion which followed was
therefore distributed to the NAMM
membership by Executive Secretary
William A. Mills and is printed here-
with for the benefit of The Review
readers—Editors note.
LOUIS G. LaMAIR
as high as $500 and $550. They
would take five dollars down and hope
that the customers would take four
or five years, at six per cent interest,
to pay them off.
I believe that when such easy condi-
tions as that exist in an industry, you
have to be pretty darn good to avoid
making money—and those are the
conditions which prevailed in this
music business twenty, thirty, forty
years ago. But we might just as well
wake up and realize that those condi-
tions are not here now, and that they
are never coming back. They just
aren't. You are going to have to be
better merchants. You are going to
have to do your business in the best,