Excerpt from Retail Buying: Modern Principles and Practice This volume on Retail Buying provides a simple and readable explanation of what is best to-day in buying principles and practice. The author has built around his own experience as a buyer and as a student and teacher of buying, and he has drawn upon the experience and the investigations of successful merchandizers in every line of retailing. Therefore, the book will be found to cover the subject briefly and concisely but yet completely. It is only within very recent years that such a work has been possible. In the "good old days" buying was done by "rule-of-thumb" methods. A science of buying was as unknown as a science of retailing. In fact it is only by developing buying methods along scientific lines, and by working out methods in the other divisions of retailing in the same way, that we can hope to put storekeeping on a rational basis. The department store and the chain store have been doing pioneer work along this line, and to them and to a small band of scattered retailers of other types must be given much of the credit. For it is generally known that a large part of their success is due to their development of scientific buying principles and practices. But the difficulty has been to adapt the methods of the larger stores, and particularly those in which it seems possible to install complete systems, to the needs of the average retailer. A system is of no value if it cannot be used. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.