’As long as the customer is alive, you have a prospect’

Early Life

While the store was growing up, so was I. When my mother went downtown to visit the store, she deposited me in the department where ladies’ dresses were altered, where I played on the floor and made toy carts from empty thread boxes and spools. Thus my experience at Neiman-Marcus literally started at the age of two and from “the floor up.”



I was sent to a public grammar school, many of whose students came from a rough and tough adjoining area, and many a day I was run home by a gang of schoolmates, shouting, “Ikey, Ikey, little Jew-boy.” This was my first experience with any form of anti-Semitism . . .



I was in a hurry to grow up. Everything I wanted to do was being done by people older than I. When I was ten, I wanted to be sixteen; when I was sixteen, I wanted to be twenty-one. I lied about my age to girls and boasted of ficticious accomplishments and deeds to document my age . . . I guess I must have been a lonely and moody child, for I can’t recall having any good friends of my own age until much later in my adolescence.



My most dubious honor occurred during my senior year (in high school) when I was voted “ugliest boy” in the class. Mother, finding no humor in the title, quickly paid a visit to the principal, who persuaded the class to change the title to “most natural boy.”



On the day of my arrival at Am-herst, I was met at the station by a group of rushers for the various fraternities . . . When I was asked to pledge one of them, I said I’d be glad to, but I thought they should know I was a Jew. Upon this disclosure, they thanked me very much and said in that circumstance they would have to withdraw their invitation . . . Two days later when all the new students had been pledged, I found myself a member of a group of six “barbarians” including two other Jews, one Chinese, and two blacks . . . When it came to social events, we were frozen out completely.

The Family



Father:

He was right so much of the time it seemed difficult to believe he could ever be wrong.



Mother:

Mother was meticulous in showing no favoritism, or permitting any othermember of the family to do so. She always “evened” things up, even afterher four sons were grown and married.



Uncle Al:

He was volatile, egotistical, opinionated and emotional.



Aunt Carrie:

She was not only kind and gracious . .. but she possessed a queenly quality which she carried as if to the manner born.



Brother Edward:

He had spent six months at Harvard, having passed the entrance examinations which I had previously failed, but he devoted most of his time to playing bridge, which he mistakenly believed to be a required course of more importance than English and other academic subjects.



Brother Herbert:

For some reason difficult for me to understand even now, my father had a blind spot for Herb, and excused or tolerated his demonstrations of authoritarianism, temper and spendthriftness . . .



Brother Lawrence:

He was serious, analytical, and fashion-sensitive, but stubborn.



Nepotism is one of the most debilitating of all business diseases.

Stanley on Stanley

Probably the single greatest disappointment in my business career was the failure of my father, on his own initiative, to name me president prior to my fortieth birthday … I had graduated from high school at sixteen, from college at twenty, and to have made the presidency before forty would, in my opinion, have completed my track record.



I was what might be called a “fifteen minute father.” I left at eight-thirty in the morning, and I could never get home before seven in the evening. When I did return, I adored the children for fifteen minutes; fortunately, it was then time for them to go to bed. I would adore them again in the morning before I departed, for fifteen minutes.



In my most uncommunicative moments, she (wife Billie) accuses me of being a “loner,” which I guess is partially true. I do know that I sometimes “lock out” the outside world just to be able to concentrate on a thought satisfying my urgent need for privacy but antagonizing those around me. I can scarcely list this as an attractive social trait.



I should prefer to describe myself as a “progressive,” who believes so strongly in the principles of the free enterprise system that I recognize the necessity for constant reform and improvement to save it from itself.



On People

It doesn’t take long for poor people to adjust themselves to new found riches; most people want to eat well, dress better, own fine automobiles. They accept lower qualities, not out of choice, but through necessity.



We relied on our understanding of the psychology of small town residents, who have a certain inferiority complex in relation to people from metropolitan areas, coupled with a consuming desire to own something of recognizable merit. Small town inhabitants like to boast of a movie star or writer from “their” town. It gives them a sense of identity. We wanted to give them a label which would provide them with what has come to be known today as a “security blanket.”



I have found that almost any businessman is reasonable and can recognize a point of equity if you can talk to him in private, but that same man, in a crowd, can be swayed to support the most unreasonable proposition.

Some Oooh, Ahhh Sales

Large ticket sales are always exciting, though I’m prepared to spend as much time helping a customer make a modest purchase as well. One customer from Lubbock had been looking at a mink wrap for several years. Finally, she came back the fourth year and, after another two-hour session, at last found her dream stole. Then she started to bargain with me.

“Since there has been no salesperson involved, why don’t you give me the benefit of the selling commission?” she asked.

“Mrs. Allen, you have had the benefit of the undivided attention of one of the highest salaried salespersons in Neiman-Marcus, with more knowledge of furs than anyone in the Southwest, for which you have not been charged one extra penny. Neither you nor anyone else can buy this garment for less than the market price.”

Very meekly she accepted this final verdict and wrote a check for the full amount.



Late one afternoon, a little old lady in shabby clothes, carrying a paper sack instead of a handbag, came in and looked (at an art show). She was a pathetic looking person, but having nothing else to do, I explained the various media of reproduction presented in the show, and told her a little about the artists who had made the prints. After I was all through, she glanced about and said, “I’ll take that one,” pointing to a Rembrandt etching. While my mouth was still open, she reached into her sack and pulled out a roll of bills, peeled off fifty $100 notes, and handed them to me.



One man who had shopped the entire store complained that he hadn’t found what he was looking for. When I asked him what that might be, he confessed that he didn’t know, but would recognize it if he saw it. Suddenly I conceived an idea. I recalled a giant-size brandy type glass, which had been made for use as a goldfish bowl. I filled it with layers of fine cashmere sweaters in various colors to give the appearance of a pousse-café, finishing with a white angora sweater to suggest whipped cream. I then topped it with a ten-carat ruby ring costing $25,000, to simulate the cherry. I brought it down for him to see and he exclaimed, “That’s exactly what I was looking for. I’ll take it!”



Faced with another similar situation, Marcus, in desperation, suggested that he and the customer, independent oilman Dick Andrade, step outside and look at the show window.

“We passed one window filled with a variety of gifts ranging from lingerie to a white ermine evening wrap, handbags to perfumes. He paused and said, “If you could reproduce this window, as it is, in my playroom, I’ll take everything in it.” I assured him we could. We were successful in building a replica of our display just as he had seen it, using huge sheets of cellophane in place of the glass window pane. Inside was a large display card which read, “Merry Christmas, to Mary from Dick.”



One Christmas, (Silver Dollar) Jim West announced he needed a special present for his bourbon-drinking attorney. He wanted a decanter which would hold an entire case of whiskey. I recalled that we had bought a gigantic decanter for our Steuben shop, which had long since been put away in storage. Within 15 minutes I had it brought from storage and placed in front of West.

“That won’t hold twelve quarts,” he bellowed.

“Ten bucks it will,” I bellowed back.

“You’re on,” he said, turned, and ordered his minions to open the whiskey bottles. One by one the whiskey bottles were emptied into the vessel, while West and I watched, until the last quart filled the decanter.

“Deliver it,” West said, as he handed me ten dollars. I told West the decanter would cost him $2,500. Fresh out of silver dollars, he paid in $100 bills.



On Running Neiman-Marcus

We have always believed that if we can please the 5% of our customers who are the most discriminating, we will never have any difficulty in satisfying the other 95% who are less critical. The latter know the difference between good and bad, but the former know the difference between better and best. Thus, if you please the 5% the balance will willingly accept their standards.



There is a fine line between making a good and a bad sale, for if you sell a person an article beyond his financial capacity, you’ve made a bad sale; if you sell him something not as good as he should have, you have also made a bad sale.

I constantly preach to our salespeople, “As long as the customer is alive, you have a prospect.”



Specialty store retailing in particular, I soon learned, consisted of a mass of minutiae, and you made and kept your customers by your ability to remember small details, such as anniversary dates or birthdays; a promise to get a certain evening bag in time for a certain social occasion; an assurance that a purchase wouldn’t be billed until the following month; a promise that the dress bought for a girlfriend would be billed to the Mr. account and not the Mrs. account; the new name of your thrice-married best customer; a stock check to find out why we had missed the sale of a pair of black patent leather pumps; an investigation to discover who in the or-ganization had indiscreetly commented that a certain designer’s collection was poor. None of this was trivia; it’s what specialty store retailing is all about.



I received a phone call from a customer who lived in a little town two hundred miles away. She said she had purchased twenty-four gifts at $5 each which were to have been gift-wrapped, to serve as table decorations and place cards. The gifts arrived, but they were not gift-wrapped as specified, and as a result her whole Christmas dinner table decor was ruined. It was then two-thirty, and her party was to start at six-thirty. I told her not to worry, for I would charter a plane and send a gift wrapper to wrap the gifts. Our specialist was there by five o’clock, wrapped the presents, placed them on the table, and went out the back door as the guests started coming in for dinner. We spent two hundred dollars to rectify our error on a purchase of $120. We didn’t pat ourselves on the back for our urgency, but our customer did.



Very frequently I am asked the question, “Why is Neiman-Marcus so different from other stores?” The best answer I can give is that stores are, in a way, similar to newspapers, which all have access to the same news sources. They subscribe to the same domestic and foreign wire services, some may have more reporters in various parts of the world than others, and they all use approximately the same grade of newsprint and similar types of presses. The quality that makes one paper stand out like The New York Times, and another like the New York Daily News lies in the editing. One paper features its foreign news on the front page, the other buries it in condensed form inside; one plays up violence in its headlines, the other relegates such stories to its local news section. So it goes with stores … A customer of ours once described what she discerned as the difference between our store and others when she said, “What I like about your store is what it doesn’t have.