And these were as wrong as the first.
"Where McGinty sits is the head of the table." The trade siphoned itself
thither under the magic name of Wanamaker, as though the shade of A. T.
Stewart had been summoned from its confines in the Isles of Death.

In Stewart's day no sign had been placed on the building. He said,
"Everybody will know it is A. T. Stewart's!" And they did. After his
death the place was plastered with signs that called in throaty falsetto
at the passer-by, like eager salesmen on the Midway who try to entice
people to enter. The new management took all these signs down, and by
the main entrance placed a modest tablet carrying this inscription:

John Wanamaker
Successor to
A. T. Stewart

It was a comment so subtle that it took New York a year to awaken to its
flavor of tincture of iron.

That little sign reminds one of how Disraeli was once dining with an
American and two other Englishmen. In the course of the conversation the
American proudly let slip the information that he traced a pedigree to
parents who came to America in the Mayflower. One of the Englishmen here
coughed, and vouchsafed the fact that he traced a lineage to Oliver
Cromwell. A little pause followed, and the other guest spat, muzzled his
modesty and said he traced to William the Conqueror. Disraeli, with
great deliberation, made a hieroglyphic on the tablecloth with his fork
and said, "And I trace a pedigree to Moses, who walked and talked with
God on Mount Sinai, fifteen centuries before the birth of Christ."

John Wanamaker leaped the gulf of twenty years and traced direct to A.
T. Stewart, as well he might, for it was Stewart's achievement that had
first fired his imagination to do and become. A. T. Stewart was the
greatest merchant of his time. And John Wanamaker has been not only a
great merchant, but a teacher of merchants. And the John Wanamaker
Stores now form a High School of economic industrialism.

John Wanamaker is still teaching, tapping new reservoirs of power as the
swift-changing seasons pass. As a preacher and a teacher he has surely
surpassed the versatile Stewart.

* * * * *

To succeed in business today it is not enough that you should look out
for Number One: you must also look out for Number Two. That is, you must
consider the needs of the buyer and make his interests your own. To sell
a person something he does not want, or to sell him something at a price
above its a