psychotechnics of selling and to
put it on a firm psychological foundation.

The idea of scientific management must be extended from the industrial
concerns to the commercial establishments. The questioning and
answering, the showing and replacing of the goods, the demonstrating
and suggesting by the salesmen, must be brought into an economic
system which saves time and energy, as has been tried with the laborer
in the factory. Wherever economic processes are carried out with
superfluous, haphazard movements, the national resources have to
suffer a loss. The single individual can never find the ideal form of
motion and the ideal process by mere instinct. A systematic
investigation is needed to determine the way to the greatest saving
of energy, and the result ought to be made a binding rule for every
apprentice. How the smallest influences grow by summation may be
illustrated by the experience of a large department store, in which
the expense for delivery of the articles sold was felt as too large an
item in the budget. The hundreds of saleswomen therefore received the
order after every sale of moderate-sized articles not to ask, as
before, "May we send it to you?" but instead, "Will you take it with
you?" Probably none of the many thousand daily customers observed the
difference, the more as it was indifferent to most of them whether
they took the little package home themselves or not. In cases in which
it was inconvenient, they would anyhow oppose the suggestion and
insist that the purchase be sent to them. Yet it is claimed that this
hardly noticeable suggestion led to a considerable saving in the
following year, distinctly felt in the budget of the whole
establishment.

We must not forget, however, that the process of buying deserves the
same psychological interest as that of selling. If psychotechnics is
to be put into the service of a valuable economic task, the goal
cannot possibly be to devise schemes by which the customer may easily
be trapped. The purpose of science cannot be to help any one to sell
articles to a man who does not need them and who would regret the
purchase after quiet thought. The applied psychologist should help the
prospective buyer no less, and must protect him so that his true
intention may become realized in the economic process. Otherwise
through his suggestibility, the determining idea of his goal might
fade in his consciousness and the appeal to his vanity or to his
instincts might