Almost everything has price
Philadelphia, USA, 11 July 1838. John Wanamaker is born, an entrepreneur who will then have a great influence on the marketing world. He started working in the commercial area with his brother-in-law at the age of 22. They both opened a store and the business gradually grew.
In 1910 he opened the big Wanamaker’s business in his city, where he started very common practices today: he organized sales at certain times of the year, organized Christmas shows to attract clients, installed restaurants within the establishment and started offering the possibility of returning after testing the product purchased. He was also a pioneer in advertising, and his is the well-known phrase: “Half of the money spent on advertising is useless. The problem is, I don't know what half it is."
One of its greatest achievements was to fix the prices of goods and label them. Wanamaker was a fervent Christian and faith led him to make this decision: for God all human beings are equal, so he considered it absolutely unfair that the customer had to try to buy any product. So, with the same price for everyone, there would be no difference. However, he did not take into account that there were huge vicissitudes in his purchasing power, so he thought God’s roads were insatiable.
Although the treatment was more common than today, many products already had a fixed price before, and surely many will have labeled it for customers to see. Wanamaker's merit was to systematize the price labels and, above all, to sell well. Pioneering marketing, great publicity was made: their articles were always high quality, their workers had better working conditions than anyone, never lied in advertising…
However, in his brilliant resume, he was stained, especially in his political performance. During the First World War, the obsession with pricing everything led him to put forward a curious proposal to the American Congressmen. By then Germany had already occupied Belgium and Wanameker proposed that the US buy from Germany the whole occupied country. So I thought the conflict would definitely end. The price proposed was one hundred billion dollars, as round as the congressional refusal.
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