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I Women s Wear _A Dominant Figure in a Hard-Skelled City By Milton Mackaye H OW he revolutionized selling methods and enthroned himself as the king of the women’s wear in New York is the dramatic story of the rise of S. Klein, related to The Southern Israelite through special arrange ment with The New Yorker, smart New York w eekly. * * • S. Klein grew rich by breaking all the well- established laws of retailing except those of honest \alue and honest dealing, and now, the ramshackle store that sprawls across the east side of In ion Square and nods to the dance halls and cheap- John joints in Fourteenth Street does a gross of >25.000,000 a year—at least it did last year. His personal income is more than $1,000,000 a \ ear, his material possessions momentarily increase, and he remains, in his own mind, a mere shirt-cutter who made good. l'wenty-six years ago Klein was a half-starved tailor with ambitions. Today he is one of the won ders of the mercantile world, and the heads of great depart ment stores come humbly to his converted loft building to study his methods. He is honestly unassuming and is perennially surprised that public officials and community leaders should take an interest in him. Praise his business, the thing he has created, and he is \our friend for life. The Klein store deals only in women’s and children's wear and it is the largest women’s wear shop in the world, despite the fact that the average sale price of a dress at the Union Square emporium is less than >5.00. On Saturday, the multitude makes a Times Square rush 'ccm as lonely as a Texas plateau; thousands of ruthless and voracious women fill the j aisles and elevators, pushing, jabbing, clawing, I slugging their way toward bargains. All’s fair and the only rule is a rule of self- prr^rvation: keep a stiff knee in your neighbor’s midriff and a firm hand on your pocketbook. Klein probably is the only man in the world j w ho advertises not to bring people to his place of | business but to keep them away. The crush during ’he busy hours is responsible. He has a high regard tor advertising as a commercial investment, but, out of a decent consideration for the welfare and safety of the community, he doesn’t dare use it. 1 he simple facts are these: Every time he has mnounced special bargains in the newspapers, '^re have been riots. The size of the crowds have :«>rced him to close his doors, people have been in- | ured, traffic has been paralyzed in the Square, md police reserves have been called out. V ven now, reserves are often summoned into 1 ’ion when a carload of dollar dresses is placed on ‘‘‘ c * view of this risk to life and limb, Klein j a d\ertises only to announce that the store is clos- !n 2 for a holiday, thus saving customers a futile *'ip to Fourteenth Street. THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE * The attraction at Klein’s, the magnet that draws the thousands there, isn’t the courtesy of the clerks; there are no clerks. Nor is it the magnificence of the store; it is a pretty dismal place. The answer to Klein’s success is low prices. Some of the prices just can’t be believed; a sports dress for a dollar, a silk suit for $5, an evening dress for $7.75. Not all of these outfits are in the best possible taste, but excellent styles and neat getups can be located by the occasional patient and well-armored shopper of taste. The choice is wide. Klein has adapted the cafeteria system to ready- to-wear. Monstrous racks, groaning with bright colors and silks and woollens, run angular miles through the store. There are no showcases, no folderol. Every customer thumbs through the racks, grabs what she wants before the woman be hind her does, and carries her prize off to the dressing-rooms. On busy days the less modest girls have been known to hoist their skirts and get on with the business of fitting right in the middle of the store, hut that practice is discouraged. Privacy in the dressing-rooms, however, is something less than that of a nunnery, and no over whelming fastidiousness is tol erated. You can undress with 500 other women or you can go somewhere else to trade. Klein has four thousand square feet of floor space. He has a constant stock of between two and three thousand gar ments—the very thought of 200,000 dresses is somehow ap palling—and the stock changes constantly. Nothing must stand still; if a dress does not sell in two weeks, it is automatically re duced in price. Say that a garment is priced at $4.45. If it is still on the rack in a fortnight, it is reduced to $3.45. If it fails to sell in two weeks more, it is cut to $2.45, and the process con tinues until the customer may have it for a dollar. Klein, to whom every inch of floor space is so much gold dust, cannot afford to have it in the shop. The store’s gross at the end of the first year was $20,000 and by 1914—his self-service system in stalled—he was doing a business of $100,000 an nually. Klein in those days was his own manager, his own bookkeeper, and his own buyer. His greatest assets were a pocketful of cash and the nose of a terrier for manufacturers in trouble. He knew goods and he knew workmanship and he could locate infallibly the firms which were about to close their doors. At the last minute before the sheriff came, Klein, his stocky shoulders hunched in an old brown coat, would appear with $500 in cash to buy the stock on hand. He was hardboiled; busi ness was business. And the bargain he drove with a strong whip he passed on to his customers. Ctmrtap TV JewUh Trwarrlpt—Seattle. S. KLEIN It Pleases Momma.” Self-service, the handling of the dresses by the customers themselves, is a great temptation to the light fingered, and Klein has taken cognizance of the fact by plastering all over the store great signs, printed in English, Italian, and Yiddish. They bear such blunt legends as “Don’t Dis grace Your Family!’’ and “The Punishment for Dishonesty is Jail,’’ and each placard is adorned by a rude chromo of a distraught maiden peer ing from behind big, black bars. Girls on high platforms maintain a constant surveillance of the customers, store police are scat tered through the premises, and patrons in the dressing-rooms receive the comforting assurance that “Detectives Are Always Watching Y'ou.’’ Klein says that he loses $100,000 a year through shoplifting, but the true figure is probably much higher. YY’hcn Klein apprehends a woman with a rec ord, a professional shoplifter, he prosecutes to the limit; it is a sort of insurance that his store should be known as tough hunting grounds. l he kleptomaniac wife of a prominent man, for example, pilfered most of the Fifth Avenue shops and got aw*ay with it because of her husband’s influence. She was caught at Klein’s and sent away to the Island for three days despite everything her hus band could do. Klein's tough ways with confirmed criminals are offset by a rich vein of understanding and toler ance where first offenders are concerned, but he hates to have stories of his leniency get about. He thinks it is bad for business. Washington Irving High School, a populous hive, is just around the corner from Union Square, and for years the fluttering schoolgirls were con siderably more than a nuisance. Many of them came from poor homes and were dazzled by the unending array of frocks in the store. Finally Klein made a rapproachment with the Washington Irving principal. Schoolgirls now are rarely arrested when they sneak a drew; as a rule, they are sent quietly back to their teachers and the matter is allowed to drop there. Klein’s decency, howxrver, goes farther. He has created a special fund which is in the custody of the principal. Instructors are told to keep a lookout for youngsters whose poverty and shabbi ness shame them before the other girls. They are outfitted free from the Klein fund and there is always a free outfit at Klein’s for anyone who comes to him with the proper cre dentials. • • * t'Moruay The Jewish Tnutarript Seattle. It is quite impossible to separate Klein the man from Klein the businessman, for the simple rea son that he has no interests outside his business; it is his life. His only reactions are motoring and horseback riding; he never plays golf, never goes to the thea tre, never patronizes night clubs, and never reads a book. He is forty-five years old and a widower, and despite his nabob’s income, lives very simple at 225 Central Park West with his three daughters, nineteen, seven teen and nine years old. He has no social ambitions and would sooner take a licking than wear a dress suit. He is short and sturdy, has a large head on square shoulders, talks with a faint accent, and has a broad, homely, cheerful face. He laughs a great deal. Complementing his commercial shrewdness, there is in the merchant a streak of sentimentality a yard wide. He keeps a record of everyone of his eighteen hundred employees in a special file in his office, and if he discovers that increases have lagged in a particular case, he calls in a department head to find out why. Each Christmas (Please turn to page 15)