Although they did a business of over 153 billion dollars in 1952, retailers, faced with half the costs of overall distribution and cut throat competition from within their ranks, only averaged a profit of one to three cents on the dollar. The problem of reducing distribution costs will fall on the coming generation of retailers to solve before the industry can offer high returns to its stockholders, and establish itself as a blue-chip investment field.

Retailing may have lagged behind other industries in its development, but never because of inaction. Merchandising has always been a dynamic field, of necessity living from day to day, dependent upon its ability to guess what the public will want tomorrow. With ever-fluctuating customer demand and price competition setting the pace, retailers have until recently hesitated to gamble on long-range planning.

The first steps in an organized industrial development can be seen in the move t the suburbs.

The move has only served to heighten the ulcer-forming problems of the merchandising executive. All the old problems of daily sales reports, increased expense problems, profit responsibilities, slow selling merchandise, fashion trends, and long hours have taken on a new suburban slant. The result has been to make the retailer's job one of the toughest and most unpredictable in any field. Rapid turn overs in executive positions are the rule, not the exception.

With the industry based more than ever on the query "What's new?", the trend and demand is more than ever toward younger men to fill extensive junior executive posts. yet younger men are sorely lacking in the field.

High Overhead

Department store heads blame high initial salaries offered by more mechanized industries for luring away college graduates who, they feel, would do far better in the merchandising field in the long run.

Yet salary and the rate of advancement are the strongest inducements t men to enter retailing. After completion of the initial six to 18 month training period, "the sky's the limit" for a talented person able to stand the physical rigors of the buying and selling life.

Establishments customarily divide themselves into five departments: merchandising, management, publicity control and finance, and personnel. Although the trend is away from the emphasis now placed upon the merchandising division, it is still by far the most dominant and distinctive feature of the business. It includes the essential functions of buying and selling.

The buyer is still the center of the retail trade, and will probably always remain so. He is the hub of a wheel around which flourish dozens of advisory bureaus connecting every phase of the business. They exist solely to support the buyer. He must go out and bring in the goods that will sell. It is on his success above all that every branch of the retailing industry must stand.

Nine out of ten prospective retailers gamble their physical energy and mental capacity in the hectic field of buying.

For college graduates the gamble usually begins to pay off within three years with no more serious results than eventual upper bracket incomes.

Buyers live at a phenomenally fast pace, performing a dynamic and fascinating function. The starting pay is low, and the training period is tedious, but 18 months will make a man an assistant buyer, and sometimes another 18 months make him a full buyer. With companies hiring one buyer for every 50 employees, advancement is rapid.

Salaries depend upon the size of the organization, and the sales volume of the department for which a buyer is working. Pay will run from 1 1/2 percent to 2 1/2 percent of that volume. An assistant buyer usually earns between $50 to $125 a week; a buyer makes from $75 a week to $25,000 a year after bonuses.

Stores currently follow one of two dif- ferent schools of thought on the function of a buyer, but the tendency seems to be toward turning the buying job into that of a department, manager.