By Harold Henderson
People seem to like the arrangement. “We started advertising on the radio four or five years ago, and we heard from our customers. They said, “Please stop! We don’t want other people to know about you!”‘
MARBLE SLABETTES. Marble bases with small imperfections. But hey, who among us doesn’t have a few? Made from a beautiful white marble, they were intended as trophy bases but can be used to display art, small science projects, etc. They come in three sizes, and some boast soothing cork bottoms to protect the furniture. Made in Italy.
“He was working for Western Electric, and the company next door was throwing away lenses that had hairline scratches and other small defects. Al had a passion for optics. He asked if he could buy their rejects. “No,’ they said, “but you can have them if you’ll take them away.”‘ Optical glass, it turns out, is extraordinarily hard, and hard to get rid of. “So he and his wife sat around and polished them up. They put an ad in the Tribune, ten lenses for 50 cents. Then he thought he’d try pricing them at ten for a dollar instead. “Maybe people will think they’re better and will buy more.’ They did, and that was the beginning of the business,” which at that time went under the name American Lens & Photo. Increasing the price is not as odd a beginning for a discount business as you might think; the company’s survival still depends on figuring out exactly what its idiosyncratic market will bear.
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It’s helped some. “Jerry and his father ran the business on a pack-rat basis: buy what looks good and keep it forever, just in case someone wants it. We still buy heavily what we think is good. But if it isn’t moving, I say, “Let’s start marking it down.’ Occasionally we even give stuff away. At some point it’s not worth keeping.
The company is still selling prisms and optics left over from World War II, and it buys telescopes, microscopes, science kits, and novelties straight from the manufacturer like any other store. But most of its merchandise comes from the surplus subculture. Its stock-in-trade is the going-out-of-business sale residue, the distributor’s excess inventory, the factory overrun, the game or puzzle that never caught on. There’s another element too: industrial motors, switches, and the like that aren’t usually consumer items at all. Edmund Scientific chief operating officer Dave McGonigle says, “They take items that were part of some manufacturing process, find some alternative uses for them, and offer them to the public–items that wouldn’t be available to most people in private life.”
