A LONDON INDICTMENT

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 134, 4 December 1930, Page 10

A LONDON INDICTMENT

Sir Sydney Skinner, chairman of the great London department store of John Barker and Co., Kensington, presiding over a conference of the Drapers' Chamber of Trade of the United Kingdom, at Exeter, recently, gave an address on advertising. He said that every firm had to create a demand and much advertising had to be of an educational character and suggestive to men and women of what to buy. The trader had to give good value, but if he advertised with sincerity and treated the public as reasonable-thinking beings it would pay. The most serious abuse of advertising was the coupon system. He thought it would have its dajr and cease to be. Its suggestion was wrong. It created a dishonest type of mind, and he had no' use for anybody who wanted something for nothing. There were enough honest people in the world to do business with without resort to that form of trading. The public mind was a sensible mind and a suspicious mind, and when people thought they had been getting something for nothing they always had, at the back of their minds, the thought that they were getting a poor article. There were whispers of the predicament of many of the gift exploiters, and he thought the idea would devour itself before long. The .Exeter conference unanimously passed a resolution recommending members to refrain from giving prominence to articles with which gift coupons are given.