United Cigar's Drug Stores

Faces of clerks working in the chain of 75 Happiness Candy Stores were animated last week. They had been thinking.

The Happiness clerks had been thinking of how to avoid disappointing customers who, because they see candy counters, soda fountains, lunch counters and, in five stores, complete restaurants, expect a full line of drugs. Customers whisper, their faces impassive as possible, hygienic and illegal requests to the Happiness clerks. The clerks on such frequent occasions are embarrassed. Frankly they explain that at their counters they have only bromo seltzer, aromatic spirits of ammonia, bicarbonate of soda and epsom salts, nothing more.

The painful situation required thought. The clerks thought, and their thoughts rose like thin spirals of incense through the executive organization of the Happiness Candy Stores, to the executive organization of the United Cigar Stores, which operates the Happiness chain. And last week the plan took form, which made the diligent store clerks rejoice.

In 15 or 20 Happiness Candy Stores best located in New York City, the United Cigar Stores will put a stock of drugs. The candy and restaurant business will be reduced to coordinated departments of those drug stores, according to the best practice of chain merchandising. If the first stores do good business, United Cigar Stores will make more Happiness Candy Stores into United Cigar drug stores. Later will be occluded by the chain the 64 drug stores operated by the United Retail Chemists' Corporation, a United Cigar Stores subsidiary. And later will come more retail outlets. Then Louis Kroh Liggett's $102,500,000 United Drug Co.'s chain of drug stores across the U. S. will have a most potent rival. United Cigar's drug store chain will be capitalized for $25,000,000 or $30,000,000.