Frugality, Inc.

To see how well it pays

To be clean & neat & frugal,

Consider please the case

Of Alice Foote MacDougall.

Little Widow MacDougall started business in Manhattan at 41 with $38 and a coffee pot. She picked up things as she went along.

In 1908, her coffee merchant husband dead and three children on her hands, she bought 100 Ib. of coffee from friends on credit, roasted it, sold it to other friends at 75% profit. In seven years she had put the children through school. To the coffee business she had added tea and cocoa.

Curly Son Allan went to War; Widow MacDougall did War work at home. In 1919 Allan returned to home and business; mother & son opened a shop in Manhattan's Grand Central Station. In addition to coffee, tea & cocoa they sold Spanish, Italian and English pottery and tea sets.

The shop lost money. Mused Allan: "If we could get them to drink a cup of our coffee they would want to buy it."

"I'm not going to be a Salvation Army lassie now the War is over," said frugal Mother MacDougall.

Nonetheless. Son Allan had his way. One day coffee & waffles were served free to 115 people. Many of them took home a can of MacDougall coffee. A few days later waffles & coffee were again served-- for a price. From then on, to the business in coffee, tea, cocoa. English, Italian and Spanish pottery and tea sets, were added waffles.

The MacDougalls opened a coffee house at No. 37 West 43rd Street. It served not only coffee, tea, cocoa and waffles, but sandwiches, complete lunches, dinners.

Mrs. MacDougall had a breakdown, went to Florence for a rest. When she returned she enlarged her restaurant, sold not only Italian, Spanish and English pottery and tea sets, but decorated the place to look like an Italian garden. Prospering, she added two other spots of Italian atmosphere, a Normandy Inn, a Spanish patio in other parts of Manhattan, as well as a marionette store at the opening of which a sign announced: "Alice Foote MacDougall and Tony Sarg have a surprise for you."

Now, if you go into any one of the seven Alice Foote MacDougall restaurants in Manhattan or into the one in Rye, N. Y., you can buy breakfast, luncheon, dinner, sandwiches, waffles, tea, coffee, cocoa, Italian, Spanish or English pottery and tea sets, 29 flavors of preserves and jellies, nine kinds of pickles and relishes. You can look at lamps, shades, bric-a-brac, pottery, leather goods, Venetian woodenware, Holland glass, table linen. Tooth-picking is discouraged.

Last week Alice Foote MacDougall added one more item to her list of things for sale. Announced was the formation of Alice Foote MacDougall. Inc., a corporation to operate the restaurant and food products business. Within a month will be offered for sale 105,000 shares of common stock at about $3.25 per share. The company has an authorized issue of 500,000 shares, of which 350,000 will be outstanding. As an inducement to buy, the company can cite a $1,684,000 volume of gross business last year. Peak year was 1929, with $2,100,000. Over-the-counter sales will be handled by Pringle, Price & Co. Largest stockholders will be Mrs. MacDougall, Son Allan, and Chain Store Fund, Inc., an investment trust which bought a minority interest in the MacDougall business two years ago. With new capital Mrs. MacDougall plans to expand her business outside the metropolitan area, to advertise nationally, to add to the 250-to-500 stores which now carry MacDougall teas, coffees, cocoas, jellies, preserves, pickles, relishes.

Widow MacDougall is now 65, grey, pretty. She is still short, plump, neat and clean. Though frugal (waitresses in her Grand Central restaurant pay $10 a week for their jobs), she lives on swank Park Avenue. Her daughter Gladys married Harry Montrose Graham two years ago. Son Allan, 37, has had complete charge of the coffee business for several years (he put it in cans), is the financial brains of the organization. He is smallish, neat, curly-mustached, rides to hounds with the Spring Valley Harriers near his home at Convent, N. J. But Mrs. MacDougall is still the decorative and culinary genius of the business. Her precept: "Remember that cleanliness is next to godliness and invest everything that you use in connection with coffee with a godlike cleanliness."

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