Something for Everybody

Marvin and Obadiah Leonard were a couple of Texas farm boys when they came to Fort Worth in 1918, bought a general store and settled down. They knew how to make customers feel at home. Said Marvin: "If you see a man who wants to spit, walk in front of him and spit, so he'll see that it's the thing to do." Said Obadiah: "The customer pays our bills. We're going to be good to him."

This week the Leonards opened the latest addition to their cut-price department store. It upped their selling space by half, making it one of the largest retail houses in the Southwest. They expect 100,000 customers on opening day, hope never to see a day when the cash registers fail to ring up $100,000 in sales.

The Leonard brothers, in addition to low prices, lure customers with such things as shopping buggies that have space for both packages and babies. In keeping with their original general-store idea, the Leonards try to stock their counters with so great a variety that there is sure to be something in the store for everybody. Old hands at buying (and selling) "distress merchandise," they once bought eleven carloads of "surplus white enamel iron mosquito bars, converted them into wartime-scarce towel racks, and sold the whole caboodle at a nice profit.

The Leonards treat their suppliers with the same regard as their customers. Salesmen are met at the railroad station with limousines, and office space is provided them. The store has a fleet of trucks which pick up much of the merchandise it buys--a scheme that helps to keep down costs.

Now grossing $26 million a year, Leonard's is neck & neck with Houston's Foley's, Texas' most spectacular retail outlet. Next year Leonard's hopes to leave Foley's far behind. Says brother Marvin: "A store must always grow, or else it's going to shrink."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.