The New Year prophets have come and gone. And the average businessman is now trying to summarize their messages and find out what they said. First, he finds that financial as well as other doctors disagree; second, that when such messages from the master minds of Business really say anything, it is apt to be limited to the district or business in which the particular master mind is preeminent.

SO started a TIME story in the issue of Jan. 7, 1924, as the weekly newsmagazine, looking back on its own first year of existence, "reviewed" the U.S. economy and, taking into consideration the dangers of economic prophecy, refrained from making any forecasts.

Ever since, TIME has in one form or another presented what has come to be called its Year-End Business Review. Yet "review" seems an unsatisfactory word. In business, as in all fields of human endeavor, one of TIME'S major aims is always to review the news--not just in the details and meaning of events that took place last week, but within the context of the more distant past.

Still, we believe we would be failing in our function if we were to offer only a compendium of the past without reference to the future, if we were to concentrate on the accomplished while neglecting the accomplishable. Economic prophecy remains a hazardous proposition, but likelihoods can be drawn from present trends and past experiences.

It is in that sense that this issue's cover story falls within the category of the Year-End Business Review. It is less a review than an analysis of that phenomenon of modern times --the Consumer Economy. The consumer, of course, has been around for a long while, and anyone who has ever gone as far as Economics I recognizes at least his abstract force for sustaining prosperity or hastening recession.

But the individual consumer is not apt to think of himself as an economic power. When he thinks about it, he is more likely to feel himself at the mercy of governmental and business trends beyond his ken or control; when he goes to the store, he sometimes feels himself the victim of surly salespeople and shoddy goods. And when he starts feeling too strongly along such lines, he may start sitting on his wallet.

Few people understand this better than Jack Straus, boss of the world's largest store and the man who appears on the cover. He was chosen as a representative of the best among U.S. retailers--and for helping bring out the best in the U.S. consumer, thereby making 1964 the most prosperous year ever and offering both the hope and expectation that 1965 will be even better.

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