The retail store contains fabrics of every description and price. The wife of a millionaire can gratify her fancy here to its utmost limit, while the poor sewing-girl can obtain her simple necessities at the same price which is demanded for them from the rich. In the shawl department, there are "wraps" worth as much as $4,500, but not more than one or two find a purchaser in the course of a year. Shawls at $3,000 find a sale of about twenty a year, and the number of purchasers increases as the price diminishes. The wealthy ladies of New York deal here extensively. One of the clerks of the establishment recently made a statement that a fashionable lady ran up a bill of $20,000 here in two months.
Mr. Stewart, though leaving the details of the retail business in the hands of Mr. Tuller, the general superintendent, yet keeps himself thoroughly informed respecting it, and exercises over it a general supervision, to which its increasing success is due. He knows exactly what is in the house, how much is on hand, and how it is selling. He fixes the prices himself, and keeps them always at a popular figure. He is said to have an aversion to keeping goods over from one season to another, and would rather sacrifice them than do so. He has no dead stock on hand. His knowledge of the popular taste and its variations is intuitive, and his great experience enables him to anticipate its changes.
"There can not be so much selling without proportionate buying, and Stewart is as systematic in the latter as the former. Of late he has not acted personally in making purchases, but has trusted to the system which he organized some years ago, and which he has found to admirably answer as his substitute. He has branch establishments exercising purchasing functions only in Boston and Philadelphia, in the United States; in Manchester, England; and in Paris and Lyons, France. But while these are his agencies, his buyers haunt the marts of the whole