Eye – 8 April 2016
From price tags to white feathers
The provenance of the price tag
Eye has discovered that Friends had a hand in pricing becoming more equal.
A tag indicating a fixed price was considered revolutionary at a time when haggling with the shopkeeper was the norm. The Oxford Handbook of Pricing Management says that Quaker merchants ‘are often credited with being the first’ to use this practice.
References can be found as far back as 1658, in a tract by George Fox in which he urges merchants to stop the ‘cozening and cheating and defrauding’ practice of haggling.
Daniel Defoe, in The Complete English Tradesman of 1726, wrote that Friends ‘resolved to ask no more than they would take upon any occasion whatsoever and chose rather to lose the sale of their goods… than abate a farthing from the price they asked’.
In the mid-1800s one Quaker department store entrepreneur in America helped to make the use of price tags mainstream.
Rowland Hussey Macy was born in 1822 to a Nantucket-based Quaker family. In 1858 – with a string of failed retail ventures as well as experience in whaling, printing, gold and real estate under his belt – he applied the values and lessons he’d learned to what would become the flagship Macy’s store in New York.
One of his distinctive initiatives was the use of a one-price system rather than customer-by-customer bargaining.
Equality wasn’t just limited to pricing. A profile of Rowland Hussey Macy in Success magazine also highlights that, in 1866, he was the first to hire a female executive in retail sales: ‘Having grown up on Nantucket, where women ran family businesses and households in the absence of husbands, fathers and brothers who were on whaling expeditions, Macy believed that women were just as capable as men. His Quaker upbringing also promoted the idea of spiritual and intellectual equality of the sexes.’
Too good to be lost
Seven plays and twelve stories written by two Friends from Dorking are to be saved for posterity. Su Johnston, of Dorking Meeting, told Eye that the pieces will be summarised and made available to the wider public.
They were written between 1991 and 2009 by Charles Kohler and the late Joan Macalpine, a respected theatre director. Joan’s plays included The Law and Resta Patching, Elizabeth Fry and the Wild Women of Newgate, and The Chocolate Quakers. Among Charles’ work was Box Brown’s Escape and Stiff as a Tree, True as a Bell.
The plays were performed at Dorking Meeting House, with several performances at other Meeting houses in West Weald Area Meeting. Su said: ‘The plays were loved and so was Joan – who was also a fierce director, but got terrific performances out of her actors. The plays are too good to be lost, and still have “a message”’.
White Feather
The conscientious objectors’ special issue of the Friend (26 February) prompted Jean Daintree, of Wilmslow Meeting, to share this poem. It was penned by her granddaughter, Naomi Abson, and appeared in an anthology of world war one poetry by Congleton and District schoolchildren, What Price Glory?
I’ll always remember the day I received it
Thrust into my face by some woman I didn’t even know.
The source of all my shame.
I can still feel the weight dragging my head down,
forcing my eyes to the floor.
Strange, isn’t it?
How something so light can feel so heavy.
I thought it was a symbol of peace,
that maybe, just maybe, she agreed with me,
that I’d found someone who didn’t judge me in the first second,
someone who celebrated my refusal to fight instead of mocking it.
I wore it with pride all day.
So stupid.
I kept it there until they explained.
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