Business: Hahn

Sound investment advice is this: Watch new industries; determine which company is going to dominate the new field; then buy as much of the common stock of that business as your nerve permits. There is always a new industry or type of business. One was foreshadowed last week when Lew Hahn, famed head of the National Retail Dry Goods Association, said: “. . . some day there may be in the field of retailing a distributing enterprise as great as the United States Steel Corporation is in the field of production.”

Concurrently he resigned from his well paid post to become head of Hahn Department Stores Inc. Its plans: to buy up department stores in dozens of cities from coast to coast, doing a total of $100,000,000 business the first year. ”

In support of his project, Mr. Hahn also said: “The vitality of the chain idea has been demonstrated in the success of great chains of stores in specialty lines. The attempt to weld department stores into efficient and economical chains probably will prove a much more difficult task than has been the case in specialty lines, but the opportunity is there and the problems which accompany it will be solved.”