Education: Speech Sale

Most salable success secret in the U. S. at the moment is speech improvement. Last week Chicago’s Better-Speech Institute of America gave evidence of the profitableness of this industry.

The Better-Speech Institute, operated by Neal B. Dunbar and Estelle B. Hunter, sells a speech training course in 15 lessons at $1.85 in group lots, or $5 to the individual. The institute’s unique sales technique is to persuade corporation managements that their employes would serve them better if they talked better. So strong a spur is company endorsement that sometimes the institute sells every single employe. Biggest customers: employes of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. (11,067 courses), J. C. Penney Co., Inc. (11,000), Sears, Roebuck and Co. (10,750). All told the institute has sold 650,000 courses in hundreds of corporations.

Better-Speech pupils get 15 pamphlets providing the equivalent of eighth-grade instruction in grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary. They are told that it is not so elegant to say “we couldn’t get along without the typewriter” as “the typewriter is an indispensable office appliance.”

Last week the Treasury Department’s report of 1936 salaries showed that Salesmen Dunbar and Hunter were better paid than any U. S. university president, netted $32,545 apiece.