Retailing: Low-Pressure Profits

While more and more retailers stampede customers with discount prices and waylay them near home with suburban branches, the pride of San Francisco’s Post Street, Gump’s Inc., prospers by remaining as aloof as Kipling’s cat. With arrogant contempt for trends, Gump’s eight years ago sold its only two branch stores (in Honolulu and Carmel, Calif.), and the nearest thing to a loss leader a Gump’s customer can expect to find is a pair of pewter and brass candlesticks reduced from $250 to $125. Yet in a little more than a decade, Gump’s sales have almost doubled, last year approached $4,000,000, with profits before taxes running a comfortable 6% of gross.

Driving the century-old family store to new heights is a white-haired, crew-cut retailing iconoclast, Richard Benjamin Gump, 55, grandson of the founder. When Dick Gump took over full management in 1947, his father, A. (for Abraham) Livingston Gump, had already built the store into one of the Occident’s richest treasure houses of the Orient’s art. Dick shocked Gump’s older patrons by streamlining the temple-quiet, museumlike showrooms into tastefully contemporary salesrooms. And though the Oriental accent still dominates, Gump’s small task force of buyers, led by Dick himself, scours Latin America and Europe to bring in a greater variety of art, antiques and home furnishings.

Taste Setter. To bolster his store’s carriage-trade appeal, outspoken Dick Gump long ago set out to establish himself as an arbiter of good taste. On lecture tours and in a widely sold book (Good Taste Costs No More), he has waged incessant war against what he considers bad design. One of his targets was none other than New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; he was distressed by the museum’s pride in a gold cup made by Benvenuto Cellini in the shape of an ornate shell resting on a dragon riding on a turtle. Shudders Gump: “It’s really pretty horrible.”

Gump’s own taste in all things has not been universally admired. The New York Times said that his favorite hobby—the Guckenheimer Sour Kraut German Band, which he leads in irregular concerts in San Francisco—deserves “a special place in the history of musical mayhem.” But in matters artistic, Gump’s has established itself as a place where people not sure of their own judgment may buy confidently. Bargains are not the house specialty, but not everything is expensive: on the same page in the Gump catalogue, a gold-finished compact with a jade medallion is listed for $13.75 and a jade and diamond ring for $10,000.

Soft Sell. Gump thinks that his store’s reputation rests primarily on the casual soft sell practiced by its knowledgeable sales staff. “I’ve told them,” says Gump, “that if we don’t carry an item, tell the customer where he can buy it. Don’t tell him we have something better. The customer thinks, ‘Isn’t it nice of Gump’s to tell me where to find it,’ and he comes back to Gump’s.”

Though he is at heart as hard-driving a retailer as any discounter going, Gump strains for casualness in his store, adamantly refuses to set sales quotas for his 170 employees. One year, he relates, “I told a sales meeting, ‘I expect 10% less sales next year.’ That year our sales went up 15%.” In 1961 it seems certain that Gump’s business will hit another high, but even though the year is well along, Dick Gump still refuses to predict what sales will be. “If you had a projected sales figure,” says he, “you’d have to exert pressure to make it.”