Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Mysteries Goldsmith's — Socks for Sale!
Posted by Vance Lauderdale on Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 10:18 PM
- 1941 Commercial Appeal ad
And sometimes those days seem pretty strange. Case in point: In December 1941, Goldsmith's (describing itself as "Memphis' Greatest Christmas Store") had apparently advertised some "interwoven" socks for sale. You could pay 39 cents for a pair, or get three pair for a buck. Seems reasonable, no?
But wait — that was WRONG. The following day, the store ran this correction, saying, "We are sorry — this was an error."
Oh my gosh. What horrible mistake did they — COULD they — have made in a simple ad for SOCKS?
Why, they got the price wrong, and were losing almost 10 cents on every sale! Just look. The correct price should have been three pairs for ... $1.10.
Boy, I guess they must have planned on selling lots of these socks to pay for the cost of running the correction.
Comments (12)
Showing 1-12 of 12
Well, look at the date. It was 1941, probably not long after Pearl Harbor, and people were hoarding socks.
It was a time of great anxiety in the garment industry. Prices were all over the place. Underwear was down, but skirts were up. A big sale like that probably induced a run in stockings and they were losing their shirts. They had to print a correction. A couple of nickels might not seem like much to us these days, but back then a nickel was still worth five cents.
like
dislike
This reminds me of the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. “Give me five bees for a quarter,” you’d say. Now where were we? Oh yeah – the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…
That's a great story, autoegocrat. It doesn't really have a beginning, or end, or point, or plot, and it doesn't have anything much to do with those socks at Goldsmith's, but oh I could listen to that story again and again. I'm going to try to tell it to my Sunday School class this weekend, so they can learn a valuable lesson from it. I think.
The bees were/was/is my favorite part, that's for sure.
Uh, I hate to break it to you, but there is no "Comment of the Week" for this particular blog. Oh sure, it works for the Flyer, but the Lauderdales are above such shenanigans.
Yeah, I hope nobody thinks I made that up myself. It was a total cut and paste job. I figure the source material is so widely known that attribution was unnecessary.
Those socks remind me of the story that one time Grampa Simpson told before those cut and paste days about Swedish Lunchbox.
Three wars back we called Sauerkraut "liberty cabbage" and we called liberty cabbage "super slaw" and back then a suitcase was known as a "Swedish lunchbox." Of course, nobody knew that but me. Anyway, long story short... is a phrase whose origins are complicated and rambling.
I thought everybody knew about the onion on the belt. I don't even watch TV and I knew about that meme.
So if they were quick to correct their gaff I presume back in those days they had already invented lawyers? Otherwise they could just charge the customers full whack and be imperious about it. They must have invented "Not responsible for typographical errors" later, then. However I have a cunning plan, there is no expiration date, so let us all print a copy and run out to the mall and see if "interwoven Socks" are still available, then claim them for that price. I'm off to Goldsmiths ...oh, rats.
(PS-- Jeff that was a wonderful post with so many puns that I snorted my afternoon tea all over my socks, which are probably not interwoven unless they make them that way at Wal-Mart's Chinese factories.)
