A pleasing personality, however, inspires confidence, tends to put the customer in a good humor and optimistic mood, and results in sales.
A cold, formal manner, ill temper, or a pessimistic outlook, on the contrary, will
handicap the sale of the best merchandise made.
A man is said to be suggestible when he comes to conclusions or acts without due deliberation. Suggestion, then, is nothing but the mental condition which causes us to believe and respond without the normal amount of weighing of evidence. While in a suggestible condition we are credulous, responsive, and impulsive. Such a mental condition is favored and induced by pleasure. Discomfort or dissatisfaction with the conditions or surroundings prompts the opposing attitude; we become suspicious and slow to act or believe. While in a suggestible condition, we place our orders freely and promptly. The merchant who can please his customers and bring them to a suggestible mood before he displays his wares, therefore, has done much to secure generous sales.
Advantageous results from suggestion are not limited to the relationship between buyer and seller.
_The pleased and satisfied employee is open_
_to the suggestions of foreman and manager and responds with an enthusiasm impossible of generation in one dissatisfied from any cause_.
Methods of insuring this pleasure in work
for employees are yet in the formative stage.
Until recently the want of such methods, indeed,
was not felt. The slave driver with the
most profane vocabulary and the greatest
recklessness in the use of fist and foot was
supposed to be the most effective type of boss.
The task system set an irreducible minimum
for the day's work; the employer exacted the
task and assumed that no better way of handling
men could be devised. Piecework rates
provided a better and more reasonable basis
for securing something like a maximum day's
work; bonus and premium systems have carried
the incentive of the wage in increasing efficiency
to the last point short of co
varying conditions or environment; that a
man can achieve the desired standard, if only
he has the will to achieve it.
_Discipline has become less brutal if not less
strict. The laborer works, not alone to avoid
poverty and hunger, but to secure the means of
pleasure_.
It is not so long since harsh discipline was
common both in homes and in business. The
boy worked hard because he was afraid not to.
The man labored because poverty threatened
him if idle. We were in what might be called
a ``pain economy''; we worked to escape pain.
To-day this has largely been changed.
Employers, too, are experimenting boldly
with the idea of creating pleasure in work.
The first step has been taken in the very
general elimination of the old wasteful, neglectful
elements of factory and office environment.
Comfort, the first neutral element
of pleasure, is provided for employees just as
solid foundations are provided for the factory
buildings. There is light, heat, and ventilation
where a generation ago there were tiny windows,
shadows, lonely stoves, and foul air. Cleanliness
is provided and preserved; not a few of
the larger industries employ a regular corps of
janitors to keep floors, walls, and windows clean.
The walls are tinted; the lights are arranged
so as to provide the right illumination without
straining the workers' eyes. The departments
are symmetrically arranged; the aisles are
wide; the working space is ample; there is
no fear to haunt machine tenders that a mis-
step or a moment of forgetfulness will entangle
them in a neighboring machine. The factory
buildings themselves, without being pretentious,
have pleasing, simple lines and unobtrusive
ornamentation. They look like, and
are, when the human equation does not interfere,
_*pleasant_ places to work in.