What a One Price Cash business was in old-time Phoenix - Hanny's


In 1915, Hanny's Clothing Store described itself as a "One Price Cash Clothier", which to our modern ears sounds very strange. You may wonder if there was just one price for everything in the store, like a dollar store? No, that's not it. And you may wonder if they only accepted cash, not checks? No, that's not it either. Let's take a closer look.

Nowadays there aren't many businesses that have more than one price for their stuff. The only place that springs to my mind is a car dealership, where the price is negotiable. I can't do that at my local Walmart, I pay the price that they ask, or I don't buy it. So a "one price" store would be a store that asks a price, and will not listen to negotiation. Pretty common now, not so common 100 years ago. Vic Hanny put a price on an item, and expected you to pay it, no haggling, no offers, take it over leave it. This may have offended a lot of people, who were used to entering into negotiations anytime they bought something, but as you can tell, it simplified the process, and it caught on. I'm still trying to think of any business that expects the customer to make an offer, and go back and forth, and right now all I can think of is a garage sale. Or maybe if you're buying stolen goods, or anything illegal? Anyway, having one price is what businesses do now. It's considered the respectable way to do business. The price is clearly marked.

The cash part of it has to do with credit, which was a very common practice back then. Instead of paying for something right when you bought it, like when I buy a bag of Apples at Walmart, most businesses at the time would let you pay for it later, usually with no extra charge. Businesses that didn't offer free credit were called "cash stores". Sure, you could pay with a check, but you couldn't just put something on your tab with a promise to pay for it later and walk out of the store. That's what they meant by "cash" - no credit. Grocery stores that asked for you to pay for something right there were often called "Cash and Carry", or even "Pay and Takit" (really, there was a store in Phoenix with that name).

Inside of Hanny's Store in the 1940s, Central Avenue location.

The big idea behind having one price and expecting customers to pay for things then and there was to have lower prices and build a better reputation, and it did that. Businesses no longer had to "carry" customers, by giving them free credit, and customers were more comfortable knowing that everyone paid the same amount for goods. Did that guy over there pay less for his tie than I did? No, we both paid the same price, he went to Hanny's! Sounds like a commercial, doesn't it?

This type of thinking built some strong businesses, and Hanny's was one of them. Vic Hanny's name was so well-respected in Phoenix that it was used long after Vic wasn't even associated with the store, long after it moved to its new location on 1st Street (where that building is now a restaurant). Vic's original store, as you can see on the ad, was on Central Avenue, between Washington and Adams. And he was a One Price Cash Clothier.

If you liked this article, and would like to see more in the future, please consider becoming a patron of History Adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! Your pledge makes this happen!

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more