SATTLER SCRIP OF BUFFALO, NEW YORK

 

Founded in 1889 as a shoe business by John G. Sattler, after 1926 the store began expanding into clothes and then into many other merchandising lines over the years, including food and home furnishings. Its location at 998 Broadway placed it in a Polish neighborhood on Buffalo's east side, about two miles from the city's downtown.

In 1927, John G. Sattler's son-in-law, Charles Hahn Jr., took over running the business. Hahn in turn hired a young newspaperman named Robert S. Cornelius to manage the store's promotional strategies and advertising campaigns. It was Bob Cornelius who masterminded Sattler's distinctively manic merchandising style. A scrappy discount retailer located at some distance from downtown pedestrian traffic, Sattler's under Cornelius resorted to over-the-top spectacles to draw crowds to its premises. The store brought in elephants and tightrope walkers; hosted a live wedding in its display windows; sponsored visits by television and radio celebrities; and held a guessing contest for the correct weight of the world's largest hunk of bologna.

At around this time, Sattler's also introduced a distinctive form of store credit, Sattler Scrip, which circulated across its counters in one form or another for nearly thirty years.

Frequently mistaken for depression-era local currency, Sattler Scrip was, in fact, anything but that. Whereas the various kinds of emergency monies and clearinghouse notes issued during the 1930s served to address some aspect of the economic crisis of those years, Sattler's merchandise certificates were actually a reflection of post-World War II consumer abundance. Introduced in late 1946, Sattler Scrip functioned as a flexible form of consumer credit before store charge cards and credit cards came into widespread use.

As the store's tutorial advertisements in 1946 instructed the public, shoppers interested in purchasing goods now but desiring to make payment later could do so using Sattler Scrip. Customers wanting supplies of the store's certificates visited the store's budget office where, after providing suitable identification, they set up what amounted to charge accounts. For a one dollar "service fee", paid upfront in cash, a customer received twenty dollars' worth of Sattler Scrip merchandise certificates. These certificates could then be used anywhere in the store the same as regular money. By acquiring Sattler Scrip, the customer committed to a plan whereby that twenty dollar balance (or multiples thereof) would be paid off, on terms as long as six months. If the customer paid the balance owed within thirty days, Sattler's would offer to refund the one-dollar fee.

Sattler Scrip was, in effect, a form of store credit that allowed customers to purchase on time. The terms, as described, seem to have been generous. Sattler's advertising never mentioned any interest charges owed on customer balances other than the initial fee.

Thus, for customer purchasing, say, $100 worth of certificates with a five-dollar fee and paying off the balance over six months, that fee represented a 10% annual interest rate (assuming they did not pay off the balance within thirty days). The plan was easy for the company to manage, since it did not need to calculate interest on variable balances in order to bill its customers. At the same time, Sattler Scrip was flexible enough to resemble a revolving credit line. The language printed on the back of each note explained how that would work. Anybody with a Sattler Scrip account could return their remaining certificates (rather than using them to buy anything) for full credit against their balance due, even receiving back a prorated portion of their original service fee. Conversely, anyone needing more certificates than they currently possessed in order to purchase some expensive item could roll their outstanding certificate balance into a new, larger issue, and receive a discount on the new service fee by applying the prorated refund on their previous fee.

For at least thirty years after its introduction, Sattler Scrip not only enabled customers to buy now and pay later but figured in a number of the store's incessant marketing gambits. Typically, merchandise certificates were handed out as prizes in some offbeat or oddball contest. For example, in 1959, the store gave out Sattler Scrip to selected owners of cars, identified by their license plates, sitting in the store's parking lot. Other promotions involving Sattler Scrip appealed to juvenile audiences. In 1961, Sattler's put on a "Search for Dondi" contest that awarded certificates to that youngster who most resembled the child actor David Kory, who starred as the Italian war orphan "Dondi" in a highly sentimental (and rather forgettable) 1961 film of that same name.

To read the complete article, see:
Sattler Scrip of Buffalo, New York (https://www.spmc.org/blog/sattler-scrip-buffalo-new-york)

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