Corporations

Corporation

Last week the following newsworthy corporations made the following news:

Scots' Store. In 1854 two God-fearing young Scots named Samuel Carson and John Taylor Pirie opened a dry goods shop in Amboy, Ill, then the headquarters of Illinois Central Railroad. "Carson & Pirie's One Price Cheap Cash Store" made so much money that the founders, with the help of two more Scots named Scott, opened four more stores and a wholesale business in Chicago. One Sunday in 1866 Founder Carson, a stanch Baptist, met at church a shrewd, twinkly-eyed Scot named Andrew MacLeish whose father had been a Glasgow merchant. Andrew MacLeish wanted to start a retail store in Chicago, had no money. "We'll help you," said Carson. The store, which looked like a country hotel, was opened on Lake Street where Potter Palmer's dry goods shop (now Marshall Field & Co.) was nourishing. Messrs. Carson, Pirie and Scott shut up shop in Amboy, moved to Chicago for good.

Today Carson Pirie Scott & Co. is generally regarded as Chicago's second biggest department store. But only the tight-lipped Scotsmen who run it, and a handful of stockholders, know how much it sells, how much it makes. No financial statement has ever been published. But business has apparently been good enough for Carson Pirie Scott & Co. to announce last week that it would spend $1,500,000 modernizing its rambling State Street store, now full of wheezy elevators, soup-bowl chandeliers, shabby supporting columns. Two banks of escalators, 16 new elevators and an air-conditioning unit will be installed.

Control of Carson Pirie Scott & Co. never passed out of the founders' families. President is John Taylor Pirie, 62, second son of Founder Pirie. God-fearing as his father, he is a good Presbyterian church worker, neither smokes nor drinks (only beer is sold in the store). Fond of shooting & hunting (he once spent four months bagging big game in Africa), he works with Spartan zeal in a small brown-stained office on the ground floor of the company's wholesale establishment. With him work seven Piries, one Carson, four Scotts, two MacLeishes.

Hudson Loan. Though its plant is one of the most efficient in the industry, Hudson Motor Car Co. was never able to cut down overhead as fast as sales slumped. In the balmy days of 1929 it turned out 300,000 automobiles, took in $200,000,000. In 1933 it sold 45,000, took in $23,000,000. Meantime working capital had shrunk nearly 90% to $3,000,000. Until last week the deficiency of working capital was, next to deficits, the company's biggest financial problem. Then it was announced that President Roy D. Chapin had secured new capital in the form of a $5,200,000 loan from the New York and Chicago Federal Re- serve Banks under the Direct Loans to Industry Act (TIME, June 4). The Hudson loan, biggest since the Act was passed, brings Federal Reserve industrial lending to $25,000,000, 18% of the amount the system is authorized to lend.

$4 for 1934. "The trouble with Wall Street," tush-tushes Montgomery Ward & Co.'s President Sewell Lee Avery, "is that every time you manage to make a dollar this year, they figure you will make three next." Last week cautious Mr. Avery revealed that for every dollar Ward had made in 1933, it made four last year.

In 1933 sales were $187,600,000, net profits $2,200,000. Last year sales were $249,800,000, a record beaten only by 1929's $267,000,000. Net profits were $9,161,000.

Nipples. Not all nipples are used on babies' bottles. Iron and steel nipples for machinery and piping are tubed couplings that connect two parts. Depression had been gallingly hard for the nipple industry and for Chicago Nipple Mfg. Co. in particular. Since 1929 sales of its nipples "both chamfered and reamed" and other products have shrunk 80%. For six years the little company has fought desperately to stay in business against mounting deficits. Last week Chicago Nipple reported that despite a drop of 15% in total sales, its 1934 deficit was only $30,000 against $102,000 the year before.

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