The Quinby Plan

"Buy stocks the same way you buy gasoline for your car--by the dollar's worth." With this slogan, Rochester's H. (for Henry) Dean Quinby Jr., 55, has sold $6,580,000 worth of stock to members of his "Quinby Plan." Last week Quinby's plan got the biggest boost in its 15-year history. Eastman Kodak Co. announced that it is setting up a voluntary payroll deduction system for its 52,000 employees to buy the company's common stock through the Quinby system.

Quinby, onetime Wall Street broker, launched his plan in 1938 in the belief that most people fail to buy stock simply because they don't know how to go about it. He decided to sell stock on a flexible installment plan, with 120 payments ranging from $10 up. A local bank, now the Lincoln Rochester Trust Co., agreed to be custodian of the stock and keep records of the payments. To make things simple, Quinby offered only one stock, Eastman Kodak, the company best known in Rochester.

The stock was bought regularly, regardless of price, which set the average price per share somewhere in between the stock's highs and lows. Actually, Eastman was growing so fast that most stock bought soon increased in value. A buyer who signed up for a $12,000 plan ten years ago would now own 400 shares of Eastman bought at an average price of $30 a share. Since the stock is now around $44, he would own $17,600 worth and with an additional $2,847, from reinvested dividends, have a total of $20,447.

The plan has grown fast. At World War II's end, Quinby had only 241 customers, paying in $40,772 for 1945, and owning $380,067 worth of Eastman. But now he has 3,500 customers who have paid in $1,100,000 so far this year and now own 81,000 shares of Eastman--one of the company's ten largest blocks of stock. Quinby, who charges between 4% and 6.8% commission (the bank charges another 1% to 2.4%), is now grossing some $120,000 a year. Besides Eastman, he now also offers three other gilt-edge stocks--Du Pont, General Motors and Standard Oil (N.J.). Quinby tells prospective customers just to ignore what the stock market does. "If it goes up," he says genially, "all the shares you own are worth more. If it goes down, you are getting bargains; your money is buying more shares than the same amount bought previously."

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