Retail profitability accounting;

              Retail Profitability Accounting
by David Fleisher
David L. Fleisher, manager in our St. Louis
office, has been with TRB&S since 1957. A
major part of his professional career has been
devoted to working with retail firms, and he
has written and spoken extensively in the retail
industry. He is the author of the chapter on
management reporting in the Retail Account­ing
Manual published by the National Retail
Merchants Association, and is presently par­ticipating
in the Tobe Lecture series for gradu­ate
retail students at Harvard Business School.
Mr. Fleisher holds a B.S. degree in Industrial
Engineering and a M.B.A. degree in Business
Administration from the University of Mich­igan.
He is a member of the Management
Services Committee of the St. Louis Chapter
of the Missouri Society of CPAs, a member of
the St. Louis Retail Controllers Group and a
member of the American Production and
Inventory Control Society.
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Touche, Ross, Bailey & Smart and its predecessor firms
traditionally have been recognized as leaders in the retail
accounting field. The vast majority of the major depart­ment
stores in this country are numbered among our
clients. They include Allied, Associated, Federated, Gim-bels,
Macy's, May Company and Sears Roebuck in the
category of national department store chains and several
of the major independent department stores such as
Gilchrist Company in Boston, Hudson's in Detroit, Mil­ler's
in Knoxville, H. C. Prange in Sheboygan, Nieman-
Marcus in Dallas, Popular Dry Goods in El Paso and
Rich's in Atlanta. In addition, our firm has among its
clients several of the large retail discount firms, a number
of major food chains and numerous specialty stores hand­ling
a variety of merchandise lines.
Further evidence of the participation of Touche, Ross,
Bailey & Smart in the retail accounting field is the efforts
over the past 40 years of the late J. P. Friedman, John W."
McEachren and Kenneth P. Mages, all TRB&S part­ners,
in developing and updating the department store
industry accounting manuals which have been a vital
part of the department store industry figure exchange
program. More recently, James Lynch, manager in our
Boston office, was honored at the annual convention of
the relatively young discount industry held in May, 1965
for his work in developing the first accounting manual
and figure exchange for this industry group. Because of
the large number of retailers in this country and their
reasonably uniform operating characteristics, the retail
industry has traditionally emphasized industry-wide finan-
8 THE QUARTERLY