News-Press from Fort Myers, Florida • Page 90

rr 'm rrr rr rr rr1 "Iff) I 1 0G Fort Myers News-Press, Sunday, January 2, 1 983 Phone sales of show tickets makes CHARGIT a hit TT 1 'i rf lips, -17 i i I i says Golden, an amiable, balding man with narrow-rimmed, tortoise-shell glasses. "We were being bombed out as they say." Soon the business grew too fast for Golden, especially when one day he temporarily lost track of $100,000. In 1977 he decided be needed help, and hired Richard A.J. Williams, formerly of Citicorp, to run the operation. Today CHARGIT handles events in 23 cities and its phone lines are answered by up to 50 people after being run through a computerized telephone system.

Another computer keeps track of what seats are available at what events, and Williams estimates that CHARGIT now handles about 25 percent of all ticket sales for Broadway shows. CHARGIT does not sell specific seats, but sells a certain number of seats in a certain section of a theater. The number of sales are sent to the box office, which then assigns seat numbers to each sale. Then the tickets can be mailed out or picked up at the event. CHARGIT pays the box-office price for a ticket, then tacks on its service charge to the customer's credit-card bill.

Williams, now president, says Golden and his wife "collectively are the most dedicated people to a business or a function I've ever seen In my life. They literally live and breathe the system. That's why it worked." Golden was born in the Bronx, moved to Manhattan at age 10 and has spent most of his life in the New York City area. After high school he was a golf caddie and later worked as a Wall Street clerk. He lost that job and enlisted in the Army in 1940.

Five years later he was discharged, married Gladys in 1946 and began the string of jobs that included selling dairy products, furniture and later sightseeing tickets from a counter in Penn Station. Golden tells a story typical of those NEW YORK (AP) Arthur Golden knows failure, or at least going broke no matter whose fault it is. Being penniless has pricked bis heels several times, and he almost relishes telling stories of how, after selling dairy products door to door, making furniture and selling sightseeing tickets, "there I was, without a living again!" No more. Golden, 63, founded and now is chairman of CHARGIT, a service that allows people to order seats at a Broadway show or other event with their credit cards over the telephone. CHARGIT expects to process well over $100 million worth of ticket sales this year and post $5 million in revenue for itself.

Buying Broadway tickets for decades was a cash-only business. No one was willing to charge your purchase over the phone. Why not, figured Golden, and in 1966 he persuaded Diner's Club to let him insert a note about the idea at his expense into 5,000 Diner's Club bills. Encouraged by the response, Golden and his wife, Gladys, refinanced their house to borrow $18,000 and mailed their idea with the American Express bills for the entire East Coast Convinced it would work, the Goldens, who were then running a small travel and ticket business on 48th Street, soon began selling their tickets over the phone. The theaters noticed an Increasing number of their customers were arriving at the box office and asking for the tickets they had bought by credit card.

Slowly, the theaters themselves also took credit cards for tickets instead of cash, and then began taking credit-card sales over the phone as well. The Goldens and two others decided in July 1975 to make this a full-time credit service, and set up CHARGIT with four telephones. "Two months into the operation, I realized that the telephone system I Installed was absolutely worthless," 1 -'---'-nftimtkwiij Mt.wwtwwy.j "aT? CHARGIT FOUNDER Arthur Golden, right, with CHARGIT president Richard Williams time job. And that's what we do. We sit around all day figuring out what to do.

"I love to go to work," he continues. "Only people who don't want to work call people workaholics. Some people love to work!" But the drive was always there. "I don't know where it comes from," he says. "You don't want to do something because you want to make money.

You have a desire to do something, and because you love to do something you do it well, and times. He was making and selling desks, but "we lost all our money because we were selling them for $36, which was the going price, but they were costing us $42 to make as we found out after we had no money left." when you do it well you make money." Golden says Williams now manages CHARGIT's operations. "I'm not a manager at all here," Golden says. "Most of our day is taken up in strategy, policy, and I find that a full- Franklin Mint breaks out of mold, casts fate with porcelain QUBE cable system operated by Warner-Amex Cable Communications Inc. The system allows viewers to talk back to the cable station through a link, which can be used to let the audience do such things as decide plays in a football game or make purchases.

"Instead of a two-minute commer cial to sell country and western (records), we're going to produce an actual half-hour featurette film on the history of country western music" to be followed by a pitch for the record set, Andes says. "There aren't enough people out there, there isn't enough penetration" yet for that type of market he says. "But it's only a matter of time." handpainted music boxes, decaled beer steins and porcelain thimbles that have become Franklin's biggest winners. Franklin's acquisition by Warner Communications Corp. in 1981 also has opened up new areas of merchandising.

"We feel down the road there is a great future in interactive television," Andes says, referring to the who has worked for the mint almost since its inception. "I remember we all sat around and said this is the ultimate test of our morality." But there were more severe tests to come, particularly in 1978 when CBS's "60 Minutes" broadcast a segment questioning the value of Franklin's products. The show quoted coin dealers who contended Roberts' and other artists' exactingly engraved medals were worth only the "melt" value of the gold or silver content which, in cited instances, was not enough to recoup the cost of the medal. Andes, bristling when the subject is brought up again four years later, says, "The whole thing on '60 Minutes' was a setup." Coin dealers, such as those who talked to CBS, "never liked the Franklin Mint because we never sell to coin dealers," he says. After the CBS program, Franklin Mint stock plummeted to a low of $5.25 a share.

"Most of the product really disappeared off the market after '60 Andes says. "There was a lot of product melted down, and when the price of silver went way up a lot was melted, along with everyone's silver tea set." Meanwhile, the end of the Bicentennial, which was a boon for the company's line of upbeat Americana, including the medallions, great works in American literature and even first-day issue $2 bills that came packaged and postmarked for $6 apiece, brought an unexpected lull in sales. "What happened was we were essentially a one-product company," Andes says. "I think people got burned out on the Bicentennial (and) we were surprised by the suddden drop In orders In 1977 we were geared up for a big year, we had high overhead. We were expecting a big increase, instead we got a decrease." Hence the emphasis on Franklin Porcelain, located in its own factory a few miles from the mint The plant, which began production in 1977, was equipped in four months and plant manager Michael Venezla, 43, says he got some quick "on the job training." The factory now hums along smoothly, turning out thousands of Gouity Mb Crook IWO I BOND MONEY II V.

1 Jii financing i Suit Your Heeds! lu ES WAWA, Pa. (AP) Franklin Mint, whose profits melted away like so many of its medallions sold for silver content in the late 1970s, is molding a new future for Itself with clay. The 100,000 or so visitors each year to the company's gleaming headquarters about 20 miles south of Philadelphia no longer are permitted a glimpse of the mint equipment that stamped out Norman Rockwell scouting scenes and lured the likes of Gerald Ford to put the ex-presidential seal of approval on a set of medallions. Instead, visitors are ushered through a labyrinthine building where Franklin Mint porcelains, coins, books, clocks, crystal, stamps and floral arrangements are displayed in glass cases and Franklin Mint furniture is arrayed, museum-style, in a roped-off room. The mint now accounts for only 10 percent of the company's $400 million in annual sales while porcelain is the biggest seller, the company says.

"We're trying to produce a broad range of products that have an art and aesthetic value that people buy because they enjoy them personally or for home decor products that they purchase because they take great pleasure in owning them," says Charles Andes, chairman and chief executive. The product lineup marks an about-face from the mint's humble origins in a garage in the Philadelphia suburb of Yeadon in 1966. Business-school graduate Joseph Segel founded a predecessor company to capitalize on Americans' interest in minted objects after he saw long lines of people buying the U.S. Treasury's John F. Kennedy half dollar.

After some early successes, fueled in part by a big sale of tokens for use in Las Vegas casinos, Segel hired away U.S. Mint engraver Gilroy Roberts, who had sculpted Kennedy's likeness for the coin. Roberts' engravings for Franklin now grace walls and cabinets in the museum and hundreds of thousands of collectors' houses. Another policy introduced by Segel, who left the mint in 1974 to pursue other business interests, was to create subscription lists for products and set a deadline for buyers to sign up. A typical ad for a 200-piece medal-lic history of the United States, offered at a cost of $9.75 per medal in sterling silver or $950 apiece in platinum in 1968, bore a notice that "advance subscription rolls close April 26, 1968." "The satisfaction of being associated with a project of this importance, the excitement of seeing America's heritage so beautifully portrayed, the thrill of building such a magnificent collection and the feeling of security that comes from systematically accumulating a 'private treasury' of precious metal at a limited cost may soon be yours, providing you act promptly," the ad copy said.

The technique opened Franklin to charges, in the words of one coin writer, that it trafficked In "instant rarity" by limiting sales. But Andes says the purpose was to avoid a glut on the market "I remember in 1968 when we started our date subscription, we got $4 million worth of lati orders cash, tnlt we sent back-said Andes, Palmbraeie California impired, 3 bedrooms, 2 batfci. new home with double garage, cutlitrjiul ceiling, eat in kitchen and 1.666 sq ft. under mm Gulfstrsam Luxury, split 3 or 4 bedroom, 2 bath home with double garage, cathedral ceiling, two-way fireplace, eat-in kitchen, formal dining room, and 2,244 sq. ft.

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