ECAL storage space, delivery facilities and other services necessary for getting merchandise onto the shelves of retailers or into the hands of industrial consumers are commonly found necessary by every major manufacturer. Individual concerns vary in their practices. Some have many branch storerooms while others use public warehouses exclusively. Whatever may be the method of meeting the problem, all face the need of spot stocks so allocated as to supply every market with goods. Every manufacturer has peculiar difficulties which determine his particular solution to the problem. Nevertheless, the widespread use of public warehouses during the depression and the adaptation of the public warehouse industry to modern business needs are significant in present day distributive trends. In the following pages will be described the major changes in public warehouse practice of the last few years which tend to facilitate the prompt and convenient movement of merchandise from factory to retailer. 1. The public warehouse and small-lot buying. The midget radio may be regarded as merely one of the thousand evidences that the diminutive idea has struck the American people. With shrunken incomes, individuals have taken smaller apartments, and, in smaller quarters, minute equipment is essential. Retail business has suffered from the same ailment. Minimum store fronts and tiny inventories are the result. For years, the retailer has had inventory control and increased turnover drummed into him. Since 1930, economic necessity has forced dealers to welcome this advice, possibly to take it even too seriously. Small-lot buying by retailers is a seemingly permanent outcome of the depression. The concept of small stocks and avoidance of dead merchandise has permeated our marketing. Today's merchant believes that a retail store is a place to sell goods. Storing should be done elsewhere. So intent have dealers become on these ideas that inventories have been sometimes reduced to such low minimums that customers cannot be properly served. The goal for which retailers are striving is so to improve stock control that their assortments of merchandise are constantly replenished. Day-to-day sales must not void their stock, yet the merchandise on hand must not exceed the requirements of a week. Reordering must be done systematically and frequently. Daily orders have become the