Wealth & Money Quote by John Wanamaker

A century before “growth hacking” became a religion, Wanamaker is already puncturing the fantasy that business can be run like arithmetic. The line lands because it performs a neat double move: it flatters the listener’s sense that advertising is necessary while admitting, with almost comic resignation, that the machinery is partly unknowable. It’s a businessman’s confession, but also a pitch. By framing waste as inevitable yet bounded (“half”), Wanamaker normalizes inefficiency as the cost of reaching mass audiences. The joke doesn’t argue against advertising; it argues for spending through uncertainty.

The subtext is managerial humility with a razor edge. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, department stores were inventing modern consumer culture: fixed prices, branded goods, newspaper ads, catalogs, spectacle. Measurement was crude. There were no dashboards, no attribution models, no A/B tests at scale. If you ran a retail empire, you learned by watching foot traffic and receipts, then guessing what caused them. Wanamaker’s wit makes that guesswork sound like wisdom rather than failure.

Intent matters here. This isn’t a lament; it’s an inoculation against blame. If waste is structurally baked in, then the executive isn’t incompetent for missing the precise lever. The line also quietly telegraphs sophistication: only someone spending serious money on ads gets to complain about which half is wasted. That’s why it still circulates today, quoted by marketers who want to sound realistic while keeping budgets intact. It’s a one-sentence defense of faith-based spending, delivered as a sober joke.