Wealth & Money Quote by John Wanamaker

A century later, this line still stings because it’s a confession disguised as a brag. Wanamaker, the department-store pioneer who helped invent modern retail, isn’t merely joking about bad bookkeeping. He’s naming advertising’s original sin: in a mass market, persuasion works at scale precisely because it’s hard to trace. The quip lands with the clean symmetry of a magic trick - “half” and “half” - but the punchline is epistemic uncertainty. The money isn’t just “wasted”; the waste is unknowable, and that’s what keeps the machine running.

The intent is double-edged. On one side, it normalizes inefficiency as the price of doing business, a kind of cheerful resignation that reassures peers: if even Wanamaker can’t measure it, your confusion is respectable. On the other, it’s a quiet flex. Only a businessman with enough margin can afford to treat ambiguity as wisdom. The subtext is power: advertising is less a lever you pull than weather you pay to influence.

Context matters. Wanamaker’s era was when newspapers, catalogs, and brand trademarks were turning local commerce into national appetite. Measurement tools were primitive, but the deeper issue persists even in today’s dashboarded world: attribution is a story we tell after the sale, not a certainty before it. His line survives because it punctures the fantasy that markets are rational and auditable. It’s witty, yes, but also an early warning about an economy built on influence you can’t fully prove.