Success Quote by John Wanamaker

There’s a sly social judo move in Wanamaker’s jab: a businessman insisting that talking about business is “vulgar.” Coming from a retail titan who helped define modern advertising and department-store culture, the line isn’t self-denial so much as class choreography. He’s drawing a boundary between commerce as a respectable engine of society and commerce as a personality - the kind of eager self-marketing that turns conversation into a sales call.

The punchline is the dinner party. Wanamaker locates business talk in the one place it’s both most tempting and most revealing: the arena where status is performed under the pretense of leisure. Stockbrokers become the convenient foil because they trade in abstraction and speculation, a form of wealth that can feel unmoored from tangible work. By contrast, the merchant prince gets to imply his own virtue: he builds, he employs, he “serves” the public, and he doesn’t need to announce it.

Subtext: real power doesn’t hustle out loud. The people who name their ambitions at the table confess insecurity; the people who already own the room can afford discretion. That’s an old-money rule dressed up as manners, and it doubles as reputation management. Wanamaker’s era was thick with anxiety about money’s new visibility - industrial fortunes, mass consumption, the rise of professional finance. Calling business talk “vulgar” turns a moral suspicion into an etiquette rule, sanitizing capitalism by insisting it should remain, like plumbing, essential but not discussed over soup.