Eighty years ago this month, according to the December 1940 issue of Radio Retailing, everybody, including Santa Claus, stopped, looked, and listened to the new personal portables that had been hitting the market. When America entered the war, sourcing the required batteries would become an iffy proposition, but in the meantime, the sets were popular.

It’s quite possible that Santa got the idea from having lunch in downtown Denver. According to the magazine, the radio buyer of the Denver Dry Goods Company harnessed the power of “women paid to gossip” to sell the sets. You could put one on layaway for a dollar down and a dollar a week. Then, to drum up excitement, “certain shopgirls were loaned instruments, subsidized to play and talk about them during lunch in the smartest restaurants in town.”

The young women shown below are on their lunch break from their duties at the store at one of the aforementioned smart restaurants. For each sale they referred, they earned a one dollar commission.

According to the article, twenty radios were sold the first day, and “in this case, it paid to pay women to gossip.”