The overwhelming majority of Tirocchi clients spent money that they had inherited or their husbands had earned. The spouses of Providence customers were prominent lawyers (Harvey A. Baker); physicians (Martin S. Budlong); bankers (Michael F. Dooley); brokers (Frank D. Lisle, Pardon Miller); insurance executives (Harold J. Gross, William E. Maynard, James F. Phetteplace); and executives in the state's industrial concerns: textiles (Richard LeBaron Bowen, Arthur D. Champlin, Henry A. DuVillard, E. Fielding Jones, David S. Seaman, Edward R. Trowbridge), jewelry (William P. Chapin, Jr; Ashbel T. Wall, Sr.), precision tools (Paul Churchill DeWolf), and office equipment (Thomas Arnold Briggs and Frank D. Simmons). Some were involved in the expansion of the thriving city. Benjamin Harris was a construction engineer, Stephen Harris a real estate agent, and William M. Harris a prominent lumber dealer. Byron S. Watson was a supplier of wholesale boots and shoes. Others were engaged in less obviously remunerative but genteel occupations, such as Howard Chapin, librarian of the Rhode Island Historical Society, or sculptor E. Edwin Codman. Many husbands had broad interests bridging the manufacturing and financial sectors, such as Samuel Mowry Nicholson, who was president of American Screw Company and Nicholson File Company and chaired the Board of Directors of the Industrial Trust Company; and Frederick Stanhope Peck, who was involved in textile manufacture, coal and oil supply, and stock and bond dealing, as well as Republican party politics. Mrs. Walter (Ivy) Callender, married to the president of a major downtown Providence clothing store (Callender, McAuslan and Troup), spent nearly $1500 with the Tirocchis in 1930, instead of wearing the ready-mades available in her husband's store.

One of the puzzles of this project has been to discover why certain members of the Rhode Island and nearby Connecticut and Fall River elites came to the Tirocchi shop. Clients shared a variety of characteristics in addition to their wealth. They belonged to many of the same organizations and many lived in some proximity to one another. Of one hundred Providence clients whose addresses were found for the period 1916 to 1920, ninety lived on Providence's East Side, mostly on streets where large single-family houses of a certain grandeur set the standard [see fig. 3, p. 13; figs. 8-9, p. 19]. Of those ninety, moreover, sixty-four lived in the sector bounded by Olney Street, Hope Street, Stimson Avenue, Governor Street, Williams Street, and Benefit Street in the East Side's stately, aristocratic core, built primarily in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some clients were very close neighbors: Ivy Callender and Ella Jones lived next door to each other at 196 and 198 Hope Street; Florence Elgar and Elizabeth Smith resided across the street from each other at 169 and 170 Brown Street. At least five Tirocchi clients each were to be found on Brown, Lloyd, Bowen, Waterman, and George Streets, and six lived at the Minden, a residential hotel at 123 Waterman Street [fig. 38]. All but one of the remaining twenty-six East Side clients lived east of Hope Street and north of Waterman Street, an area with somewhat newer but still substantial homes built in the early twentieth century. This group of clients was more widely dispersed than those in the core East Side area. Of the ten Providence clients who did not live on the East Side, nine resided on the West Side, within a radius of about a mile and a half of the Tirocchi shop. The surviving client record books show no clear change over time in the residential patterns of the clientele [see p. 74].