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+Project Gutenberg's The Romance of a Great Store, by Edward Hungerford
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Romance of a Great Store
+
+Author: Edward Hungerford
+
+Illustrator: Vernon Howe Bailey
+
+Release Date: February 18, 2012 [EBook #38921]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF A GREAT STORE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ROMANCE OF A GREAT STORE
+
+[Illustration: THE NEW YORK TO WHICH MACY CAME--IN 1858
+
+Looking south from 42d Street--The old Reservoir and the Crystal Palace
+in the foreground]
+
+
+
+
+The Romance of a Great Store
+
+by Edward Hungerford
+
+Author of "The Personality of American Cities,"
+"The Modern Railroad," etc.
+
+Illustrated by Vernon Howe Bailey
+
+New York
+
+Robert M. McBride & Company
+1922
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & CO.
+
+_Printed in the United States of America_
+
+Published, 1922
+
+
+To the Men and Women of The Great Macy Family Whose Fidelity and
+Interest, Whose Enthusiasm and Ability Have Upbuilded A Lasting
+Institution of Worth in The Heart of a Vast City This Book is
+Affectionately Dedicated by its Author.
+
+E. H.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                         PAGE
+
+INTRODUCTION                                      ix
+
+
+_Yesterday_
+
+  I. THE ANCESTRAL BEGINNINGS OF MACY'S            3
+
+ II. THE NEW YORK THAT MACY FIRST SAW              7
+
+III. FOURTEENTH STREET DAYS                       31
+
+ IV. THE COMING OF ISIDOR AND NATHAN STRAUS       47
+
+  V. THE STORE TREKS UPTOWN                       63
+
+
+_Today_
+
+  I. A DAY IN A GREAT STORE                       87
+
+ II. ORGANIZATION IN A MODERN STORE              109
+
+III. BUYING TO SELL                              145
+
+ IV. DISPLAYING AND SELLING THE GOODS            163
+
+  V. DISTRIBUTING THE GOODS                      185
+
+ VI. THE MACY FAMILY                             201
+
+VII. THE FAMILY AT PLAY                          233
+
+
+_Tomorrow_
+
+  I. IN WHICH MACY'S PREPARES TO BUILD ANEW      255
+
+ II. L'ENVOI                                     279
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+The New York to Which Macy Came--in 1858      _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                 FACING PAGE
+
+The Beginnings of Macy's                                  18
+
+The Fourteenth Street Store of Other Days                 34
+
+The Herald Square of Ante-Macy Days                       66
+
+The Macy's of Today                                       82
+
+Where Milady of Manhattan Shops                          114
+
+The Science of Modern Salesmanship                       210
+
+The Summer Home of the Macy Family                       242
+
+
+
+
+Introduction
+
+
+"Caveat emptor," the Romans said, in their day.
+
+"Let the Buyer beware," we would read that phrase, today.
+
+For nearly four thousand years, perhaps longer, _caveat emptor_ ruled
+the hard world of barter. Yet for the past sixty years, or thereabouts,
+a new principle has come into merchandising. You may call it progress,
+call it idealism, call it ethics, call it what you will. I simply call
+it good business.
+
+_Caveat emptor_ has become a phrase thrust out of good merchandising. It
+is a pariah. The decent merchant of today despises it. On the contrary
+he prides himself upon the honor of his calling, upon the high value of
+his good name, untarnished. The man or the woman who comes into his
+store may come with the faith or the simplicity of the child. He or she
+may even be bereft of sight, itself--yet deal in faith and fearlessly.
+
+_Caveat emptor_ is indeed a dead phrase.
+
+How and whence came this murder of a commercial derelict?
+
+You may laugh and at first you may scoff, but the fact remains that the
+development of the department store as we know it in the United States
+today first began some sixty or sixty-five years ago. And almost
+coincidently began the development of a code of morals in merchandising
+such as was all but undreamed of in this land, at any rate up to a
+decade or two before the coming of the Civil War. Not that there were no
+honest merchants in those earlier days of the republic. Oh no, there was
+a plenty of them--men whose integrity and whose sincerity were as little
+to be doubted as are those same qualities in our best merchants of
+today. Only yesterday these honest men were in the minority. The moral
+code in merchandising was yet inchoate, unformed.
+
+It might remain unformed, intangible today if it had not been for the
+coming of the department store. The enormous consolidation and
+concentration that went to make these enterprises possible brought with
+them a competition--bitter and to the end unflinching--which hesitated
+at no legitimate means for the gaining of its end. But competition
+quickly found that the best means--the finest battle-sword--was honest
+commercial practice, and so girded that sword to its belt and bade
+_caveat emptor_ begone.
+
+The great department store around which these chapters are written
+assumes for itself, neither yesterday, today nor tomorrow, any monopoly
+of this virtue of commercial honesty. But it does assert, and will
+continue to assert that it was at least among the pioneers in the
+complete banishment of _caveat emptor_, that its founder--the man whose
+name it so proudly bears today--fought for these high principles when
+the fighting was at the hardest and the temptations to move in the other
+direction were most alluring.
+
+Of these principles you shall read in the oncoming chapters of this
+book. There are many, they are varied--in some respects they vary
+greatly from those upon which other and equally successful and equally
+honest merchandising establishments are today operated. Macy's has no
+quarrel with any of its competitors. It merely writes upon the record
+that, for itself, it is quite satisfied with the merchandising
+principles that its founder and the men who came after him saw fit to
+establish. Upon those the store has prospered--and prospered greatly.
+And because of such prosperity--social as well as commercial--because it
+feels that its selling principles are quite as valuable to its patrons
+as to the store itself, it has no intention of giving change to them.
+Macy's of today is like in soul and spirit to Macy's of yesterday;
+Macy's of tomorrow is planned to be like unto the Macy's of today--only
+vastly larger in its scope and influence.
+
+For the convenience of the reader this book has been divided into three
+great parts, or books. Time has formed the logical factor of division.
+Time, as in the theater, forms these three books, or acts--Yesterday,
+Today, Tomorrow. They move in sequence. The stage-hands are placing the
+setting for the New York of yesterday--the New York that already has
+begun to fade, far from the eyes of even the oldest of the humans who
+shall come to read these pages. It is a charming New York, this American
+city of the late 'fifties, the city whose ladies go shopping in
+hoopskirts and in crinoline. It has dignity, taste, bustle, enterprise.
+
+But anon of these. The stage is set. The director's foot comes stamping
+down upon the boards. The curtain rises. The first act begins.
+
+
+
+
+_Yesterday_
+
+
+
+
+I. The Ancestral Beginnings of Macy's
+
+
+Interwoven into the history of the ancient island of Nantucket are the
+names and annals of some of the earliest of our American families--the
+Coffins, the Eldredges, the Myricks, and the Macys. Their forbears came
+from England to America fully ten generations ago. They settled upon the
+remote and wind-swept isle and there to this day many of their
+descendants ply their vocations and have their homes.
+
+In the beginning the vocation of these settlers was found to lie almost
+invariably upon a single path; and that path led down to the sea. They
+were sea-faring folk, those early residents of Nantucket: God-fearing,
+simple of speech and of action, yet mentally keen and alert. And from
+them sprang the segment of a race which was soon to grow far beyond the
+narrow barriers of the little island and to spread its splendid
+enthusiasm and energy far into a newborn land.
+
+Among the very earliest of these Nantucket settlers was one Thomas Macy,
+who, from the beginning, took his fair place in the development of its
+fishing and its whaling industries. From him came a long line of
+descendants--a clean and sturdy record--and in the eighth generation of
+these there was born--on August 29, 1822--as the son of John and Eliza
+Myrick Macy, the man whose name chiefly concerns this book--Rowland
+Hussey Macy.
+
+The record of this young man's youth is not so consequential as to be
+worth the setting down in detail. It is enough perhaps to know that at
+the age of fifteen he followed the common Nantucket custom of those days
+and went away to sea; upon a whaling voyage which was to consume four
+long years before again he saw the belfried white spire of the South
+Church rising through the trees back of the harbor and which was to make
+him in fact as well as in name, Captain Macy.
+
+Three years later he married. He chose for his wife, Miss Louisa
+Houghton, of Fairlees, Vermont. Their pleasant married life continued
+for thirty-three years, until the day of Mr. Macy's death. Mrs. Macy
+lived for several years afterwards, dying in New York City in 1886. They
+had three children, one of whom, Mrs. James F. Sutton, the widow of the
+founder of the American Art Galleries in New York, still survives and is
+living at her suburban home in Westchester County.
+
+Such is the simple statistical record of the man who lived to be one of
+New York's great merchant princes, who, upon the simple foundations of
+good merchandising, of strength, integrity and initiative, upbuilded one
+of the great and most distinctive businesses of the greatest city of the
+two American continents. Back of it is another record--not so simple or
+so quickly told. It is the story of successes and of sorrows, of
+triumphs and of failures--but in the end of the final triumph of New
+England conscience and energy and vision. It is with this last story
+that this book has its beginning.
+
+
+It was not many moons after his marriage that young Macy started in
+business, in store-keeping in Boston. He was convinced that the sea was
+no calling for a married man, and, with the Yankee's native taste for
+trading, decided that the career of the merchant was the one that had
+the largest appeal to him. So he made immediate steps in that direction.
+
+The record of that early Boston store is meagre. It is enough, perhaps,
+to say here and now that it failed, and that if its collapse had really
+dismayed the young merchant, this book would not have been written. As
+it was, the failure seemed but to stir him toward renewed efforts. He
+stood in the back of his little store and flipped a coin. It was a habit
+of his in all periods of indecision.
+
+"Heads up, and I go north," said he. "Tails and next week I start
+south."
+
+Heads came. And Rowland Macy and his wife went north. They went to
+Haverhill and there upon the bank of the Merrimac he set up his second
+store. This venture was far more successful than the first. It
+prospered, if not in large degree, at least far enough to encourage its
+proprietor. But he did not cease regretting that the coin had not come
+tails-up. Then he would have gone to New York. For New York, he was
+convinced, was about to become the undisputed metropolis of the land.
+Already it was going ahead, by leaps and bounds. And men who slipped
+into it quickly and who possessed the right qualities of commercial
+ability would go ahead quickly. Rowland Macy was convinced of this.
+
+He was not a man who lost much time in vain repinings. To New York he
+would go. He suited action to thought, sold his Haverhill business at a
+fair profit, again bundled his wife and small family together and set
+out for the metropolis of the New World.
+
+
+
+
+II. The New York That Macy First Saw
+
+
+In 1858 New York was just beginning to come into its own. It was ceasing
+to be an overgrown town--half village, half city--and was attaining a
+real metropolitanism. It had already reached a population of 650,000
+persons, and was adding to that number at the rate of from twelve
+thousand to fifteen thousand annually. Its real and personal property
+was assessed at upward of $513,000,000. New building was going apace at
+a fearful rate. Already the town was fairly closely builded up to
+Forty-ninth Street, and was paved to Forty-second. Above it up on
+Manhattan Island were many suburban villages: Bloomingdale, where Mayor
+Fernando Wood had his residence, upon a plot about the size of the
+present crossing of Broadway and Seventy-second Street, Yorkville,
+Harlem and Manhattanville. To reach the first two of these communities
+one could take certain of the horse railroads. John Stephenson had
+perfected his horse-car and these modern equipages--how quaint and
+old-fashioned they would seem today--were already plying in Second,
+Third, Sixth, Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Slowly but surely they were
+displacing the omnibuses, which dated back more than half a century. A
+goodly number of these still remained, however; twenty-six lines
+employing in all 489 separate stages--New York certainly was a
+considerable town.
+
+To reach the more remote communities of Manhattan Island--Harlem or
+Manhattanville--one took the steam-cars: either the trains of the Hudson
+River Railroad in the little old station at Chambers Street and West
+Broadway, from which they proceeded up to the west side of the island
+and, as to this day, through a goodly portion of Tenth Avenue, or else
+the trains of the New York & Harlem, or the New York & New Haven, from
+their separate terminals back of the City Hall and Canal Street up
+through Fourth Avenue, the tunnel under Yorkville Hill and thence across
+the Harlem Plain to the river of the same name. A little later these
+railroads were to consolidate their terminals, in a huge block-square
+structure at Madison and Fourth Avenues, Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh
+Streets, the forerunner of the present Madison Square Garden; but the
+first of the three successive Grand Central Stations was not to come
+until 1871.
+
+Fifth Avenue, too, was just beginning to come into its own. Some of the
+handsome homes in the lower reaches of that thoroughfare and upon the
+northern edge of Washington Square which have been suffered to remain
+until this day had already been built and an exodus had begun to them
+from the older houses to the south. All of the churches were gone from
+down town with but a few exceptions, the most conspicuous of which were
+the two Episcopalian churches in Broadway--Trinity and St. Paul's--the
+Roman Catholic Church of St. Peter's in Barclay Street, St. George's in
+Beekman, the North Dutch in William, the Middle Dutch in Nassau and the
+Brick Presbyterian, also in Beekman Street. This last, in fact, had
+already been sold for secular purposes and had been abandoned. The
+congregation was building a new house up in the fields at Fifth Avenue
+and Thirty-eighth Street, a step which was regarded by its older members
+as extremely radical and precarious, to put it mildly. The ancient home
+of the Middle Dutch Reformed had also gone for secular purposes. In it
+was housed the New York Post Office, already a brisk place, which soon
+was to outgrow its overcrowded quarters and to expand into its ugly
+citadel at the apex of the City Hall Park.
+
+The two great fires--the one in 1833 and the other in 1845--had removed
+from the lower portions of the city many of their more ancient and
+unsightly structures. The rebuilding which had followed them gave to the
+growing town much larger structures of a finer and more dignified
+architecture. Six and seven story buildings were quite common. This
+represented the practical limitations of a generation which knew not
+elevators, although the new Fifth Avenue Hotel which already was being
+planned upon the site of the old Hippodrome, at Broadway and
+Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Streets, was soon to have the first of
+these contraptions that the world had ever seen.
+
+Gone, too, were other old landmarks of downtown--some of them in their
+day distinctly famous--the City Hall, the Union Hotel, the Tontine
+Coffee House, the Bridewell and the reservoir of the Manhattan Company
+in Chambers Street. The new Croton Works, with their wonderful
+aqueduct, the High Bridge, upon which it crossed the ravine of the
+Harlem, and the dual reservoirs at Forty-second Street and at
+Eighty-sixth, had rendered this last structure obsolete. The State
+Prison had disappeared from its former site at the foot of East
+Twenty-third Street. A new group of structures at Sing Sing had replaced
+the old upon the island of Manhattan.
+
+Even then the elegant New York was moving rapidly uptown. Union Square,
+still known, however, to older New Yorkers as Union Place, was the heart
+of its life and fashion. It was lined by the fine houses of the elect
+and two of the most superb hotels of the metropolis, the Brevoort and
+the Union Square, while the Clarendon, which was destined soon to house
+the young Prince of Wales, stood but a block away. At Irving Place and
+Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets had just been completed the new Academy
+of Music. New York at last had a real opera-house, with a stage and
+fittings large enough and adequate to present music-drama upon a scale
+equal to that of the larger European capitals. She had plenty of
+theaters, too: the Broadway, the Bowery, Laura Keene's, Niblo's Garden,
+and Wood & Christy's Negro Minstrels, chief amongst them. While down at
+the point where Chatham Street (now Park Row) debouched into Broadway,
+Barnum's Museum already stood, with its gay bannered front beckoning
+eagerly to the countrymen.
+
+And how the countrymen did flock into New York--in those serene and busy
+days before the coming of a tragic war. New York harbor was a busy
+place. For not all of them came by the well-filled trains of the three
+railroads that reached in upon Manhattan Island. There were
+sailing-ships and steamboats a plenty bumping their noses against the
+overcrowded piers of the growing city; ferries from Brooklyn and
+Williamsburgh and Jersey City and Hoboken and Astoria and Staten Island;
+steamboat lines down the harbor to Amboy and to Newark and to
+Elizabethtown; and up the Sound to Fall River, to Providence and to the
+Connecticut ports. But the finest steamers of all plied the Hudson.
+There the rivalry was keenest, the opportunities for profit apparently
+the greatest. And despite the fact that New York was already the port of
+many important ocean lines--the Cunard, the Collins, the Glasgow, the
+Havre, the Hamburg and the Panama steamers, for the fast-growing fame of
+the metropolis of the New World was already attracting great numbers of
+travelers from overseas--the fact also remains that when the _Daniel
+Drew_, of the Albany Night Line, was first built, in 1863, she exceeded
+in size and in passenger-carrying capacity any ocean liner plying in and
+out of the port of New York.
+
+So came the countrymen and the residents of the other smaller towns and
+cities of the land, along with many, many foreigners, to this new vortex
+of humanity. They found their way, not alone to the hotels of the Union
+Square district, but to such equally distinguished houses as the Astor,
+the Brevoort, the St. Nicholas, the Metropolitan, the New York. They
+went to the theaters and almost invariably they climbed the brown-stone
+spire of old Trinity, in order to drink in the view that it commanded:
+the wide sweep of busy city close at hand, the more distant ranges of
+the upper and lower harbors, the North and the East Rivers, Long Island,
+Staten Island, New Jersey and the western slopes of the Orange
+Mountains. And some, loving New York and realizing the fair
+opportunities that it offered, came to stay.
+
+
+In among this throng of folk who rushed into the town in 1858 there
+came--among those who came to stay--Rowland H. Macy. The partial success
+of his Haverhill store, to an extent overbalancing the initial failure
+in Boston, had brought him into the metropolis of America, the city of
+wider, if indeed not unlimited opportunity. In those days there were few
+large stores in New York; nothing to be in the least compared with its
+great department stores of today. One heard of its hotels, its churches,
+its theaters, its banks, but very little indeed of its mercantile
+establishments. They were, for the most part, very small and exceedingly
+individual. They were known as shops and well deserved that title. There
+were a few exceptions, of course: A. T. Stewart's--still on Broadway
+between Worth and Chambers Streets--Ridley's, Lord & Taylor's and John
+Daniell's in Grand Street (this last at Broadway), McNamee & Company's,
+Arnold, Constable & Co., McCreery's, Hearn's, and one or two others,
+perhaps, of particular distinction.
+
+It is hardly possible that Macy, as he found his way into these larger
+establishments, believed that he might ever in his own enterprise match
+their elegance and distinction. It is difficult to believe that in those
+very earliest days he had the vision of a department store. At any rate
+the extremely modest establishment which he opened at 204 Sixth Avenue,
+between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets, in conjunction with his
+brother-in-law, Samuel S. Houghton, devoted itself at first, and for a
+long time afterward, exclusively to the sale of fancy goods. For
+specializing was the fashion of that day and generation; John Daniell
+sold nothing but ribbons and trimmings then; Aiken laces, and Stewart's
+chiefly dress-goods.
+
+Yet Macy had vision. The department store idea must slowly have forced
+itself into his mind. For, five years later, we find his small business,
+originally on Sixth Avenue, just a door or two below Fourteenth Street,
+expanding so rapidly that he was forced to secure more room for it. And
+this despite the fact that not only was he two long blocks distant from
+Broadway but the particular corner which he had chosen for his store was
+known locally as unlucky--two or three other stores had gone bankrupt on
+it. Macy had no intention of going bankrupt. He added to his original
+shop the store at 62 West Fourteenth Street, at right angles to and
+connecting in the rear with it, and in this he installed a department of
+hats and millinery. He was beginning to come and come quickly--this
+country merchant to whom at first New York refused to extend either
+recognition or credit.
+
+Now was the complete department store idea fairly launched, for the
+first time in the history of America, if not in the entire world. Yet,
+when one came to fair and final analysis, it represented nothing else
+than the country-store of the small town or cross-roads greatly expanded
+in volume. And so, after all, it is barely possible that the canny New
+Englander may have had the germ of his surpassing idea implanted in his
+mind, a full decade or more before he had the opportunity to make use of
+it. Incidentally, it may be set down here, that Mr. Macy in the rapidly
+recurring trips to Paris which he found necessary to make in the
+interest of his business developed a great admiration for the Bon Marché
+of that city. He studied its methods carefully and adopted them whenever
+he found the opportunity.
+
+From hats to dress-goods--the addition of still another adjoining store
+was inevitable--came as a fairly natural sequence. And one finds the
+successful young merchant who had had the enterprise and the initiative
+to leave Broadway--supposedly the supreme shopping street of the New
+York of that day--laying in his stocks of alpaca, of black bombazine, of
+silks and muslins, sheetings and pillow-cases and all that with these
+go. The idea once born was adhered to. As it broadened it gained
+prosperity. And as a natural sequence there came gradually and with a
+further steady enlargement of the premises, jewelry, toilet-goods and
+the so-called Vienna goods. Toys were added in 1869, and gradually
+house-furnishing goods, confectionery, soda water, books and stationery,
+boys' clothing, ladies' underwear, crockery, glassware, silverware,
+boots and shoes, dress-goods, dressmaking, ready-to-wear clothing, and,
+in due time, a restaurant.
+
+For many years it was the only store in town to carry soaps and
+perfumes. This, of itself, brought to the store a clientele of its
+own--the most beautiful women of New York, among the most notable of
+them, Rose Eytinge, the actress, who was just then coming to the
+pinnacle of her fame.
+
+
+Mr. Macy, accompanied by his wife and daughter--the latter of whom is
+still alive at an advanced age--took up his residence at first over the
+store and then, a little later, in a small house in West Twelfth Street,
+within easy walking distance of his place of business. From this he
+afterward moved to a larger residence in West Forty-ninth Street. He was
+a man of sturdy build, of more than medium height and thick-set,
+extremely affable in manner. He wore a heavy beard, and an old employee
+of the store was wont to liken his appearance to that of the poet,
+Longfellow. His tendency toward black cigars and to appearing in the
+store in his shirt-sleeves did not heighten the resemblance, however.
+
+He was a man of almost indomitable will. Such a quality was quite as
+necessary for success in those days as in these. The modern ideas of
+beneficence and generosity to the employee were little dreamed of then.
+The successful merchant, like the successful manufacturer or the
+successful banker, drove his men and drove them hard. Macy was no
+exception to this rule. If he had been, it is doubtful if he would have
+lasted long. For while '58 was a year of seeming prosperity in New York
+it also followed directly one of the notable panic-years in the
+financial history of the United States and was soon to be followed by
+four years of internecine struggle in the nation--in which its credit
+and financial resources were to be strained to the utmost.
+
+It is entirely possible that the record of the Macy store might not be
+set down as one of final and overwhelming success, if it had not been
+for the driving force of a woman, who was brought into the organization
+not long after the opening of the original store in lower Sixth Avenue.
+This woman, Margaret Getchell, was also born in Nantucket. She had been
+a school-teacher upon the island, until the loss of one of her eyes
+forced her to seek less confining work. She drifted to New York and,
+taking advantage of a girlhood acquaintance with Mr. Macy, asked him for
+employment in his store. He knew her and was glad to take her in. She,
+in turn, engaged rooms in a flat just over a picture-frame store, in
+Sixth Avenue, across from her employment, so that she might devote every
+possible moment of her time, day and night, to its success.
+
+So was born a real executive--and in a day when the possibilities of
+women ever becoming business executives were as remote seemingly as that
+they might ever fly. For decades after she had gone, she left the
+impress of her remarkable personality upon the store. An attractive
+figure she was: a small, slight woman, with masses of glorious hair and
+a pert upturn to her nose, while the loss of her eye was overcome, from
+the point of view of appearance at least, by the wearing of an
+artificial one, which she handled so cleverly that many folk knew her
+for a long time without realizing her misfortune.
+
+At every turn, Margaret Getchell was a clever woman. Once when Mr. Macy
+had imported a wonderful mechanical singing-bird--a thing quite as
+unusual in that early day as was the phonograph when it came upon the
+market--and its elaborate mechanism had slipped out of order, it was
+she, with the aid of a penknife, a screw-driver and a pair of pliers--I
+presume that she also used a hair-pin--who took it entirely apart and
+put it together again. And at another time she trained two cats to
+permit themselves to be arrayed in doll's clothing and to sleep for
+hours in twin-cribs, to the great amusement and delectation of the
+visitors to the store. Later she caused a photograph to be made of the
+exhibit, which was retailed in great quantities to the younger
+customers. Miss Getchell was nothing if not businesslike.
+
+It was her keen, commercial acumen that made her alert in the heart
+center of the early store--the cashier's office. She tolerated neither
+discrepancies nor irregularities there. There it was that the New
+England school-ma'm showed itself most keenly. Did a saleswoman
+overcharge a patron two dollars? And did the cashier accept and pass the
+check? Then the cashier must pay the two dollars out of her meagre
+pay-envelope on Saturday night. "Overs" were treated the same as
+"unders." It made no difference that the store was already ahead two
+dollars on the transaction. Discipline was the thing. Discipline would
+keep that sort of offense from being repeated many times, and Macy's
+from ever being given the unsavory reputation of making a practice of
+overcharging.
+
+"Don't ever erase a figure or change it, no matter what seems to be the
+logical reason in your own mind," she kept telling her cashiers. "The
+very act implies dishonesty."
+
+So does the New England conscience ever lean backward.
+
+Yet it is related of this same Margaret Getchell that when a little and
+comparatively friendless girl had been admitted to the cashier's cage--a
+decided innovation in those days--and had been found in an apparent
+peculation of three dollars and promptly discharged by Mr. Macy, Miss
+Getchell dropped everything else and went to work on behalf of the
+little cashier. Intuitively she felt that another of her sex in the cage
+had made the theft--a young woman who had come into the store from a
+prominent up-state family to learn merchandising. The up-state young
+woman was fond of dress. Her dress demands far exceeded her salary. Of
+that Miss Getchell was sure.
+
+Yet intuition is one thing and proof quite another. For a fortnight the
+store manager worked upon her surpassing problem. She induced Macy to
+suspend for a time his order of discharge and she kept putting the women
+cashiers in relays in the cage, to suit her own fancy and her own plans.
+The petty thefts continued. But not for long. The plans worked. The
+altered checks were found to be all in the time of one of the
+cashiers--and that was not the one who had been discharged. Miss
+Getchell drove to the home of Miss Upper New York and there, in the
+presence of her family, got both confession and reparation.
+
+[Illustration: THE BEGINNINGS OF MACY'S
+
+The original small store in Sixth Avenue just south of 14th Street. Here
+the business starts in 1858]
+
+She was forever seeking new lines of activities for the store--branching
+out here, branching out there, and turning most of these new ventures
+into lines of resounding profits. "If necessary, we shall handle
+everything except one," she is reputed to have said. And upon being
+asked what that one was, she replied brusquely, "Coffins." Once she
+embarked Macy upon the grocery business--whole decades before the
+establishment of the present huge grocery department--and while
+eventually the store was forced to drop for a time this line of
+merchandise, she succeeded in taking so much business from New York's
+then leading firm of grocers that they came to Macy, himself, and begged
+him to drop the competition.
+
+
+In the retailing world of that day, tradition and habit still governed
+and with an iron hand. Stores opened early in the morning and kept open
+until late in the evening, and did this six days of the week. Their
+workers rose and left their homes--before dawn in many months of the
+year--and did not return to them until well after dark. Yet they did not
+complain, for that was the fashion of the times and was recognized as
+such. Wages were as low as the hours were long. But food-costs also were
+low, and rentals but a tiny fraction of their present figure. The
+apartment house had not yet come to New York. It was a development set
+for a full two decades later. The store-workers lived in
+boarding-houses, in small furnished rooms or with their families. The
+greater part of them resided within walking distance of their
+employment.
+
+Mr. Macy had all of his fair share of traditional New England thrift.
+One of the favorite early anecdotes of "the old man," as his
+fellow-workers were prone to call him, and with no small show of
+affection, concerned his refusal to permit shades to be placed upon the
+gas-jets in the store, saying that he paid for the light and so wanted
+the full value for his money. He was skeptical, at the best, about
+innovations. Moreover, necessity compelled him to keep close watch upon
+the pennies. At one time he reduced the weekly wages of his cash-girls
+from two dollars to one-dollar-and-a-half, saying that the war was over
+and he could no longer afford to pay war wages. Yet when a courageous
+sales-clerk went to him and told him that she could not possibly live
+any longer upon her weekly wage of three dollars, he promptly raised it
+a dollar, without argument or hesitation. And the following week he
+automatically extended the same increase to every other clerk in the
+store.
+
+Labor conditions in that day were hard, indeed. The working hours, as I
+have already said, were long. In regular times the store hours were from
+eight to six, instead of from nine to five-thirty, as today. On busy
+days the clerks worked an extra hour, putting the stock in place, while
+in the fortnight which preceded Christmas the store was open
+evenings--supposedly until ten o'clock, as a matter of fact, often until
+long after ten, when the workers were well toward the point of
+exhaustion. Other conditions of their labor were slightly better. There
+were no seats in the aisles and conversation between the clerks was
+punishable by discharge. They might make their personal purchases only
+on Friday mornings, between eight and nine o'clock, and they received no
+discount whatsoever. In Mr. Macy's day the only discounts ever given
+were to the New York Juvenile Asylum in Thirteenth Street nearby, which
+was an institution peculiarly close to his heart.
+
+There were no lockers in the early days of the old store. In one of its
+upper floors several small rooms were set aside as a crude sort of
+cloak-room for the employees. A few nails around the walls sufficed for
+their outer wraps but there were never enough of these nails to go
+around. One of the clerks was chosen to come early and stay late in
+order to supervise these rooms. Inasmuch as there was neither glory nor
+remuneration in this task, it was not eagerly sought after.
+
+Nevertheless, here was the enlightened day at hand when women would and
+did work in stores--not alone in great numbers but in a great majority
+and in many cases to the exclusion of men. It was one of the sweeping
+economic changes that the Civil War brought in its train. When the men
+must go to fight in the armies of the North, women must take their
+places--for only a little while it seemed up to that time. Yet so well
+did they do much of men's work, that their retention in many of their
+positions came as a very natural course. So while the decade that
+preceded the Civil War found few or no professions open to women--save
+those of teaching or of domestic employment--the one which followed it
+found them coming in increasing numbers, into a steadily increasing
+number and variety of endeavors.
+
+So it was then that the great war of the last century brought women
+behind the counters of the stores--Macy's was no exception to the
+invasion. They came to stay. And stay they have, to this very day, even
+though most of the New York stores still retain men to a considerable
+extent in some of their departments--notably those devoted to the sale
+of furniture, dress-goods and boots and shoes. For some varieties of
+stock the male clerk still is the most suitable and successful sort of
+salesman.
+
+
+In his store in Haverhill, Mr. Macy had adopted as his trade-mark a
+rooster bearing the motto in his beak, "While I live, I'll crow." For
+his nascent enterprise in New York, however, he adopted a different and,
+to him at least, a far more significant device, which to this day
+remains the symbol of the great enterprise which still bears his name.
+
+It was a star, a star of red, if you will. And back of that simple
+symbol rests a story: It seems that in the days of his youth when he
+sailed the northern seas in a whaling ship he had gradually acquired
+such proficiency that he was made first mate and then master. It was in
+the earlier capacity, however, and upon an occasion when he was given a
+trick at the wheel that Macy found himself in a thick fog off a New
+England port--one version of the story says Boston, the other New
+Bedford. To catch the familiar lights of the harbor gateways was out of
+the question. The cloud banks lay low against the shore. Overhead there
+was a rift or two, and in one of them, well ahead of the vessel's prow,
+there gleamed a brilliant star.
+
+For the young skipper this was literally a star of hope. His quick wit
+made it a guiding star. By it he steered his course and so successfully
+into the safety of the harbor that the star became for him thereafter
+the symbol of success. With the strange insistency that was inherent in
+the man, he was wont to say that the failure of his Boston store was due
+to the fact that he had not there adopted the star as his trade-mark. He
+made no such mistake in his New York enterprise. The star became the
+forefront of his business. And to this day it is a prominent feature of
+the main façade of the great establishment which bears his name.
+
+Mr. Macy never lost his boyhood affection for the sea--the one thing
+inborn of his ancestral blood. It is related of him that one morning on
+his way to the store he found a small silver anchor lying on the
+sidewalk, picked it up, placed it in his pocket and thereafter carried
+it until the day of his death, regarding it as a talisman of real value.
+There was one souvenir of his early connection of which he was greatly
+ashamed, however. As a boy he had permitted his shipmates to tattoo the
+backs of his hands. In later years he regretted this exceedingly, and
+developed a habit of talking to strangers with the palms of his hands
+held uppermost, so that they might not see the tattoo marks.
+
+
+From the very beginning Macy adopted certain fixed and definite policies
+for his business. These showed not alone the vision but the breadth and
+bigness of the man. For one of the most important of them he decided
+that in his business he would have cash transactions only. This applied
+both ways--to the purchase of his merchandise as well as to its retail
+sale. It is a bed-rock principle that has come down to today as a
+foundation of the business that he founded. It is perhaps the one rule
+of it, from which there is no deviation, at any time or under any
+circumstance. It is related that a full quarter of a century after Macy
+had first adopted this principle, one of the then partners of the
+concern was approached by a warm personal friend, a man of high
+financial standing, who said that he wished to make a rather elaborate
+purchase that morning, but not having either cash or a check handy,
+asked for an exception to the no-credit rule. The partner shook his
+head, smiled, rather sadly, and said:
+
+"No, Mr. Blank, I cannot do that, even for you. But I can tell you what
+I can, and shall do."
+
+And so saying he reached for his own check-book, wrote out a personal
+voucher for two hundred dollars, stepped over to the cashier's office,
+had it cashed and presented the money, in crisp green bills to his
+friend.
+
+"You can repay me, at your convenience," was all that he said.
+
+Convinced that trust--as he insisted upon calling credit--was a
+millstone upon the neck of the merchant--let alone a struggling man of
+thirty-five who previously had known failure--Macy insisted upon
+matching his purchases for any ensuing week close to his sales for the
+preceding one. He did all his own buying at first; and for a number of
+years thereafter he employed no professional buyers whatsoever. In this
+way he kept his margin closely in hand and at all times well within the
+range of safety. There was little of the spirit of the gambler in him.
+It would not have sat well with his Yankee blood.
+
+A second principle of the store in those early days which has come
+easily and naturally down to these--when it is accepted retailing
+principle everywhere--was the marking of the selling price upon each and
+every article. It seems odd to think today that the installing of such a
+fair and commonsense principle should once have been regarded as a
+stroke of daring initiative in merchandising. Yet the fact remains that
+in the days when Macy's was young, in the average store one bargained
+and bargained constantly. There was no single price set upon any
+article. Even when one went into as fine and showy a store as New York
+might boast one bartered. _Caveat emptor_, "Let the buyer beware," was
+seemingly the dominating retail motto of those days.
+
+But not in Mr. Macy's. The selling price went on every article displayed
+in the store in those days and in such plain and readable figures that
+any fairly educated person might clearly understand. This principle
+alone was one of the huge factors that went toward the early and
+immediate success of the enterprise.
+
+There was still another merchandising idea born of that great and
+fertile New England brain that needs to be set down at this time. For
+many years a notable feature of the advertising of the Macy store has
+been in the peculiar shading of its prices--at forty-nine cents or
+ninety-eight, or at $1.98 or $4.98 or $9.98 rather than in the even
+multiples of dollars. A good many worldly-wise folk have jumped to the
+quick conclusion that this was due to a desire on the part of the store
+to make the selling price of any given article seem a little less than
+it really was. As a matter of fact it was due to nothing of the sort.
+With all of his respect for the honesty of his sales-force, the Yankee
+mind of R. H. Macy took few chances--even in that regard. He felt that
+in almost every transaction the money handed over by the customer would
+be in even silver coin or bills. To give back the change from an
+odd-figured selling-price the salesman or the saleswoman would be
+compelled to do business with the cashier and so to make a full record
+of the transaction. With the commodities in even dollars and their
+larger fractions the temptation to pocket the entire amount might be
+present.
+
+It required a good deal of logic, or long-distance reasoning, to figure
+out such a possibility and an almost certain safeguard against it. But
+that was Macy. His was not the day of cash-registers or other checking
+devices. The salesman and the saleswoman in a store was still apt to
+find himself or herself an object of suspicion on the part of his or
+her employer. Business ethics were still in the making. A long road in
+them was still to be traversed.
+
+
+Mr. Macy's brother-in-law, Mr. Houghton, did not long remain in
+partnership with him, but retired to Boston, where he became senior
+partner of the house of Houghton & Dutton, which is still in existence.
+For a long number of years thereafter Macy conducted his business alone.
+Its steadily increasing growth, however, the multiplication of its
+responsibilities and problems, and his own oncoming years finally caused
+him to admit to partnership on the first day of January, 1877, two of
+his oldest and most valued employees, Abiel T. LaForge and Robert M.
+Valentine. It had long been rumored in the store that Miss Getchell's
+years of faithful service were finally to be rewarded by a real
+partnership in it. But even in 1876, woman's place in modern business
+had not been firmly enough established to permit so radical a step by a
+business house of as large ramifications and responsibilities as Macy's
+had come to be. Yet the point was quickly overcome--and in a most
+unexpected way. Early in 1876 Miss Getchell became Mr. LaForge's wife.
+And so, in a most active and interested way, she gained at the end a
+real financial interest in the profitable business, in the upbuilding of
+which she had been so large a factor.
+
+Mr. LaForge had been a major in the Northern Army during the Civil War;
+in fact it was there that he had contracted the tuberculosis which was
+to cause his early demise. He had come into the store in the middle of
+the 'seventies as one of its first professional buyers--being a
+specialist in laces--and had developed real executive ability. He had
+great affection for things military. And when Mr. Macy told him of the
+uniformed attendants of his beloved Bon Marché, LaForge promptly
+proceeded to place the entire salesforce of Macy's in uniform. Neat
+uniforms they were, too: of a bluish-grey cadet cloth, and with stiff
+upstanding collars of a much darker blue upon the points of which were
+interwoven the familiar device of the bright red star. The Macy uniforms
+did not long remain, however. New York is not Paris. And in that day,
+when uniforms in general were looked upon as something quite foreign to
+the idea of the republic, American labor was particularly averse to
+them.
+
+His important partnership step taken, Mr. Macy began to lay down his
+responsibilities. Despite his great fame and vigorous constitution his
+health had begun to fail under the multiplicity of duties. Again he
+turned toward the sea. He embarked upon a long voyage to Europe; in
+which he was to combine both business and pleasure. From that voyage he
+never returned. His health sank rapidly and he died in Paris, on the
+twenty-ninth day of March, 1877.
+
+
+Two days later in New York, Mr. LaForge and Mr. Valentine formed a
+partnership, Mr. LaForge, although the younger of the two men, becoming
+the senior member of the firm. It was provided in the co-partnership
+papers that the business should be continued under the name of R. H.
+Macy & Co., until January 1, 1879; and thereafter under the new firm
+name of LaForge and Valentine. However, Mr. LaForge's death in 1878,
+followed a year later by that of his wife, prevented this scheme from
+being carried out. The question of changing the name of a
+well-established business--now come to be one of the great enterprises
+of the city of New York--was never again brought forward. The name of
+Macy had attained far too fine a trade value to be easily dropped, even
+if sentiment had not come into the reckoning. And sentiment still ruled
+the big retail house in lower Sixth Avenue, sentiment demanded that the
+name of one of New York's greatest merchant princes should be henceforth
+perpetuated in the business which he had so solidly founded. And so that
+name continues--in growing strength and prosperity.
+
+
+
+
+III. Fourteenth Street Days
+
+
+By 1883 the Macy store had rounded out its first quarter century of
+existence. The big, comfortable, homely group of red brick buildings on
+Sixth Avenue from Thirteenth to Fourteenth Streets had come to be as
+much a real landmark of New York as the Grand Central Depot, Grace
+Church, Booth's Theater, the Metropolitan Opera House or the equally new
+Casino Theater in upper Broadway. Its founder had been dead for six
+years. But the business marched steadily on--growing steadily both in
+its scope and in its volume. It already was among the first, if not the
+very first in New York, in the variety and the magnitude of its
+operations. It employed more than fifteen hundred men and women, a great
+growth since 1870 when an early payroll of the store had shown but one
+hundred on its employment list.
+
+Other stores had followed closely upon the heels of Macy's. Stewart's
+had moved up Broadway from Chambers Street to its wonderful square iron
+emporium between Ninth and Tenth Streets, where, after the death of the
+man who had established it, it enjoyed varying success for a long time
+until its final resuscitation by that great Philadelphia merchant, John
+Wanamaker. Benjamin Altman had moved his store from its original
+location on Third Avenue to Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street, Koch
+was at Nineteenth Street, but Ehrich was still over on Eighth Avenue.
+None of these had been an important merchant in the beginning. But all
+of them, by 1883, were beginning to come into their own. The Sixth
+Avenue shopping district of the 'eighties and the 'nineties was being
+born. Mr. Macy's vision of more than twenty-five years years before was
+being abundantly justified. The new elevated railroad, which formed the
+backbone of Sixth Avenue and which had been completed about a decade
+before, all the way from South Ferry to One Hundred and Fifty-fifth
+Street, had proved a mighty factor in bringing shoppers into it. Mr.
+Macy in 1858 might not have foreseen the coming of this remarkable
+system of rapid transit--the first of its kind in any large city of the
+world. But he foresaw the coming of both Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth
+Street. There is no doubt of that. He had a habit of reiterating his
+prophecy to all with whom he came in contact.
+
+The prophecy came to pass. Union Square no longer was surrounded by fine
+residences. Trade had invaded it, successfully. Tiffany's, Brentano's,
+_The Century's_ fine publishing house had come to replace the homes of
+the old time New Yorkers. So, too, had Fourteenth Street been
+transformed. Delmonico's was still at one of its Fifth Avenue corners
+and back of it stood, and still stands, the Van Buren residence, a sort
+of Last of the Mohicans in brick and stone and timber and plaster. All
+the rest was business; high-grade business, if you please, and Macy's
+stood in the very heart of it.
+
+We saw, in a preceding chapter, how just before the passing of Mr. Macy
+he had taken into partnership Mr. LaForge and Mr. Valentine. Mr.
+LaForge, as we have just seen, lived hardly a year after Mr. Macy's
+death in Paris, and Mr. Valentine died less than a twelvemonth later--on
+February 15, 1879. Yet the force and impress of both of these men
+remained with the organization for a long time after their going. Miss
+Prunty, one of the older members of it, still remembers as one of her
+earliest recollections, seeing Mr. LaForge taking groups of the
+cash-girls out to supper during the racking holiday season. The little
+girls were duly grateful. Theirs was a drab existence, at the best; long
+hours and wearying ones. A type that has quite passed out of
+existence--in these days of automatic carriers--that old-time cash girl
+in the big store, with her red-checked gingham frock and her hair in
+pig-tails, which had a fashion of sticking straight out from her small
+head. Lunch in a small tin pail and a vast ambition, which led many and
+many a one of them into positions of real trust and responsibility.
+
+The most of them continued in the business of merchandising. They rose
+rapidly to be saleswomen, buyers and department managers--not alone in
+Macy's; but in the other great stores of the city. A Macy training
+became recognized as a business schooling of the greatest value. While
+at least one of these Macy graduates--Carrie DeMar--came to be an
+actress of nation-wide reputation, a comedienne of real merit.
+
+There were times when the existence of these smart, pert little girls
+grew less drab. One of them told me not so long ago of the _entente
+cordiale_ which she had upbuilded between Mr. S---- and herself; nearly
+fifty years ago.
+
+"Mr. S---- was the only floorwalker that the store possessed in those
+days," said she. "Mr. Macy had been much impressed by his fine
+appearance and had created the post for him. On duty, he seemed a most
+solemn man. That was a part of his work. Behind it all he was most
+human, however; and sometimes on a hot day in midsummer he would begin
+to think of the cooling lager that flowed at The Grapevine, a few blocks
+down the avenue. That settled it. He would have to slip down there for
+five minutes. And slip down he did, while I stood guard at the
+Thirteenth Street door. I felt that Miss Getchell's far-seeing eye was
+forever upon us or that Mr. Macy might turn up quite unexpectedly.
+
+"In return for all this, Mr. S---- would occasionally stand guard while
+I would slip over to John Huyler's bakery at Eighth Avenue and
+Fourteenth Street--sometimes to get one of his wonderful pies, and other
+times to buy the lovely new candies upon which he was beginning to
+experiment. We were great pals--S---- and I."
+
+
+Nowadays in the great department stores they order this entire business
+of collecting both cash and packages in a far better fashion. The
+merchant of today has a variety of wondrous mechanical contraptions--not
+only cash-carriers but cash-registers--which do the work they once did,
+much more rapidly and efficiently. Even in those long ago days of the
+'eighties the Macy store was beginning to install pneumatic tubes for
+carrying the money from the saleswomen at the counters to the high-set
+booths of the head cashiers, who seemingly had come to regard it as a
+mere commodity, to be regarded in as fully impersonal a fashion as boots
+or shoes or sugar or broom-sticks. Put that down as progress for the
+'eighties.
+
+[Illustration: THE FOURTEENTH STREET STORE OF OTHER DAYS
+
+By the early 'seventies Macy's had absorbed the entire southeastern
+corners of 14th Street and 6th Avenue, and had come to be a fixture of
+New York]
+
+The Macy store prided itself during that second generation, as now, upon
+its willingness to take up innovations, particularly when they showed
+themselves as possessing at least a degree of real worth. Mr. Macy, with
+his old fashioned prejudices against innovations of any sort, was gone.
+His successors took a radically different position in regard to them.
+Here was the electric-light--that brand-new thing which this young man
+Tom Edison over at Menlo Park was developing so rapidly. It was new. It
+had been well advertised; particularly well advertised for that day and
+generation. How it drew folk, to gaze admiringly upon its hissing
+brilliancy! Ergo! The Macy store must have an electric light. And so in
+the late autumn days of 1878 one of the very first arc lamps to be
+displayed in New York was hung outside the Fourteenth Street front of
+the store and attracted many crowds. It was hardly less than a
+sensation.
+
+In the following autumn arc lamps were placed throughout all the retail
+selling portions of the store. Of course, they were not very dependable.
+Most folk those days thought that they would never so become. The
+store's real reliance was upon its gas-lighting; nice, reliable old
+gas. You could depend upon it. The new system was still erratic. So
+figured the mind of the 'eighties.
+
+Soon after the first electric lamps, the store's first telephone was
+installed. It, too, was a great novelty, and the customers of the
+establishment developed a habit of calling up their friends, just so
+that they could say they had used it. Eventually the convenience of the
+device became so apparent that folk stood in queues awaiting their turn
+to use it, and the telephone company requested Macy's to take it out or
+at least to discontinue the practice of using it so freely.
+
+In that day there were no elevators nor for a considerable time
+thereafter. All the store's selling was at first, and for a long time
+thereafter, confined to its basement and to its main-floor. Gradually it
+began to encroach upon small portions of the second story. This afforded
+fairly generous selling space; for it must be remembered that the
+establishment not only filled the entire east side of Sixth Avenue from
+Thirteenth Street to Fourteenth Street but extended back upon each of
+them for more than one hundred and fifty feet. Moreover it was beginning
+slowly to acquire disconnected buildings in the surrounding territory;
+generally for the purpose of manufacturing certain lines of
+merchandise--a practice which it has almost entirely discontinued in
+these later years. Then it still made certain things that it wished
+fashioned along the lines which its clientele still demanded. And even
+some of the upper floors of the older buildings that formed the main
+store group were partly given over to the making of clothing; of
+underwear; and men's shirts and collars in particular.
+
+It was after 1882, according to the memory of Mr. James E. Murphy, a
+salesman in the black silk department, who came to the store in that
+memorable year, that the first elevator was installed in the store. Up
+to that time, as we have just seen, there had been no necessity
+whatsoever for such a machine. But the steadily growing business of the
+store--there really seemed to be no way of holding Macy's back--made it
+necessary to use upper floors of the original building for retailing and
+more and more to crowd the manufacturing and other departments into
+outside structures.
+
+So Macy's progressed. It kept its selling methods as well as its stock,
+not only abreast of the times, but a little ahead of them. Miss Fallon,
+who was in the shoe department of those days of the 'eighties, recalls
+that up to that time the shoes had been kept in large chiffoniers--the
+sizes "2½" to "3½" in one drawer, "4" to "5" in the next, and so on.
+This meant that if a clerk was looking for a certain specified
+width--say "D" or "Double A"--she must rummage through the entire drawer
+until she came to a pair which had the required size neatly marked upon
+its lining. The mating of the shoes was accomplished by boring small awl
+holes in their backs and tying them neatly together. There was no repair
+shop in the shoe department of that day--merely an aged shoemaker who
+lived in a basement across Thirteenth Street and to whom shoes for
+repair were despatched almost as rapidly as they came into the store.
+
+These methods seem crude today. But, even in 1883, they were in full
+keeping with the times. Merchandising was still in its swaddling
+clothes; the real science of salesmanship, a thing unknown. Yet men were
+groping through; and some of these men were in Macy's. You might take as
+such a man C. B. Webster, who came to the forefront of the business,
+soon after the deaths of Macy, LaForge and Valentine at the end of its
+second decade. In fact, his actual admission to the partnership preceded
+Mr. Valentine's death by a few months. A while later he married Mr.
+Valentine's widow. And when the last of the old partners was gone his
+was the steering hand upon the brisk and busy ship.
+
+To help him in his work he brought to his right hand Jerome B. Wheeler,
+who was admitted as a full partner April 1, 1879, and who so continued
+until his complete retirement from business, December 31, 1887. Mr.
+Webster continued with the house for a considerably longer time,
+maintaining his active partnership until 1896 when he sold his interest
+in the business to his partners. He continued, however, to retain his
+private office in the Macy store, coming north with it from Fourteenth
+Street to Thirty-fourth in 1902, and, until his death four or five years
+ago, staying close beside the enterprise in which he had been so large a
+creative factor.
+
+Webster and Wheeler are, then, the names most prominently connected with
+the second era of the store's growth and activity. They were bound to
+the founder of the house by blood-ties and by marriage. Mr. Webster's
+father--Josiah Locke Webster, a merchant of Providence, R. I.--and Mr.
+Macy were first cousins, their mothers having been sisters. The elder
+Webster and Rowland H. Macy were, in fact, the warmest of friends and so
+the proffer by the original proprietor of the store of an opening to his
+friend's son, came almost as a matter of course. Its educational value
+alone was enormous. Young Webster accepted. He joined the organization
+in 1876 and a year later was made one of its buyers. His worth quickly
+began to assert itself. And within another twelvemonth he had abandoned
+all idea of returning to his father's store in Providence and entered
+upon a partnership in the Macy business.
+
+Many of the older employees of the store still remember him distinctly.
+He was a tall man, stately, conservative in speech and in manner--your
+typical successful man of business of that time and generation. Yet
+these very Macy people will tell you today that while his dignity awed,
+it did not repress. For with it went a kindliness of manner and of
+purpose. Nor was he--as some of them were then inclined to
+believe--devoid of any sense of humor. Mr. James Woods, who is assistant
+superintendent of delivery in the store today and who has been with it
+for forty-eight years, recalls many and many a battle royal with "C. B.
+W." as he still calls his old associate and chief, which they had
+together as they worked in the delivery rooms of the old Fourteenth
+Street store, hurling packages at one another and then following up with
+smart fisticuffs.
+
+"In those early days," adds George L. Hammond, who came to the store in
+1886 and who is now in its woolen dress-goods department, "I found Mr.
+Webster a most kindly man, even though taciturn. For instance, one day
+Mr. Isidor Straus came up to the counter with a man whom he had met upon
+the floor. They stood talking together. Mr. Straus told the other
+gentleman that he had recently met a Mr. Cebalos, known at that time as
+the Cuban Sugar King, and that Mr. Cebalos had spoken to him of having
+met such a fine gentleman, an American, in France; that this gentleman
+was evidently a man of education and large means and had said that he
+was in business in New York. Mr. Cebalos asked Mr. Straus if he had ever
+known his chance acquaintance in Paris--he was a Mr. Webster, Mr. C. B.
+Webster. To which Mr. Straus instantly replied: 'Of course I know him.
+He is the senior member of our firm.' Mr. Cebalos answered: 'What, the
+senior member of the firm of R. H. Macy & Co.? Why, he never told me
+that!'"
+
+So much for old-fashioned modesty and conservatism.
+
+
+The habit of reticence enclosed many of these older executives of
+Macy's. They were silent oft-times because they could not forget their
+vast responsibilities--even when they were away from the store. It is
+told of one of them that once in the middle of the performance in an
+uptown theater the thought flashed over him that he had neglected to
+close his safe--a duty which was never relegated to any subordinate. He
+arose at once from his seat and hurried down to the Store, brought the
+night watchman to the doors and strode quickly to the private office:
+only to find the stout doors of its great strong-box firmly fastened.
+The idea that he had neglected his duty was a nervous obsession. His was
+not the training nor the mentality that ever neglected duty.
+
+Upon another occasion another partner (Mr. Wheeler) worried himself
+almost into a nervous breakdown for fear that there would not be enough
+pennies for the cashier's cage during the forthcoming holiday season.
+Mr. Macy's odd-price plan was something of a drain upon the copper coin
+market of New York. And at this particular time, the local shortage
+being acute, Mr. Wheeler took a night train and hurried to Washington,
+to see the Secretary of the Treasury. Late the next evening he returned
+to New York and went to the house of Miss Abbie Golden, his head
+cashier, at midnight, just to tell her that he had succeeded in getting
+an order upon the director of the Philadelphia Mint for $10,000 in
+brand-new copper pennies. After which he went home, to a well-earned
+rest.
+
+
+Although Mr. Wheeler's connection with the store was for a much shorter
+period, he left upon it, at the end of its second era, much of the
+impress of his own personality. Like both Webster and Valentine, he also
+was indirectly related to R. H. Macy, having married Mr. Macy's niece,
+Miss Valentine. In appearance and in manner he was the direct antithesis
+of his partner, Webster. In the language of today he was a "mixer."
+Affable, direct, approachable, men liked him and came to him freely.
+The employees of the store poured their woes into his ears; and never in
+vain. He stood ready to help them, in every possible way. And they,
+knowing this, came frequently to him.
+
+Mr. Wheeler left the store and organization in 1887, selling his
+interest in the enterprise to Messrs. Isidor and Nathan Straus--of whom
+much more in a very few moments. He became tremendously interested in
+the development of Colorado and, upon going out there in 1888, built up
+a chain of stores, banks and mines. He still lives in the land of his
+adoption.
+
+
+One of Mr. Wheeler's keenest interests in the store was in its toy
+department. In this he followed closely Macy's own trend of thought and
+desire. For Macy's had already become, beyond a doubt, _the_ toy-store
+of New York City. Starting eleven years after the foundation of the
+original store, this one department had so grown and expanded as
+annually to demand and receive the entire selling-space of the main
+floor. Each year, about the fifteenth of December, all other stocks
+would be cleared from shelves and counters, the willow-feathers, the
+fans and the fine laces would disappear from the little glass cases
+beside the main Fourteenth Street doors and in their places would come
+the toys--a goodly company in all, but strange--dolls, engines, blocks,
+mechanical devices, books.
+
+And then, to the doors of the great red-brick emporium in Sixth Avenue
+would come New York Jr. He and she came afoot and in carriages, upon
+horse-cars of the surface railways and upon the steam-cars of the
+elevated, and before they entered stood for a moment at the great glass
+windows that completely surrounded the place. For there was spread to
+view a pantomime of the most enchanting sort. No theater might equal the
+annual Christmas window display of Macy's. No theater might even dream
+of creating such a vast and overwhelming spectacle. The Hippodrome of
+today was still nearly thirty years into the future.
+
+The responsibilities of this vast undertaking alone were all but
+overwhelming. The twenty-fifth of December was barely passed, the store
+hardly cleaned of all the debris and confusion that it had brought,
+before plans for another Christmas were actively under way; Miss Bowyer,
+who specialized in the window display, taking Mr. Wheeler up to the
+wax-figure experts of Eden Museé in Twenty-third Street to order the
+saints and sinners and famous folk generally who came to the window
+annually at the end of December. One of the present executives of Macy's
+can remember being privileged, as a small boy, to go behind the scenes
+of the window pantomime. There he saw it, not in its beauty of form and
+color and light, but as a bewildering perplexity of mechanisms--belts
+and pulleys and levers and cams--an enterprise of no little magnitude.
+
+While Miss Bowyer and her assistants were busy laying the first of the
+plans for another window display, Mr. Macy was off for Europe seeking a
+fresh supply of toys and novelties for New York Jr.'s own annual
+festival. Once in a while he touched a high level of novelty, such as
+the securing of the mechanical bird--which a moment ago we saw Margaret
+Getchell taking all to pieces and then placing the pieces together
+again, with all the celerity and precision of a Yankee mechanic. The
+mechanical bird appealed particularly to Mr. Macy's friend, Mr. Phineas
+T. Barnum. Mr. Barnum came often to the store in Fourteenth Street to
+gaze upon it and to listen to it. Perhaps he regretted that he had let
+so valuable an advertising feature slip out of the hands of his museum.
+
+For Mr. Macy's chief reason in importing a toy so rare and so expensive
+as to bring it far beyond the hands of any ordinary child was to create
+sensation--and so to gain advertising thereby. The merchant from out of
+New England was nothing if not a born advertiser. While his competitors
+were quite content with small and stilted announcements in the public
+prints as to the extent and variety of their wares, Macy splurged. He
+took "big space"--big at least for that day and generation. And he did
+not hesitate to let printer's ink carry the fame of his emporium far and
+wide--a sound business principle which has prevailed in it from that day
+to this.
+
+But the toy season was never passed without its doubts and worries. An
+older employee of the store can still remember a most memorable year
+when it rained for a solid week after the toy season had opened and the
+bombazines and the muslins had been put away for the building-blocks and
+the hobby-horse. No one came to the store for seven long days. Mr. Macy
+was greatly distressed. He walked up one aisle and down another,
+stroking his long silky beard and saying that he was utterly ruined, and
+would have to close his store forthwith. But on the eighth day the sun
+came out, a season of fine crisp December weather arrived and the store
+was thronged with holiday shoppers. A fortnight's buying was
+accomplished in the passing of a single week and the situation
+completely saved.
+
+
+
+
+IV. The Coming of Isidor and Nathan Straus
+
+
+During the era in which Webster and Wheeler controlled it, the Macy
+store may be fairly said to have been in a state of hiatus. The driving
+force of its founders--Rowland Macy, LaForge and his wife and
+Valentine--was somewhat spent. And nothing had come to replace it. The
+store went ahead, of course--Webster and Wheeler were both hard workers
+and well-schooled--but keen observers noticed that it traveled quite
+largely upon the impetus and momentum which it had derived from its
+founders. New minds and hands to direct, new arms to strike and to
+strike strongly were needed and greatly needed. These new minds and
+hands and arms it was about to receive. But before we come to their
+consideration we shall turn back the calendar--for nearly forty years.
+
+
+It was in 1848 that the German Revolution drove out from the Fatherland
+and into other countries great numbers of men and women. The United
+States received its fair share of these; the most of them young men,
+impetuous, enterprising, idealistic. The late Carl Schurz was a fair
+representative of this type. About him were grouped in turn a small
+group of men, who might be regarded fairly as the most energetic and
+successful of the expatriates. In this group one of the most distinctive
+was one Lazarus Straus, who had been a sizable farmer in the Rhine
+Palatinate--at that time under the French flag--and who brought with him
+his three small sons, Isidor, Nathan and Oscar. In their veins was an
+admixture of French and German blood.
+
+In 1919 when Oscar S. Straus attended the Paris Peace Conference as the
+Chairman of the League to Enforce Peace, a dinner was given to him in
+Paris at which Leon Bourgeois, the former Premier of France and the
+present Chairman of the Council of the League of Nations, presided. In
+his address he referred to the fact that the father of the guest of
+honor, Oscar S. Straus, was born a French subject.
+
+
+To America, then, came Lazarus Straus and later his little family, as
+many and many an immigrant has come, before and since--seeking his
+fortune and asking no odds save a fair opportunity and a freedom from
+persecution. They landed in Philadelphia, where a little inquiry, among
+old friends who had come to the United States a few years before,
+developed the fact that the best business opportunities of the moment
+seemed to center in the South. Oglethorpe, Ga., was regarded by them as
+a particularly good town. With this fact established, Lazarus Straus
+started South and did not end his travels until he had reached Georgia,
+then popularly regarded as its "empire state." Through Georgia he found
+his way slowly, a small stock of goods with him and selling as he went
+in order to make his meagre living expenses, until he was come to
+Talbot County, which proudly announced itself as "the empire county of
+the empire state."
+
+It was in court-week that Lazarus Straus first marched into Talboton,
+its shire-town, and took a good long look at his surroundings. At first
+glance he liked it. It was brisk and busy; if you have been in an
+old-fashioned county-seat in court-week you will quickly recall what a
+lot of enterprise and bustle that annual or semi-annual event arouses.
+But that was not all. Talboton did not have the slovenly look of so many
+of the small Southern towns of that period. It was trim and neat; its
+houses and lawns and flower-pots alike were well-kept. It must have
+brought back to the lonely heart of the man from the Palatinate the neat
+small towns of his Fatherland. Moreover it possessed an excellent school
+system.
+
+No longer would Lazarus Straus tramp across the land. He had accumulated
+enough to start his store on a moderate basis at least. For three or
+four days he skirmished about the town looking for a location, until he
+found a tailor who was willing to rent one-half of his store to him.
+Even upon a yearly basis the rental of his part of the shop would cost
+less than the annual license which the state of Georgia required
+itinerants to buy. The opportunity was opened. A resident of Talboton he
+became. There in its friendliness and culture he brought his family and
+set up his little home.
+
+The business prospered so rapidly that within a few weeks he was obliged
+to seek larger quarters. A whole store he found this time, so roomy that
+he needs must go back again to Philadelphia to find sufficient stock to
+fill its shelves. His original stock he had purchased at Oglethorpe,
+which, although much larger than Talboton, had apparently not appealed
+to him the half as much.
+
+"Aren't you going to buy your new stock at Oglethorpe?" his fellow
+merchants of the little county-seat asked him. He shook his head. And
+they shook theirs.
+
+"The merchants of Oglethorpe will not like it if you pass them by and go
+on to Philadelphia."
+
+But the founder of the house of Straus in America kept his own counsel
+and followed his own good judgment. He went to Philadelphia, found his
+friends again, who had known his family in the Rhine, either personally
+or by reputation, obtained their credit assistance and with it bought
+and carried south such wares as Talbot County had not before known, with
+the result that the business, now fairly launched, was carried to new
+reaches of success.
+
+
+If there had been no Civil War it is entirely probable that this record
+would never have been written--that there would be in 1922 no Macy store
+in New York to come into printed history. It was in fact that great
+conflict that brought disaster to so many hundreds and thousands of
+businesses--big and little--that ended the career of L. Straus of
+Talboton, Georgia, U. S. A. But not at first. At first, you will recall,
+the South marched quite gaily into the conflict. She was rich,
+prosperous, well-populated. Impending conflict looked like little else
+than a great adventure. Lazarus Straus' oldest son, Isidor, who had been
+destined for military training--having already been entered at the
+Southern Military College, at Collingsworth, to prepare for West
+Point--could not restrain himself as he helped organize a company of
+half-grown boys in the village, of which he was immediately elected
+first-lieutenant. This company asked the Governor of Georgia for arms,
+but was refused.
+
+"There are not enough guns for the men, let alone the boys," came the
+words from the ancient capitol at Macon.
+
+At that time Lazarus Straus' partner, the man who was his right hand and
+aid, did succeed in getting a gun and getting into the war. This made a
+natural opening for Isidor in the store, in which he progressed rapidly,
+for a full eighteen months. Then, the partner having been invalided home
+from the front, the boy was free to engage once again in the service of
+the newly created nation to which the family, as well as all their
+friends roundabout them, had already given their fealty. He went to
+enter himself in the Georgia Military Academy, at Marietta--a few miles
+north of the growing young railroad town of Atlanta.
+
+Then came one of those slight incidents, seemingly trifling at the
+moment of the occurrence but sometimes changing the entire trend of men
+and their affairs. A young man, already a student at the Academy,
+volunteered to introduce Isidor Straus to his future fellow students.
+When they were come to one of the dormitories and at the door of a
+living-room, the kindly young man swung the door open and bade Isidor
+enter. He entered, a pail of water, nicely balanced atop the door,
+tumbled and its contents were poured over the novitiate's head and
+shoulders.
+
+That single hazing trick disgusted Isidor Straus immeasurably. He was a
+serious-minded young man, who realized that Georgia at that moment was
+passing through a particularly serious crisis in her affairs. For such
+tomfoolery and at such a time he had no use whatsoever. It settled his
+mind. He did not enter the school, but returned to his hotel, and on the
+following day, going to a nearby mill, bought a stock of grain and began
+merchandising it, on his own behalf.
+
+This was not to last long, however. The struggling Confederacy needed
+his services and needed them badly. The fame of the Straus family--its
+great ingenuity and ability--had long since passed outside of the
+boundaries of Talbot County. Tongues wagged and said that Isidor had
+inherited all of his father's vision and acumen. That settled it. Lloyd
+G. Bowers, a prominent Georgian, was being designated to head a mission
+to Europe, to sell, if he could, both Confederate bonds and cotton
+acceptances. He chose for his secretary and assistant Isidor Straus. And
+early in 1863 the two men embarked upon a small ship, The May, in
+Charleston harbor, which, in the course of a single evening,
+successfully performed the difficult task of running the blockade that
+guarded that port. Two days later they were at Nassau in the Bahamas,
+from which the voyage to England was a secondary and fairly easy matter.
+
+Despite the seeming hopelessness of his task--for already the tide had
+turned and was flowing against the Confederacy--Isidor Straus had a
+remarkable degree of success in England. In his later years he was fond
+of relating how, in 1890, while sojourning abroad, in turning over a
+telephone book in London he came to a name which brought back memories
+and, acting upon impulse, called that name to the telephone.
+
+"Can you tell me the price of Confederate bonds this morning?" he asked
+quietly.
+
+"Isidor Straus!" came the astonished reply. A few hours later a real
+reunion was in progress.
+
+
+Long before Appomattox came the utter failure of the once brisk little
+store at Talboton. In fact, the family had left that small village--very
+nearly in Sherman's path--and had moved to Columbus. There it sat in
+debt and desperation, as the Confederacy sank to its inevitable death.
+The only ray of hope in its existence was the vague possibility of
+success in Isidor's trip to England. And when the son came back to New
+York, soon after Lee's surrender, Lazarus Straus went north to meet him.
+Isidor had prospered. Cotton acceptances were not the bonds of a defunct
+young nation. England needed cotton--the mills of Manchester had stood
+idle for weeks and months at a time. Isidor Straus knew when and how to
+sell his cotton-bills--he was, in every sense of the word, a born
+merchant. He sold shrewdly, lived frugally, and returned to the United
+States with $12,000 in gold upon his person!
+
+This was the nugget upon which a new family beginning was made. There
+was to be no more South for the family of Straus. Business opportunity
+down there was dead--for a quarter of a century at the very least. But
+business opportunity in New York had never seemed as great as in the
+flush days of success and prosperity which followed the ending of the
+war. Lazarus Straus had brought north in his carpet-bag more cotton
+acceptances. But he had not been as fortunate as his son in having the
+time and the place to sell them at best advantage. Cotton within a few
+months had fallen in the United States to but one-half of its price of
+the preceding autumn.
+
+It was fortunate, indeed, that Isidor Straus had his little bag of
+golden coin at that moment. It was that gold that enabled him to start
+with his father, under the name of L. Straus & Son, a rather humble
+crockery business in a top-floor loft at 161 Chambers Street. The specie
+went toward the establishment of the new business. The debts of the old
+were already being paid. Lazarus Straus was, I believe, one of the few
+Southern merchants who paid their debts in the North in full, and
+thereby secured a great personal credit. This last came without great
+difficulty--in after years it was to be said that Isidor Straus could
+raise more money upon his word alone than any other man in New York. It
+was Mr. Bliss--of Bliss & Co., long time wholesalers of the city and
+predecessors of the well-known Tofft, Weller & Co.--who, upon being
+applied to by Isidor Straus for financial assistance, asked what he and
+his father proposed to do to regain their fortune.
+
+"Start in the china business," was the simple reply.
+
+"You have your courage," was Mr. Bliss's reply, "your father at the age
+of fifty-seven--and yourself--to embark upon a brand new business, in
+which neither of you have had the slightest experience."
+
+But such was the old New Yorker's faith in these men that he sold them
+the huge bill of merchandise, some $45,000, under which they embarked
+their business, saying that they could pay him, one-third in cash, and
+that he could well afford to wait two or even three years for the
+balance.
+
+He did not have to wait that long. Again the business--in the hands of
+hard-working born merchandisers--prospered, from the very instant of its
+beginning. It opened for selling and made its first sale, June 1, 1866.
+And again within a few short weeks, L. Straus & Son was demanding more
+room for expansion, and getting it--this time in the form of a ground
+floor and basement of that same building in Chambers Street. It was
+still both new and young, however. Its hired employees were but three: a
+packer, his helper and a selector, or stock-room man. Isidor Straus ran
+all the details of the store, opening it and closing it each day and
+acting as its book-keeper, until a year later when Nathan Straus came
+into the organization, becoming its first salesman. The business was
+getting ahead. Despite the difficulties and the humbleness of its start
+it had sold more than $60,000 worth of goods, in the first twelve months
+of its existence.
+
+"That they were hard months, I could not deny," said Isidor Straus of
+them in after years. "We had bought our house in West Forty-ninth
+Street, so that we might have our family life together, just as we had
+had in those pleasant Georgia days of before the war. More than once we
+contemplated selling the house so that we might put the proceeds in the
+business, but always at the last moment we were able to avoid that great
+catastrophe."
+
+And soon the necessity of ever selling the house was past. Prosperity
+multiplied. The firm went beyond selling the ordinary grades of
+crockery, which America had only known up to that time--serviceable
+stuff, but thick and clumsy and heavy--and began the importation upon a
+huge and increasing scale, of the more delicate and beautiful porcelains
+of Europe. It added manufacturing to its importations. It became an
+authority upon fine China. And Nathan Straus, its salesman, had to
+scurry to keep apace with its growth--already he was becoming known as a
+super-salesman. He extended his territory to the West and in 1869--the
+year of the completion of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific
+Railroads--was going to the West Coast in search for customers. Two
+years later--a few weeks after the great fire--he opened a
+selling-office for the firm in Chicago.
+
+"Yet I do not like this travel," he said a little later to his brother.
+"Not only is it very hard, physically, but I find that as soon as I get
+away from it the orders fall off. We have to work too hard for the
+volume of profit in hand."
+
+With this idea firmly in his mind he began a more intensive cultivation
+of the fields closer at hand. Some of the establishments of New York
+that later were to develop already were in their beginnings. There was
+that smart New Englander up at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue--that
+man Macy, whose store already was beginning to be the talk of the town.
+Nathan Straus thought that he would go up and see Rowland H. Macy. And
+one of the oldest employees of the store still recalls seeing him come
+into the place, for the first time in his life, on a Saint Patrick's
+Day--it probably was March 17, 1874--with a paper package under his arm
+which contained a couple of fine porcelain plates.
+
+Macy was a good prospect. For one thing, remember that he bought as well
+as sold for cash, and for cash alone. Credit played little or no part in
+his fortunes. New York had refused him credit when first he came to her
+and he had learned to do without it. Macy was not alone a good prospect
+from that point of view but he was, as we have already seen--a man
+constantly seeking novelty. Straus and his porcelain plates interested
+him immensely. And the upshot of that first call was the assignment of a
+space in the basement of the store, about twenty-five by one hundred
+feet in all, which L. Straus & Sons rented and owned. That was not a
+common custom at that time, although a little later it became a very
+popular one, and, I think, prevails to a slight extent even in these
+days. The Straus experiment in the basement of the Macy store paved the
+way. It having succeeded remarkably well within a short time after its
+inception, other and similar departments were established elsewhere; at
+R. H. White's, in Boston, at John Wanamaker's, in Philadelphia, at
+Wechsler & Abraham's, in Brooklyn, and in a Chicago store which long
+since passed from existence.
+
+
+Here, after all, was perhaps the real incarnation of the
+department-store in America, as we know it today, and as it is
+distinguished from the dry-goods store of other days which, as natural
+auxiliaries and corollaries to its business, had long since added to the
+mere selling of dress-goods that of hosiery, boots and shoes,
+underclothing, ribbons, hats and other _finesse_, both of women's and of
+men's apparel. We have seen long since the versatile Miss Getchell
+adding groceries to Macy's departments--and then for a time withdrawing
+them--afterwards toys, which were never withdrawn. Even then the
+department-store idea was gradually being born; with the establishment
+of the Straus crockery store in the basement of the downtown Macy's it
+came into the fine flower of its youth.
+
+For fourteen years this arrangement prospered and progressed--grew
+greatly in public favor. The store, as we have seen, had passed out of
+the hands of its original proprietors. Death had claimed four of
+them--within a short period of barely thirty months. And a new
+generation had come in. But within a decade of the time that he had
+entered the organization, one of the partners of this second generation,
+Mr. Wheeler, was considering leaving it. Colorado had fascinated him. To
+Colorado he must go. To Colorado he did go. He sold his interest to his
+partner, Mr. Webster, who in turn sold it to Isidor and Nathan Straus.
+The crockery counter had absorbed the great store which it had entered
+so humbly but fourteen years before, as a mere tenant of one of its tiny
+corners.
+
+Now were there indeed real guiding hands upon the enterprise. Force and
+energy and ability had come to direct the fortunes of what was already
+probably the largest merchandising establishment within the entire land.
+A family which had not known failure, save as a spur to repeated
+efforts, had come into control. It had everything to gain by the venture
+and it did not propose to lose.
+
+The actual consolidation and transfer of interests took place on January
+1, 1888. Mr. Webster, as has already been recorded, retained his actual
+interest in the store until 1896, when he retired, disposing of it to
+his partners but maintaining an office in their building until his
+death, in 1916. He gave way deferentially, however, to the Straus energy
+and Straus experience. The effects of these were visible from the
+beginning.
+
+The personality of the Straus family had, of course, become well
+identified with the store long before the accomplishment of its
+reorganization. The crockery department had grown to one of its really
+huge features. In it Nathan Straus was perhaps more often seen than
+Isidor, who always was of a quieter and more retiring nature. Many of
+the employees remember how Nathan Straus came to the store on the
+morning of the first day of the blizzard of March, 1888. By some strange
+fatality that morning had been appointed weeks in advance as the
+store's annual Spring Millinery Opening--a vernal festival of more than
+passing interest to a considerable proportion of New York's population.
+The actual morning found the city far more interested in getting its
+milk and bread than its straw-hats for oncoming summer. A large number
+of the employees of the millinery department who had remained in the
+store late the preceding evening in order to complete the preparations
+of the great event were compelled to remain there the entire night,
+being both fed and housed by the firm. They were there when Nathan
+Straus arrived. Even the elevated railroad which he and many others had
+looked upon as a reliance after the complete and early collapse of the
+surface lines, had finally broken under the unparalleled fierceness of
+the storm. And Nathan Straus, after arriving on a train within a
+comparatively few blocks of the store, was long delayed there, between
+the stations, and finally came to the street on a ladder and made his
+way to the store through the very teeth of the gale.
+
+That was dramatic. It was not so dramatic when, time and time again,
+both he and his brother, Isidor, would insist upon bundling themselves
+in all sorts of disagreeable weather and going downtown or up, because
+an old employee of L. Straus & Son was to be buried or a new one of the
+retail store was ill. The fidelity and the inherent affection of these
+men was marked more than once by those who work with and for them. And
+what it gave to the store in _esprit-de-corps_--in the thing which we
+have very recently come to know as morale--cannot easily be estimated.
+
+In this, its fourth decade, many distinguished New Yorkers still came
+to the store. One remembers a President of the United States who came
+often and who brought his Secretary of the Treasury with him more than
+once. The President was Grover Cleveland and his Secretary of the
+Treasury was John G. Carlisle and they were both intimate friends of the
+brothers Straus. And there came often among customers and friends the
+late Russell Sage. Macy's sold an unlaundered shirt, linen bosom and
+cuffs with white cotton back and at a fixed price of sixty-eight cents,
+which seemed to have a vast appeal to Mr. Sage. Yet he never purchased
+many at a time--never more than two or three. He was a financier and did
+not believe in tying up unnecessary capital.
+
+To the store from time to time came Mrs. Paran Stevens. And one day
+while waiting for Mr. Hibbon of the housefurnishing department, she told
+Miss Julia Neville, one of the women on the floor there, that while upon
+an extended trip abroad she had written instructions to her agents in
+this country to sell certain of her personal belongings and that upon
+her return she was astounded to find that a glass toilet set, which she
+had purchased at Macy's for but ninety-nine cents and from which the
+price-mark had long since been removed had been sold by them at auction
+for one hundred dollars!
+
+
+
+
+V. The Store Treks Uptown
+
+
+With the beginning of a new century New York was once again in turmoil.
+Always a restless city, the year 1900 found her suffering severe growing
+pains. Manhattan Island seemingly was not large enough for the city that
+demanded elbow room upon it. Moreover, a distinct factor in the growth
+of New York was not only planned but under construction. Its final
+completion--in 1904--was already being anticipated. I am referring to
+the subway. After a quarter of a century of talk and even one or two
+rather futile actual experiments, a real rapid-transit railroad up and
+down the backbone of Manhattan finally was under way. As originally
+planned it extended from the City Hall up Lafayette Street and Fourth
+Avenue to the Grand Central Station, at which point it turned an abrupt
+right angle and proceeded through Forty-second Street to Times Square,
+where it again turned abruptly--north this time--into Broadway, which it
+followed almost to the city line; first to the Harlem River at
+Kingsbridge and eventually to its present terminus at Van Cortlandt
+Park. A branch line, thrusting itself toward the east from Ninety-sixth
+Street, emerged upon an elevated structure which it followed to the
+Bronx Park and Zoological Gardens.
+
+Before this original section of the subway was completed it already was
+in process of extension toward the south; from the City Hall to and
+under the South Ferry to Brooklyn which it reached in two successive
+leaps; the first to the Borough Hall (the old Brooklyn City Hall) and
+the second to the Atlantic Avenue station of the Long Island Railroad,
+which has remained its terminus until within the past twelvemonth. More
+recently the original subway system of Greater New York has been so
+changed and enlarged as to all but lose sight of the original plan.
+Instead of a single main-stem up the backbone of New York, there are now
+two parallel trunks--the one on the east side of the town and the other
+upon the west--and the now isolated link of the original main line in
+Forty-second Street has become a shuttle service from the Grand Central
+Station to Times Square and the crossbar of the letter "H" which forms
+the rough plan of the entire system. Still other underground railroads
+have come to supplement the vast task of this original system. It is
+more than a decade since the energy of William G. McAdoo completed the
+Hudson River Tubes, which an earlier generation had had the vision but
+not the ability to build, and brought their upper stem through and under
+Sixth Avenue and to a terminal at Herald Square; while even more
+recently the huge and far-reaching Brooklyn Rapid Transit system has
+appropriated Broadway, Manhattan, for a vastly elongated terminal; which
+takes the concrete form of a four-tracked underground railroad beneath
+that world-famed street all the way from the City Hall to Times Square
+and above that point through Seventh Avenue to Fifty-ninth Street and
+Central Park; and thence across the Queensborough Bridge.
+
+It was the original subway, however, that brought the great real-estate
+upheaval to New York. Many years before it was completed New York had
+been moving steadily uptown--shrewd observers used to say at the rate of
+ten of the short city blocks each ten years. But its progress had been
+slow and dignified--relatively at least. With the coming of the new
+subway, dignity in this movement was thrown to the four winds. A mad
+rush uptown. Wholesale firms abandoned the structures that had housed
+them for years in the business districts south of Fourteenth Street and
+began to look for newer and larger quarters north of that important
+cross-town thoroughfare. The retail world of New York was far slower to
+be influenced by the change. For one thing, its investment in permanent
+structures was relatively much higher than that of the wholesale. Folk
+who came from afar and who marveled at the elegance of Sixth Avenue as a
+shopping street, all the way from Thirteenth to Twenty-third, could
+hardly have conceived that within two decades it would become dusty,
+forlorn, practically deserted. No matter that the hotel life of New York
+had ascended well to the north of Twenty-third, that the theaters were
+beginning to gather even north of Thirty-fourth, that a few small,
+smart, exclusive shops were showing signs of joining the trek--there
+remained the realty investment in the department stores at Sixth Avenue.
+It seemed incredible that such a huge investment should be thrown to
+the winds. Yet this was the very thing that actually was accomplished.
+
+Macy's stood to lose less in an economic sense from a move uptown than
+any of its competitors. True it was that the firm had builded for its
+own account in Fourteenth Street, just east of the original store, a
+very handsome, steel-constructed, stone-fronted building which it had
+thrown into the older building in order to relieve the pressure upon it.
+Across the way, on the north side of Fourteenth Street, it had put up at
+an even earlier date a substantial seven-story store for the use of its
+greatly expanded furniture department. The original store, however,
+stood upon leased land--the property of the Rhinelander Estate. One of
+the earliest of the stories about Mr. Macy concerns the coming of George
+Rogers, the agent of the estate and his warm personal friend as well,
+each Monday morning; not for his rent; but to cash a check for thirty
+dollars. It was not hard to guess at his compensation.
+
+The increase in land rentals in the neighborhood and the fact that the
+firm could hardly hope ever to acquire an actual title to the valuable
+site of its main store, coupled with the steadily increasing trek
+uptown, caused the Macy management to consider seriously whether it
+would join in the northward movement. It soon would have to do one thing
+or the other. The old store was growing very old and very overcrowded.
+Moreover, it was, at the best, a makeshift, a jumbling together of one
+separate store after another in order to accommodate a business which
+forever refused to stay put. Under such conditions a scientific or
+efficient planning of the building had been quite out of the question.
+The real wonder was that the business had been conducted so well,
+against such a handicap.
+
+[Illustration: THE HERALD SQUARE OF ANTE-MACY DAYS
+
+In 1900, before the coming of the present store, Broadway at 34th Street
+gave but faint promise of its present importance]
+
+
+The move once considered was quickly determined upon. No other course
+seemingly would have been possible. To have erected a new store building
+upon a leasehold in a quarter of the town which presently might begin to
+slide backward--would have been a precarious experiment, to put it
+mildly. It must go uptown. The only question that really confronted the
+store was just where to go uptown. A site large enough for a huge
+department-store is not usually acquired overnight. Moreover, the
+necessity for secrecy in so important a step was obvious--the dangers of
+the mere suggestion of its becoming known were multifold.
+
+With these things clearly understood, the search for a new site was
+begun. Various ones were considered, but were finally rejected. For a
+time the firm considered buying the famous old Gilsey House and the
+property immediately adjoining it. Another site which appealed to it
+even more was the former site of the Broadway Tabernacle on the east
+side of Broadway, just north of Thirty-fourth Street--the site of the
+present Marbridge Building. The commanding prescience of this corner
+forced itself upon them. Sixth Avenue, an artery street north and south,
+threaded by electric surface-cars and the elevated railroad--the McAdoo
+Tubes had not then come into even a paper being--was crossed at acute
+angles by an even more important street--New York's incomparable
+Broadway--and at right angles by Thirty-fourth Street, which even then
+was giving promise of its coming importance. The original planners of
+the uptown city of New York made many serious mistakes in their
+far-seeing scheme. But they made no mistake when they took each half
+mile or so and made one of their cross streets into a thoroughfare as
+bold and as wide as one of their north and south avenues. Thirty-fourth
+was one of the streets picked out for such importance. And from the
+beginning it realized the judgment of its planners. The completion of
+the huge Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1897 (the earlier or Waldorf side in
+Thirty-third Street had been finished in 1893) had fixed the importance
+of the street. Thirteen years later the opening of the Pennsylvania
+Station was to confirm it--for all time.
+
+In 1900 the vast plan of the Pennsylvania Railroad for the invasion of
+Manhattan was as yet unknown. Even in the main offices of that railroad,
+in Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, it still was most inchoate and
+fragmentary. In the language of the moment, Macy's was "acting on its
+own." The store was using its own powers of foreseeing--and using them
+very well indeed.
+
+But the site on the east side of Herald Square was not to be. In free
+titles it was not nearly large enough. But the west side of the square!
+There was a possibility. If the new store could be builded there it not
+only could possess an actual Broadway frontage but it would be set so
+far back from the elevated railroad as not to be bothered by its noise
+or smoke, even in the slightest degree. As a matter of fact the last
+already was disappearing. The electric third-rail system was being
+installed everywhere upon the Manhattan system, and the pertinacious,
+puffy little locomotives, which so long had been a feature of New York
+town, were doomed to an early disappearance.
+
+The west side of Herald Square appealed to Macy's. Long and exacting
+searches into its land-titles were made. Some three hundred feet back of
+Broadway the magnificent new theater of Koster & Bial's, extending all
+the way from Thirty-fourth Street to Thirty-fifth, backed up a tract
+which in the main was occupied by comparatively low buildings, the most
+of them brown-stone residences, which already were in the course of
+transformation into small business places. This tract seemingly was
+quite large enough for the new Macy's--with the possible exception,
+perhaps, of its engine-room and mechanical departments. The firm decided
+to take it, and with a policy of magnificent secrecy began negotiations
+for its lease. In order to accommodate the engine and machinery rooms it
+purchased a tract upon the north side of Thirty-fifth Street just back
+of the former Herald Square Theater. On this last land stood two of New
+York's most notorious resorts of twenty years ago--the Pekin and the
+Tivoli. The development of the Macy plan drove them out of the street
+and, for the time being at least, out of business.
+
+
+The Macy plan did not go through to a final culmination, however, quite
+as it had been laid out. So huge a scheme and one involving so many
+separate real-estate transactions is hard to keep a secret for any great
+length of time. Gradually the news of Macy's contemplated step became
+public property. It caused public astonishment and public acclaim. For,
+remember, if you will, that in 1900, none of the department stores had
+moved uptown north of Twenty-third Street. Bloomingdale's was at Third
+Avenue and Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth Streets, but it was a gradual
+upgrowth, from a modest beginning upon that original important corner.
+The last move had been in 1862, when A. T. Stewart had moved his store
+from Chambers Street north to Ninth. The cost of the lot and structure
+to Mr. Stewart was $2,750,000--a stupendous figure in that day.
+
+
+The publicity surrounding the proposed move of Macy's found the Straus
+family still without one of the plots necessary to the complete
+acquisition of all the land in the block east of Koster & Bial's. It was
+the small but important northwest corner of Broadway and Thirty-fourth
+Street--a mere thirty by fifty feet, a remnant of an ancient farm whose
+zig-zag boundaries antedated the coming of the city plan and showed a
+seeming fine contempt for it. This tiny parcel was the property of an
+old-time New Yorker, the Rev. Duane Pell. Dr. Pell was on an extended
+trip in Europe in 1901, when Macy's began the active acquisition of its
+new store-site. It was given to understand that his asking price for the
+small corner was $250,000; an astonishing figure for such a tiny bit of
+land, even today, but Dr. Pell felt that he held the key to the entire
+important Herald Square corner and that he was justified in asking any
+price for it that he saw fit to ask.
+
+While the plot was so small as to afford very little to it in the way of
+actual floor space the Macy management felt that it was so essential to
+the appearance of the store that it agreed to come to Dr. Pell's
+price--and so cabled him; in Spain. Word came back that he was about to
+embark for New York and that he would take up the entire matter
+immediately upon his arrival.
+
+
+A few years before the Macy organization planned to be the initial
+department-store to move uptown, Henry Siegel, a Chicago merchant, who
+had achieved a somewhat spectacular and ephemeral success in that city,
+decided upon the invasion of New York. He came to Manhattan and in Sixth
+Avenue, midway between Fourteenth and Twenty-third Streets, erected a
+store which for a time duplicated the success of its Chicago
+predecessor. The proposed move of the Macy store apparently filled him
+with consternation. With a good deal of prophetic vision he foresaw that
+other Sixth Avenue stores would go uptown in its wake. His own
+investment in that street was too great and too recent to be
+jeopardized.
+
+Siegel hit upon the idea of stepping into the old site and building at
+Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue as soon as the Macy organization
+should vacate. But to desire that valuable location and to secure it
+were two vastly different things. The Strauses were not asleep to the
+possibility of some one attempting such a move. It would not be the
+first time in merchandising history. They arranged carefully therefore
+that their old corner at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue should
+remain entirely empty for two years after they had moved out from it.
+The moral and educational effect of such a hiatus was not to be
+underestimated.
+
+In the meantime the Chicago man was busy on his own behalf. Through his
+realty agents he had quickly discovered Dr. Duane Pell's ownership of
+the corner point of the new Macy plot. He also found that the dominie
+was already on his return to the United States. He entrusted to a
+faithful representative the task of meeting him at the steamer-pier. The
+agent was there, bright and early, to meet the boat, and within a
+half-hour of its docking Siegel had acquired the north-west corner of
+Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street.
+
+Now was the Chicagoan in a strategic position to do business with the
+Macy concern. At least so he felt. The concern felt differently. As far
+as it was concerned the corner point had sentimental value; nothing
+else. We already have seen how slight was its floor-space. Without
+hesitation it turned its back upon the tiny corner, and with the money
+that it had intended investing in it, purchased the leasehold of the
+huge theater of Koster & Bial--about twenty thousand square feet of
+ground space--which enabled it to place its mechanical departments
+(engine-rooms and the like) in its main building, and so to leave the
+former Tivoli and Pekin sites for the moment unimproved. This done, it
+turned its attention to the gentleman from Chicago. It leased him the
+premises at Fourteenth Street at a much higher figure than it would have
+been glad to rent them to another concern, and under the provisions that
+they should not be occupied until at least two years after the removal
+of the parent concern from them and that the name "Macy" should never
+again appear on the buildings of that site.
+
+With the site difficulties cleared up, the actual construction problems
+of the enterprise were entered upon. Nineteen hundred and one was born
+before Macy's was enabled to begin the wholesale destruction of the many
+buildings upon its new site. The job of clearing the site and erecting
+the new building was entrusted to the George A. Fuller Company, which
+had just completed the sensational Flatiron Building at the apex of
+Fifth Avenue and Broadway at Twenty-third Street, and it was one of the
+first, if not the very first of the building contracts in New York where
+the estimates were based upon the cubic feet contents. DeLomas and
+Cordes, who had had a considerable success in the planning of one or two
+of the more recent department stores in the lower Sixth Avenue district,
+were chosen as the architects of the new building. Before they entered
+upon the actual drawing of the plans they made an extended study of such
+structures, both in the United States and abroad. The new building
+represented the last word in department store design and construction.
+Nine stories in height and with 1,012,500 square feet of floor-space, it
+was designed not only to handle great throngs of shoppers each day but
+the multifold working details of service to them, with the greatest
+expedition, and economy. To do this it was estimated that there would
+be required fourteen passenger elevators, ten freight elevators and
+seven sidewalk elevators of the most recent type. Four escalators were
+installed running from the main floor to the fifth. It is to be noted,
+too, that these escalators were the very first to be installed in which
+the step upon which the passenger rides is held continuously horizontal.
+In the older types the ascending floor is held at an awkward angle of
+ascension and foothold is maintained only by the attaching of steel
+cleats at right angles to it.
+
+Lighting, ventilation, plumbing, all these received in turn the most
+careful consideration and planning. For instance, it was determined
+quite early in the progress of the planning for the new Macy store that
+it should be ventilated entirely by great fans, which, sucking the air
+in ducts down from the roof, would heat it or cool it, as the
+necessities of the season might demand, before distributing it through
+another duct to the working floors of the building. In this way the
+close and stuffy atmosphere somewhat common to old-time department
+stores when filled with patrons was entirely obviated in this new one.
+
+When we come to the consideration of the everyday workings of the Macy
+store today we shall see how well these architects of twenty years ago
+planned its details. We shall not see, however, one of the most
+interesting of them. When it was originally builded, by far the greater
+part of its ninth floor was devoted to a huge exhibition hall. Within a
+short time this room was in a fair way to become as famous as the
+larger auditorium of Madison Square Garden. In it were held
+poultry-shows, flower shows, even one of the very first automobile
+shows. Within a few years after its opening, however, the business of
+the store had grown to such proportions that it was found necessary to
+give its great space to the more mundane business of direct selling.
+
+The problem of the corner tip there at Thirty-fourth and Broadway was
+quickly overcome. If the new owner of that point had counted upon the
+new store which completely encircled him turning tens of thousands of
+folk past it each day he was doomed to disappointment. For Macy's made
+its own corner by means of a broad arcade entirely within the cover of
+its own huge roof; an inside street, lined with show-windows upon either
+side and giving, in wet weather as well as fine, a dry and handsome
+passageway direct from Broadway into Thirty-fourth Street.
+
+The original suggestion for such an arcade came in an anonymous letter
+to the original architects of the building. Only within the past year or
+two has this passageway been abandoned. The demands of the business for
+more elbow-room are voracious and apparently unceasing. And the space
+that the arcade consumed became entirely too great to be used any longer
+for such a purpose.
+
+
+In that summer of 1901, while the architects and contractors were busy
+at their plans and specifications, there was wholesale and systematic
+devastation upon such a scale as New York has rarely ever seen. Such
+pullings down and tearings away! The scene was not without its drama at
+any time. The writer well remembers strolling into the Koster & Bial
+Music Hall on an evening during that season of destruction. There was no
+one to bar his passage into what, at the time of its opening, but eight
+short years before, had been New York's most elaborate playhouse. If his
+glance had not been turned downward there was nothing to indicate that
+the evening performance might not easily begin within the hour. Upwards
+the great auditorium of red and gold was immaculate. The proscenium, the
+tier upon tier of balcony and of gallery, the dozens of upholstered
+boxes, the exquisitely decorated ceiling had not been touched.
+
+But if the eye glanced downward--what a difference! The main floor and
+its row upon row of heavy plush chairs was entirely gone. In their place
+was a mucky black sea of mud; a knee-high morass, if you please, in
+which a dozen contractor's wagons, hauled and tugged unevenly by squads
+of lunging mules and horses in their traces, circled in and circled
+out--inbound empty and outbound laden deep with their muddy burden. On
+the stage, back of what had once been the footlights and in the same
+place where the darling Carmencita had once been wont to make her bow,
+stood a shirt-sleeved gang-boss. On either side of him,
+spotlights--things theatrical yanked from the memories of
+yesteryear--threw their radiance down into the auditorium and the motley
+audience it held.
+
+So went Koster & Bial's, the pet plaything of joyous New York in its
+Golden Age. In a short time the scaffolding was to rise in that mighty
+amphitheater and the decorations to come tumbling down. Gang upon gang
+to the roof; more gangs still to the stout sidewalls, brick by brick;
+down they came until Koster & Bial's was no more. Its site was marked by
+a huge and gaping hole in the subsoil of Manhattan.
+
+There were other phases of that tearing-down that were less dramatic and
+more comic. A restaurant-keeper who had a small eating place on the
+Broadway side of the site sought obdurately to hold out in his
+location--seeking an advantageous cash settlement from the store owners.
+His lease, perfectly good, still had from sixty to ninety days to run.
+He felt that the store could not wait that length of time upon
+him--that, in the language of the street, it would be forced to "come
+across." But it did not "come across." It was not built that way. It was
+built on either side of the restaurant. Its steel girders were far above
+its tiny walls and spanning one another across its ceiling before its
+disappointed proprietor moved out--at the end of his perfectly good
+lease--and without one cent of bonus money in his pocket; after which it
+was almost a matter of mere hours to tear the flimsy structure away and
+remove a small segment of earth that held it up to street level. A
+barber around the corner in Thirty-fourth street caught his cue from the
+restaurant. He, too, was going to stand pat. But he was not in the same
+strategic position as the _restaurateur_. He had no lease. He merely was
+going to stay and defy the wreckers. They would not dare to touch his
+neat, immaculate shop.
+
+They did dare. On the very night that his lease expired something
+happened to the business enterprise of the razor-wielder. A cyclone must
+have struck it. At least that was the way it looked. The barber, coming
+down to business on the morrow, found his movables upon the sidewalk,
+neatly piled together and covered by tarpaulins against the weather. But
+the shop was gone. Where it had stood on the close of the preceding day
+was a deep hole in the ground; and three Italian workmen were whistling
+the Anvil Chorus.
+
+
+About the tenth of October, 1901, actual construction began on the new
+building. On the first day of November of the following year it was
+complete--or practically so. It was a record for building, even in New
+York, which is fairly used to records of that sort. A steel-framed
+nine-story building, approximately four hundred feet on Thirty-fourth
+and Thirty-fifth Streets, by one hundred and eighty feet on Broadway
+(widening to two hundred feet at the west end of the store), with
+1,012,500 square feet of floor-space, and 13,500,000 cubic feet in all,
+had been erected in a trifle over six months. In the meanwhile the
+wisdom of the Macy choice of location was already being made evident. A
+Washington concern--Saks and Company--was on its way toward Herald
+Square. It took the west side of Broadway for the block just south of
+Thirty-fourth Street, and by dint of great effort and because its
+building was considerably smaller in area, succeeded in getting into it
+ahead of Macy's.
+
+Herald Square! There was, and still is, a site well worth rushing
+toward. We have seen already the strategic advantages of the new site,
+even as far back as 1902, long before the coming of the great
+Pennsylvania Station just back of it at Seventh Avenue. Ever since 1890,
+when the remarkable vision of the late James Gordon Bennett had seen the
+crossing of Broadway and Sixth Avenue as the finest possible location
+for his beloved _Herald_ and had torn down the little old armory in the
+gorge between these two thoroughfares, Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth
+Streets, to build a Venetian palace for it there, the square had been a
+veritable hub for the vast activities of New York. Hotels, shops and
+theaters sprang up roundabout it. And the coming of what is one of the
+finest, if not the very largest, of the great railroad terminals of the
+land but multiplied its real importance.
+
+
+The actual moving from the old store to the new was a herculean task.
+Yet it was accomplished within three days--which means that large
+enterprise was reduced through the perfection of system to a rather
+ordinary one. This could not have been if all its details and its
+possibilities had not been anticipated long in advance and planned
+against.
+
+The job was undertaken by the store itself; through its delivery
+department, in charge of Mr. James Price, with Mr. James Woods as his
+very active assistant. Both of these men are veteran employees of
+Macy's. The service record of the one of them reaches to forty-one years
+and the other to forty-eight. They knew full well the size of the
+moving-day task that confronted them. To pick up a huge New York
+department-store and carry it twenty uptown blocks--almost an even
+mile--was a deal of a contract. Yet neither of them flinched at it. But
+both put on their thinking-caps and evolved a definite plan for it--a
+plan which in all its details worked without a hitch.
+
+The old store closed its doors for the final time at six o'clock in the
+evening of Monday, November 3, 1902. The following day was Election Day.
+The movers voted early. They came to the Fourteenth Street store not
+long after daybreak and there began the great trek uptown--stock and
+fixtures. For three days they kept a steady procession; west through
+Fourteenth Street, then north through Seventh Avenue--to
+Thirty-fourth--from the old store to the new--and the empty wagons
+returning down through Sixth Avenue to Fourteenth Street once again. The
+entire route was carefully patrolled by special guards and policemen,
+and the entire task finally accomplished late on Thursday evening, the
+6th, at which Mr. Isidor Straus was called on the telephone and told
+quietly:
+
+"We shall be able to open tomorrow if you wish it."
+
+But the head of the house advised that the opening be set for Saturday,
+as had been advertised; it would give a final valuable day for setting
+things to rights, which meant that at eight o'clock on the morning of
+Saturday, November 8, the new store opened its doors to the public that
+was anxiously awaiting the much heralded event; with as much simplicity
+and seeming ease as if it had been situated at Thirty-fourth Street for
+the entire forty-four years of its life, instead of but a mere
+twenty-four hours. A great task had been accomplished, a long step
+forward safely taken--and Macy's was ready to enter upon a new decade of
+its existence.
+
+
+In its wake there came uptown the other department-stores of New York;
+one by one until, with but three exceptions, every one of these
+establishments which had been situated south of Twenty-third Street and
+which are still in business today, had joined in the trek. Lord &
+Taylor's left its comfortable home at Broadway and Twentieth Street, in
+which it had been housed for nearly half a century since coming north
+from its original location in Grand Street, and moved to Fifth Avenue
+and Thirty-ninth; its ancient neighbor in Broadway, Arnold Constable &
+Company, stood again almost cheek by jowl in Fifth Avenue. McCreery's,
+first establishing an uptown branch in Thirty-fourth Street, eventually
+abandoned its older store in Twenty-third Street and consolidated its
+energies in the upper one. Mr. Altman moved his business to its new
+marble palace at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth, and Stern's went as far
+north as Forty-second. Lower Sixth Avenue began to look like a deserted
+village. Simpson-Crawford's, Greenhut's, Adam's, O'Neill's--one by one
+these closed their doors for the final time. Once, and that was but two
+decades ago, they had been household words among the women of New York.
+Now their buildings were emptied, stood empty and deserted for months
+and for years--in most cases until the coming of the Great War and our
+participation in it, when the Government was very glad to make use of
+their spacious floors for war manufacturing and for hospitalization. Of
+Macy's old-time competitors downtown who failed to join in the uptown
+movement, but three remained--Wanamaker's, Daniell's and Hearn's, who
+stood and still stand pat and prosperous in the locations which they
+have occupied for almost half a century.
+
+The rest are all gone. Twenty-third Street, which of a Saturday
+afternoon used to be filled from Fifth Avenue to Sixth with smart folk
+of every sort, is as dull as the deserted lower Sixth Avenue. Memories
+walk its spacious pavements. The Eden Museé, that paradise for youth of
+an earlier generation, is vanished. So is the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which
+for forty years played so large a part in the political history of the
+town. That part of New York today is all but dead--inside of twenty
+years. Some day hence it may be reborn. Such things have come to pass in
+the big town ere now.
+
+In the meantime the newest New York has come into its being. The
+construction of the two modern railroad terminals--the one in
+Thirty-third Street and the other in Forty-second--has created in the
+district that lies between them what today would seem to be the
+permanent retail shopping center of the city. The one station brings
+nearly 60,000 folk--transients and commuters--the other almost 100,000,
+into New York each business day. They anchor and anchor firmly, its new
+business heart. Its sidewalks are daily thronged. As was Twenty-third
+Street two decades ago, so has Thirty-fourth become today. Not only the
+railroad stations but four great subways running north and south, four
+elevated railways, too, a dozen surface-car lines, and innumerable taxis
+and private motor-cars pour their passengers into it. It is a
+thoroughfare of surpassing importance.
+
+[Illustration: THE MACY'S OF TODAY
+
+By 1903 the new Macy's in Herald Square was finished and the business
+going forward in great strides]
+
+
+Fifty years ago, as Rowland H. Macy walked home one evening with his
+daughter--as was his frequent wont--from the simple little old red-brick
+store in Fourteenth Street to their new house in Forty-ninth, he paused
+for a moment with her in front of the old Broadway Tabernacle.
+
+"I want you to notice this corner, very carefully, Florence," said he.
+"A half-century hence and the business of New York is to be centered
+between Thirty-fourth Street and Forty-second. Here is to be the future
+business heart of this wonderful city."
+
+It is upon the vision of men quite as much as upon their prudence that
+the success of their enterprises depends.
+
+
+
+
+_Today_
+
+
+
+
+I. A Day in a Great Store
+
+
+The subtle hour which in summer comes just before the break of day is
+the only hour in which New York ever sleeps; if indeed the modern Bagdad
+ever sleeps at all. There is an hour, however--from three of the morning
+until four--when the city is all but stilled; when its heart-beats are
+at the lowest ebb of the twenty-four. In that hour even Broadway is
+nearly deserted and Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street equally
+emptied. The swinging lights of a white-fronted lunch-room or two; the
+echoing racket of an extremely occasional surface-car or elevated train;
+the rush of a "night-hawk" taxi; the clatter of the milk-wagon; the
+measured walk of a policeman and the hurried one of some much belated
+suburbanite hurrying toward the great railroad station over in Seventh
+Avenue; these sounds, occasional and unrelated seemingly, are not New
+York; not at least the New York that you and I are accustomed to
+knowing. Yet, after all, they are New York; even, if you please, the New
+York of that throbbing heart, Herald Square.
+
+Soon after four in the morning the city begins to rise. New York's
+heart-beat is quickening, distinctly, even though ever and ever so
+slightly at the beginning. Yet the activity is distinguishable. The
+policemen and the cabbies in the square realize it, so do the waiter
+and the cook in the _Firefly_ lunch wagon which has stood in the busy
+Herald Square these thirty years or more now. The morning papers are
+out. The newspaper wagons, as well as those that bring milk and other
+comestibles, begin to multiply. The earliest workers in the heart of
+Manhattan now bestir themselves. By six there is real animation in the
+broad streets in and roundabout Macy's. By seven the traffic there
+begins to be a matter of reckoning. A traffic policeman makes his
+appearance. The current of vehicles and humans in those thoroughfares
+come under regulation. At eight, the city is in full sway.
+
+
+All this while Macy's has stood dark--save for the few yellow and red
+lights which police and fire protection demand. It fronts toward
+Broadway and the side streets alike are cold, impassive, unanimated.
+Inside the great dark building the watchmen are on ceaseless patrol.
+There are miles of corridors to be paced--the night walking of the Macy
+watchmen would reach from Dan to Beersheba or possibly from New York to
+Erie--millions of dollars worth of stock and fixtures to be guarded. A
+diamond ring would be missed; and so would a spool of thread. Nothing
+must be disturbed. And in order that the owners of the store may sleep
+in the sound assurance that nothing is being disturbed, the night patrol
+is made a matter of system and of record. Watchmen's clocks, here and
+there and everywhere, proclaim the regularity of the system. And an
+occasional surprise test now and then acclaims its thoroughness.
+
+Hours before, the store was thoroughly cleaned; from cellar to roof.
+The last of yesterday's belated shoppers was hardly out of this
+market-place, before the men of the cleaning squads were in upon their
+heels. What a mess to be tidied up! Eight and one-half hours of hard
+endeavor can make daily a mighty dirty store and a huge housekeeping
+job. There is at the best a vast litter--and yet a litter that cannot be
+carelessly thrust away. In all that debris there may be some one tiny
+article of great value--a ring or a purse, dropped by some hasty or
+careless shopper or salesgirl. It all must be carefully gone through and
+in the morning sent to the Lost and Found Department where the chances
+are that it will not remain very long before having a claimant.
+
+Such is the ordinary routine of the cleaning squads. On rainy or snowy
+days its job is increased, measurably. It is astonishing the amount of
+filth the sidewalks of New York can give up on a wet day. Yet rain, or
+no rain, filth or no filth, the cleansing must be thorough. The store at
+eight o'clock of the next morning must be as clean as the proverbial
+pin. An earnest of which you can obtain for yourself any day by pressing
+your nose, among the first of the impatient early shoppers, against the
+panes of the public entrance doors. Through the night these toilers
+work; silently, unseen, save by others of their own kind. Far below
+them, in the cellars of the great structure at Thirty-fourth Street and
+Broadway, there are other squads who stand to unending tricks at the
+boilers, the engines, the dynamos and the other mechanical appliances of
+the organism. The fires may never die; the lights never go out--not
+even from one year's end to the other. And so that the very heart and
+blood and nerve-force of Macy's shall in truth be unending there are
+engines and boilers and dynamos in the mechanical plant under the
+Thirty-fourth Street sidewalks. As many as five hundred tons of coal can
+be housed in the bunkers hard at hand. The entire plant could easily
+light and supply the other necessary electric current for the needs of
+any brisk American town of five or six thousand people.
+
+
+Eight o'clock, and the night superintendent of the store unlocks the
+first of its outer doors. But not to the public. Mr. Public's hours do
+not begin until a full sixty minutes later. First the store must be made
+ready for his coming. It is not enough that it shall be thoroughly
+cleaned in every fashion. The stock must be displayed anew; the long
+miles of dust coverings lifted off, folded and put away until the coming
+of another evening. Which means, of course, that the store folk must
+come well in advance of its patrons.
+
+In the half-hour which elapses between eight and eight-thirty, many of
+the minor executives--particularly those of the selling floors--make
+their appearance at the designated doors upon the side streets. In the
+parlance of the organization these are known as "specials" and are
+divided into several classes, denoting chiefly their connection with its
+selling or non-selling forces. They "sign in" their arrival upon a
+sheet. For while Macy's is known as the department-store without a
+time-clock, there is none which is more punctilious about keeping an
+exact record of the comings and goings of its workers, from the lowest
+to the highest. In the entire permanent organization of more than five
+thousand folk, there are not more than ten or a dozen who are exempted
+from this necessity. A man may draw a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year
+salary at Macy's and still be compelled to sign his time. It is part of
+the inherent democracy of the organization which holds as a high
+principle that what is fair for one man is fair for another. A better
+bed-rock principle can hardly be imagined.
+
+
+Half after eight!
+
+A bell rings somewhere. The time-lists of the minor executives--perhaps
+it is better to remember them as the specials--are closed, and new ones
+substituted. These are duplicates of the earlier ones. When the section
+manager (a modern and much better name for the "floor-walker" of the
+earlier days) signs one of these, he does not merely put down an "X" as
+before eight-thirty, but specifically writes down his arriving time.
+
+But from eight-thirty to eight-forty-five is known to the rank and file
+of the organization as its hour for arrival. Three doors--one in
+Thirty-fourth Street (for the women, as well as for men executives) and
+two others, in Thirty-fifth Street (for the other men workers and the
+junior girls respectively) open on the precise moment of the half-hour.
+Even before they swing backward upon their hinges the earliest risers of
+the Macy family are beginning to group themselves in front of them.
+They go tramping up the broad stairs together; dropping into the slender
+receptacles the individual brass checks (of which much more a little
+later) at the first barrier-gateway; after which they go scurrying off
+to the locker-rooms, before descending or ascending to their various
+posts in the store.
+
+For fifteen minutes this rank and file--a miniature army it is--comes
+trooping in. There is no time to be lost; and yet no unseemly haste or
+confusion. And no noise. Noise, particularly surplus noise, is quite
+unnecessary in a machine which is functioning well.
+
+At eight-forty-five the barrier at the head of the main employees' stair
+at Thirty-fourth Street closes. And in order that there may not be even
+the slightest particle of unfairness--one gains an increasing admiration
+for the absolute impartiality of an organization such as this--the
+pressing of a button at that stairhead automatically orders closed the
+two auxiliary entrances in Thirty-fifth. And yet, in order perhaps that
+perfectly automatic and impartial systems may, after all, be tinged by a
+bit of human sympathy and understanding, eight-forty-five is forever
+translated at the employees' doors as eighty-forty-seven. And in cases
+of bad weather, hard rain or snow or extreme cold, eight-forty-seven
+becomes the stroke of nine by the clock--in very extreme cases even
+later, with a special allowance being made from time to time for the
+occasional breakdown of New York's rather temperamental transportation
+system.
+
+From eight-forty-five (eight-forty-seven) to nine o'clock, the
+late-comers--out of breath as a rule and extremely embarrassed into the
+bargain--are herded into a special group and given special "late"
+passes, without which they may not even enter the locker rooms, to say
+nothing of their posts in the store. Sometimes--when the tardiness
+percentages of the store have been running to unwonted heights--the
+group is admonished; always gently, always considerately. It is made to
+them a point of fairness, between the store and themselves. And almost
+invariably the admonition is received in the spirit in which it is
+given. In other days it was quite customary for the store manager or one
+of his several assistants to receive these late-comers personally and
+individually and talk to them, heart-to-heart. This method has now been
+entirely abolished. It led to controversy. It led to argument. And both
+of these led to ill-feeling. Macy's will not tolerate ill-feeling
+between its executives and its rank and file. Therefore, anything that
+might even tend to such an end was abolished--completely and
+permanently.
+
+
+In due time, and when we are studying in greater detail the Macy family,
+we shall come again to the consideration of the methods of checking the
+force in in the morning and out again at night--as well as in and out at
+different intervals throughout the day. Consider now that it is still
+lacking a few brief minutes of nine o'clock on a workday morning. The
+sales force are through the lockers and getting to their day's work upon
+the floor. The non-selling forces as well--elevator-men, cashiers, all
+the rest of them, are at their posts. A doorman is told off to each of
+the public street entrances to the main floor. It is the regular post
+for each of these. He goes to it a minute or two before the coming of
+nine.
+
+After a brief period of busy activity the store aisles are for the
+moment practically deserted once again. There is a group of buyers
+"signing in"--once again the inevitable time-list--at the
+superintendent's office just beneath the main stair, where five or ten
+minutes ago the "big chief" of the whole main floor was giving his
+section managers their special instructions for the day. The rest of the
+aisles are all but empty. The clerks are behind the desks, the cashiers
+at their posts, the section managers at attention, the elevators banked
+and waiting at the ground floor-- Then--
+
+Nine o'clock!
+
+The echo of Madison Square Mary telling the hour comes rolling up
+Broadway. The street doors swing open; almost as if working upon a
+single mechanism. The first of the shoppers come tumbling in. The great
+main aisle of the store--one thinks of it almost as the Broadway of this
+city within a city--is populated once again. The chief stream of the
+store's patrons pours down through it. Other streams from the doors in
+the side streets join it; still others diverge down the side aisles, up
+the stair and escalators, into the elevators which presently go packing
+off, one by one, toward the mysterious and fascinating regions of the
+upper floors. In three or four brief minutes the picture that one has of
+that mighty first floor from the mezzanine balcony that runs roundabout
+it is of a great mass of hurrying, scurrying humanity; no longer any
+well-defined currents, but little eddies and pools of human beings
+constantly and forever changing.
+
+And this but hardly past nine o'clock in the morning. In another hour
+there will be still more folk within the great building. Most of them
+have come to shop, a few of them to take a tardy breakfast in the
+comfortable restaurant upon its eighth floor. One might not think that
+it would pay to open a restaurant for breakfast at as late an hour as
+nine in the morning, but such a one would not know his New York.
+Breakfast in our big town is rarely over until the setting of the sun.
+
+
+For an hour at the beginning of the day the Macy family may shop in its
+own interest. The saleswomen--the men as well--may obtain permits from
+their division managers which in turn entitle them to large and
+conspicuous shopping cards which serve two pretty definite purposes--the
+identification of the saleswoman as an actual and authorized shopper
+(she is not supposed to go nosing around other departments merely in her
+own interest or curiosity) and the obtaining for her of the discount to
+which she is entitled. Macy's is known pretty generally as a store of no
+special privileges or discounts. Teachers, clergymen, professional
+shoppers, dressmakers are recognized and welcomed in the big store, but
+only upon the same terms as every other sort of customer. But the rule
+bends, ever and ever so gently, for the man or woman who is employed
+within it. After all, he or she _is_ a part of the family and so
+entitled to be recognized. This recognition takes the form of a sizable
+reduction upon the wearing apparel necessary for his or her personal
+use. This difference goes upon the books of the store as a business
+expense.
+
+By ten the store has finished shopping in its own behalf. Its maximum
+force for the day is on the job and the wise shopper comes close to this
+hour. For by eleven the force is reduced. Luncheon is a very simple
+human necessity; but a necessity, nevertheless. And New York has never
+countenanced the Parisian habit of locking up practically all shops and
+stores and offices for an hour and a half or two hours in the middle of
+the day. But then New York has never taken its meal-times quite so
+seriously as Paris. Upon this one thing alone a considerable essay might
+be written.
+
+But New York must lunch, just as Paris or London or any other community
+must lunch. And so for three valuable hours out of the middle of the day
+the Macy force is reduced nearly one-third its size. Forty-five minutes
+is the ordinary allotment for lunch and the house prefers that its folk
+shall take this mid-day meal underneath its roof. Toward this end it has
+made, as we shall see, elaborate and expensive preparations in the form
+of elaborate lunch-rooms and the like. However, it recognizes that there
+are many workers who prefer to go out at the middle of the day. And
+proper arrangements are made for the accommodation of these folk.
+
+
+By two o'clock, however, practically the entire selling force at least
+is back again. The hardest portion of the day begins. For, no matter
+how hard the store may advertise, no matter how it may strive to educate
+its patrons in every other way to the use of its facilities in the less
+crowded and hence more comfortable morning hours, the hard and solemn
+fact remains that it suits the comfort and convenience of the average
+New York woman to shop in the afternoon. And shop in the afternoon she
+does. She comes into Macy's right after luncheon--although a single
+glance at the big and crowded restaurant would easily convince you that
+she often lunches as well as shops in the big red-brick institution of
+Herald Square--and then gets right down to the serious business of
+shopping.
+
+And at Macy's it _is_ business; always business. The big store at
+Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, in recent years at least, has not
+gone in for shows--for organ and orchestral concerts or recitals or
+anything of that sort. It has considered that its best shows are always
+upon its counters. It has had no quarrel with the successful stores that
+have added entertainment features to the other routine of their
+operations. It merely has contended that its own method was completely
+satisfactory to itself. Which, after all, is a position of infinite
+strength.
+
+"Macy's attractions are its prices!" is an advertising slogan of the
+house so long sounded now that it has become almost a household phrase
+to its hundreds of thousands of regular patrons. It is a phrase up to
+which it has lived, steadily and consistently. And not only has it
+steadfastly refused to give shows of any sort--save, of course, those
+wonderful window pageants of other years, which were horses of quite a
+different color indeed--but it has also refused up to the present time
+to install such non-merchandise enterprises as manicuring parlors,
+hair-dressing rooms, barber shops and the like. And this despite the
+fact that in selling such things as groceries and automobile
+sundries--to take two specific instances out of several--it has gone
+considerably beyond the merchandise scope of some of the very largest of
+its New York competitors.
+
+"Hundreds of thousands of regular patrons?" you interrupt and repeat. "A
+hundred thousand people is a whole lot. Until very recently, at least,
+the population of what would be considered a pretty good-sized American
+city."
+
+Not long ago, I asked how many people came into Macy's in the passing of
+an average business day. I was promptly told that several times the firm
+had endeavored to make an actual and systematic count of the folk who
+passed through each of its many entrances, but had never entirely
+succeeded. Once, of a busy October day, the count up to two o'clock in
+the afternoon had reached and passed the one hundred and twenty thousand
+mark. At that time each of the great escalators which ascend from the
+main floor was handling its maximum capacity of 7,400 persons an hour;
+each of the fourteen public elevators was carrying the full number of
+passengers permitted it by law and the store management; while a host of
+other folk were doing business upon the ground floor without ever
+ascending to the fascinating mysteries of the land of Up-Above.
+
+And that was October. If a man who had seen the throng of that pleasant
+autumn day and thought it well-nigh impossible only had returned to the
+big store on a December day--say the Saturday before Christmas last--he
+would have thought that three hundred thousand would have been far
+nearer the mark of the eight and one-half hours. Could more folk have
+been squeezed through those wide doors and into those broad aisles? It
+would have seemed not. Even with the aid of a whole corps of special
+policemen and traffic rules as scientific and as ingenious as those
+which regulate the vehicular traffic of nearby Fifth Avenue, it was a
+task of a good half-hour to get within the huge mart; another half-hour
+to get out again. Certain departments--notably toys--possessed
+navigation problems of their very own, and other departments, such as
+refrigerators and other household goods, were comparatively deserted.
+The Christmas trade is nothing if not oddly balanced.
+
+Through a store such as this one may wander, _ad libitum_, and find a
+new surprise at nearly every corner of it. Certainly upon each of its
+floors. Nor are these to be limited, in any way, to the floors to which
+the public is ordinarily admitted. Once I remember coming through the
+eighth floor and suddenly emerging upon a clean, crisply lighted little
+workshop. At a long bench underneath an atelier-like window three men,
+fairly well-advanced in years, were working. One was engraving upon
+silver--the other two upon glass. The chief of the shop explained to me
+that in the beginning they were Germans but they had been in Macy's so
+many, many years that they were today to be classed as pretty thoroughly
+Americanized. One of them had sat at that bench--and the one down in
+Fourteenth Street that had preceded it before the northward trek to
+Thirty-fourth Street--for over thirty-two years. The three men were
+artisans--of the old school and of a sort that seemingly is not bred
+these days.
+
+"When they are gone I do not know where we shall go to replace them,"
+said the superintendent.
+
+"You will have to quit doing this sort of work?" I ventured.
+
+He answered quickly:
+
+"Oh no," said he, "Macy's never quits. We shall have to find
+others--even if we train them ourselves. It is only the material for
+training that worries me. American young men of today are not overfond
+of painstaking work of this sort."
+
+I knew instantly what he meant. As a nation we are made up of "shortcut"
+experts. Perseverance, patience, a tedious attention to uninteresting
+detail, have seemingly but little appeal to the average young man who is
+looking forward to a real career for himself. To be an executive--no
+matter by what name or title--and in as short a time as is humanly
+possible is apparently the only object that he sees ahead of him. A
+laudable ambition to be sure. But one shudders at the mere thought of a
+land which should be composed entirely of executives and wishes that we
+might develop more definitely a class of artisan workers, such as came
+to us forty, thirty, even twenty-five years ago.
+
+The oldest of these men--the man with thirty Macy years to his
+credit--was chasing a hunting scene upon a great glass bowl as I bent
+over his desk. It was more than artisanship, that task; it was artistry.
+A real work of real art even though at the moment these elaborate
+cut-glass designs have lost a little in public favor. In their own time
+and order they will come back again, however. And the workmanship that
+made them possible will be restored to its own former high favor.
+
+But even today there are large demands in Macy's for precisely this sort
+of thing. And glass grinding and engraving--which runs all the way from
+the making of prescription lenses for spectacles or for milady's
+_lorgnons_ up to the cutting of an entire dinner service of the most
+exquisitely patterned glass or repairs to the bowl or pitcher that
+Bridget or Selma has so carelessly broken--is the chief factor of a shop
+that handles, as other parts of its day's job, jewelry and watch
+repairs, electro-plating of gold, copper, silver, nickel, the printing
+or engraving or stamping of stationery of every sort, to say nothing of
+leather goods of every kind and description and a thousand lesser and
+highly individual jobs, such as the regilding of a mirror or the
+transformation of an ancient whale-oil lamp into a modern incandescent
+one. It is small wonder that as a minimum seventy-five men are
+constantly employed in this shop; more, as the exigencies of this season
+or of that may demand them.
+
+Yet this is but one of Macy's shops under that giant roof of Herald
+Square. There are others in close proximity--like those for the making
+of mattresses and bedding of every sort and variety and the
+establishment which brings broken toys back into life again. To my own
+Peter Pannish soul this last forever has the greatest fascination. Once,
+long years ago, I went into a great store in a distant city and found up
+under its roof a man whose sole task from one year's end to the other
+was the making of repairs upon toy locomotives. How I envied that man
+his job! And how the other day I envied the job of the Macy man who was
+repainting dolls' houses, one fascinating suburban villa after another.
+The doctor in the far corner of the room, whose patients ran all the way
+from lovely dolls of the most delicate china and porcelain to Teddy
+Bears who apparently had been badly worsted in some terrific nursery
+struggle, was a man with a position in which he might have genuine
+pride; but for the painting and re-arranging of those small houses a
+man, with an imagination in his soul, might almost afford to pay for the
+privilege of doing the work!
+
+
+Five-thirty!
+
+Again the doormen to their posts, two or three minutes in advance of the
+exact hour set. The minute hand upon the face of the clock no sooner
+reaches the exact bottom of its course, before a bell rings within the
+store and the great doors shut--simultaneously, as in the morning they
+had opened. But not permanently, of course. Dozens, hundreds, perhaps a
+thousand or more shoppers still are left within the store. Each is to be
+accorded a full opportunity to finish his or her transactions. There is
+no hurry; no ostensible hurry, at any rate. It would not be
+good-breeding to hasten the customer upon his way. And a canon of good
+merchandising is good breeding.
+
+Gradually, however, the late-stayers eliminate themselves. The big doors
+open to let them out, but never again this day to let newcomers in. No
+rule of the house is observed more inexorably. And so gradually the
+store empties itself.
+
+In the meantime certain departments have already ceased to function. The
+salesfolk are dismissed for the night and go scurrying off. A few bring
+out the dust-covers and these go out upon the stock. Counters are
+emptied. The stock, wherever possible, is put away, and when not put
+away is carefully covered. Nothing is left to chance nor to dust. System
+reigns. And the section manager, the last to leave his department for
+the night, makes sure that everything there is ship-shape against the
+coming of another day.
+
+Before he is gone--and he, in Macy's, is multiplied into ninety or a
+hundred human units--the cleaning squads are out upon the floor, rolling
+out their bin-like carts in orderly formation and proceeding upon the
+debris like a miniature army. Four, five, six hours of hard work await
+them. It will be midnight, perhaps later, before the store is absolutely
+clean again and settled down to the monotonous presence of the watchman,
+to await the arrival of another dawn.
+
+In the meantime the Macy family is pouring forth into the side streets
+through the doorways through which they entered before nine of the
+morning. There is little restriction, no red-tape about their leaving.
+Their brass discs--each individual and bearing the employee's
+designating number--which they dropped in the morning have been returned
+to them in the course of the day for use again upon the morrow.
+
+The only formality about their leaving--if indeed it might be called a
+formality--is the quick-fire inspection made by two store detectives who
+stand either side of the descending file at the main employees' stair,
+to see if any packages which are being carried out are lacking the
+check-room stamp and visé.
+
+These last are the store's protection against possible theft through its
+inner walls. The workers who bring packages in, either in the morning or
+at any later time in the progress of the day, are asked to take them to
+a well-equipped check and storage room close by the lockers, where they
+may regain them at night, stamped and viséd, to go out into the open
+once again. Any purchases that they may make during the day follow a
+similar course. It is a definite and an orderly procedure. Any other
+would be indefinite and to an extent disorderly.
+
+This is the reason why an occasional package--lacking the official stamp
+and visé of the check-room--is picked up by the keen-eyed detectives
+while its transporter is asked to tarry for a moment in an ante-room. In
+the course of an average evening there may be a half dozen of such
+outlaw packages detected. Their holders are not thieves. There is not
+even the implication that they are thieves. They are simply trying to
+ignore a fair and open-minded rule which the store has made, not alone
+for its own protection but for the protection of every man and woman in
+its employ. Such is the explanation which the assistant store manager
+makes to them before he dismisses them, at just a few minutes before
+six.
+
+"We believe in explaining things," he will tell you afterwards. "For we
+believe that we gain the very best service from the Macy people by not
+asking them to work in the dark. If we make a rule and its rulings
+sometimes puzzle them--sometimes even seem a little arbitrary,
+perhaps--we tell them why we have had to make the rule and almost
+invariably find them satisfied and quite content."
+
+The packages, themselves, are detained overnight. The store reserves the
+right to make an inspection of them. Such inspection, even when it is
+made, rarely ever shows the package to be illicit. It merely is
+carelessness. And the thoughtless worker to whom it is returned in the
+morning is merely asked not to be careless again, but to make a full and
+co-operative use of the facilities which are provided for the comfort,
+and the protection, of him and his fellows; which generally is all that
+is necessary to be said.
+
+
+By six the store is practically emptied of its workers. After that hour
+any one leaving it must have a pass and be interviewed by the night
+superintendent at the single door left open for exit. Night work in the
+Macy store is little and far between these days--save possibly in the
+Christmas season and even then it is held at a minimum; an astonishing
+minimum when one comes to compare it with the Christmas seasons of, say,
+a mere twenty years ago. The state law says that aside from that
+fortnight of holiday turmoil, the women workers of the store, who are
+considerably in the majority, shall not work more than fifty-four hours
+or oftener than one night a week and then not later than nine o'clock.
+In turn, the store, following the workings of the statute, designates
+Thursday as its late employment night. If, because of some emergency, it
+wishes to deviate from this, it must have a special permit.
+
+As a matter of fact, however, Macy's anticipates the law; goes far ahead
+of it. It finds its women workers not only willing to work the
+occasional Thursday night shifts, but, with the practical advantages of
+a full dinner furnished without cost and overpay to come into the
+reckoning, for the most part extremely anxious. And it reminds the
+solicitous legislators up at Albany that it was not a statute that
+abolished the pernicious habit of keeping the stores open for business
+evenings and late in the evening, but the progressive thought of the
+store managers of New York, themselves. These last have yielded little
+to the sentimentalists in real looking forward. Theirs have been the
+practical problems--not the least of these that of the education of a
+shopping public which seemingly had demanded that the big
+department-stores of New York should be kept open evenings--some
+evenings throughout the entire year--and all evenings in a certain
+small and terrible season; and without consideration of the task this
+custom imposed upon the patient folk who were serving them. Out of such
+lack of consideration, out of such selfishness, if you please, was a
+great practical and moral reform in merchandising evolved. Which was, in
+itself, no little triumph.
+
+
+
+
+II. Organization in a Modern Store
+
+
+I like to think of modern business as a huge, great single machine; or
+better still, a group of little machines gathered together and
+functioning as one. It is a simile that I have used time and time again.
+To feel that some single achievement of industry--of manufacturing or of
+merchandising--is as well organized and as well balanced as the many
+mechanisms that are laboring in its behalf, seems to bring the most
+single complete picture of modern business of the sort that our press
+has ofttimes been pleased to term "big business".
+
+And sometimes I like to think of these "big businesses"--with their
+hundreds and thousands of human units--as armies. At no time is this
+last comparison more apt than when one comes to apply it to the modern
+department-store, as we today know it in America. For, even if you wish
+to grant an entire dissimilarity of purpose, one of these huge
+institutions has more than one point of similarity with an army. Not
+alone in numbers can this parallel be made, but quite as quickly in
+organization. While, to return to our first simile, it, too, is a big
+machine--humanized. Its parts are carefully co-ordinated so that the
+whole will function with the least possible friction. Like an army it
+is officered with its generalissimo, its under generals, its colonels,
+its captains, its lieutenants, its sergeants and its corporals. The
+difference is only in nomenclature. The structure is quite the same.
+For, when you come to analyze, you will find the divisions of labor and
+of authority quite corresponding to similar divisions in the army.
+Officer, "non-com" and private--each contributes his more or less
+important part; each is a necessary factor in the success of the
+enterprise.
+
+Like an army, the department-store of modern America is designed to move
+constantly forward. The "big-chief" scans his balance sheets, the rise
+and fall of the curves of his outgo and income averages, the
+tremendously meaningful jagged red lines of his graphic charts, quite as
+carefully as the army general keeps track of the movement of his forces
+upon the maps which his topographists send him. He gathers his officers
+roundabout him and plans the strategy of business with the same shrewd
+foresight that must be observed by the successful military leader. He
+must be a promoter of morale throughout his forces, even down to the
+newest and the lowest-paid clerk. There must be constant liaison between
+the general and the private in the ranks.
+
+
+In considerable detail this parallel can be carried out. Soon, however,
+it must come to an end. That is, it ends in so far as Macy's is
+concerned. For the army at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street is neither
+an army of offense nor of defense. Its sole position always is upon the
+front line of service.
+
+At the head of the organization there are the three brother partners who
+inherited their original interest in the great business from their
+father, the late Isidor Straus, who, with their mother, lost his life in
+the supreme catastrophe of the sinking of the _Titanic_. In 1914 they
+acquired Nathan Straus' interest by purchase. These men, Jesse Isidor,
+the president, Percy S., the vice-president, and Herbert N., the
+secretary and treasurer, are its triple head and front. While each has
+trained himself to be a merchandise specialist of the highest order,
+there is none that knows the details of Macy's better than his
+brothers--they share equally in the supreme authority that directs the
+business. Directly responsible to them, in turn, is its general manager,
+its merchandise council and its advertising and financial departments.
+
+As I write these paragraphs, the great chart of the Macy organization
+lies upon my desk. It is a vast and fascinating thing. With the lines
+extending upon it here and there and everywhere from the box which holds
+the triple-head, branching and rebranching here and there and again, it
+looks not unlike a giant map; a chart, if you prefer to have it so. And
+so it is, a chart upon which the steersmen of so vast and so responsible
+an enterprise safely pick their course upon a seemingly unending
+journey.
+
+"Government by draughting-board," sniffed an old-time business man to me
+once, when I was trying to explain to him in some detail how a great
+steel manufacturing plant of the Middle West attempted to accomplish
+its huge job, economically and efficiently, by the use of graphic
+charts. And he added: "I'd like to see _myself_ held down by blue-print
+authority."
+
+To which, after all this while, I should like to reply:
+
+"I should like to see a concern, as big and as successful as Macy's,
+operated without a careful charting of its always difficult path."
+
+Yet, as a matter of hard fact, Macy's, any more than any other big and
+well-planned business organism of today, never binds itself to go
+blindly and unthinkingly upon the lines of the charts--and nowhere else.
+The real trick of executive direction seems to be to know when to follow
+these lines and when more or less to completely disregard them.
+Rule-of-thumb can never again overcome the rules of averages, of
+percentages or of economic laws. But the rule of wit and of human
+understanding can ofttimes be used to temper this first group and
+sometimes with astonishingly successful results.
+
+
+A glance or two at this imposing organization chart lying before me
+begins to show the many, many ramifications of the huge Macy business
+tree. It shows, for instance, how, under the direction of the
+merchandise council, are four large branches of store activity more or
+less inter-related: the handling of Macy's own merchandise (meaning
+particularly that which is either made in the store's own factories or
+at least made under its direct supervision); the work of the large force
+of buyers; the comparison department (an important phase of the
+business to which we shall come in our own good time); and the foreign
+offices.
+
+In the financial department, the controller is the quite logical chief.
+His general duties are fairly obvious. To help him in them, he has,
+under his direction, the chief cashier, the salary office, the auditing
+department, the depositors' account department--this last a most
+distinctive Macy feature--and a statistical department.
+
+Obvious, too, is the greater part of the work of the publicity
+department. It includes in addition to the advertising manager--always
+an important factor in the modern department-store and particularly so
+in the case of Macy's--a display manager. It is the job of the first of
+these men to tell the public of the merchandise being offered for sale
+at the sign of the red star; the job of his compeer to see that it is
+properly displayed to them.
+
+And, finally, there is the general manager--last but not least.
+Connected by an exceedingly direct and much-traveled line with the
+general offices upon the seventh floor of the store are Mr. W. J. Wells,
+the store's general manager, and his advisory council. For the G. M.,
+big as he is always, has need of much advice. Upon his broad and
+efficient shoulders are placed such a tremendous array of
+responsibilities that one cannot but marvel at the sheer efficiency of
+the man--to say nothing of his reserves of physical and mental
+strength--who can hold down such a job. Yet, at Macy's, the man himself
+disclaims any superhuman powers.
+
+"I am merely the automatic governor to this big machine," he will tell
+you, in his own simple, direct way. "In fact, if the machine always
+functioned one hundred per cent. efficient, there really would be no
+need either of me or of my job. It is because no machine that is built
+of human cogs and cams and levers and pulleys may ever work at one
+hundred per cent. efficiency that I, or some other man, must sit in this
+office. It is our job to meet the unusual and the unforeseen. We take up
+slack here and loosen there."
+
+The translation of this is unmistakable. If the three men upon the high
+seventh floor of the institution are its steersmen, this man, who has
+his office at the rear of its broad mezzanine balcony, is at least its
+chief engineer. And to assist him he has five assistant
+engineers--assistant general managers, in reality. The habit of simile
+leads one into odd designations of title. Each of these five assistant
+general managers--we shall stand by the nomenclature of the store--in
+turn has a large number of departments reporting to him. While in
+addition to them and ranking as virtual assistant managers are the
+superintendent of the detective bureau and that of the building, itself.
+
+The general manager, himself, is charged with the general duty of
+engaging, training and educating employees. He regulates salaries. He
+controls the transfer and discharge of employees. He is charged with the
+enforcement of all rules and regulations. He is the final authority to
+decide whether or not merchandise is returnable, for refund, exchange or
+credit. He also is the authority who adjusts all claims or
+controversies with customers. And he is the one to whom employees may
+appeal if they feel they are being treated unfairly by their superiors.
+A man-sized job truly! And because no one man, short of a superhuman at
+any rate, could ever perform all of its various and perplexing
+functions, Mr. Wells has his five assistants. In the event of his
+absence as well as that of any one of them the man below rises
+temporarily into his immediate superior's job.
+
+[Illustration: WHERE MILADY OF MANHATTAN SHOPS
+
+The vast ground floor of Macy's is, in itself, a mark of much interest
+and variety]
+
+It is the major task of the first of these assistants to direct the work
+of the floor superintendents--eight of these--and through them that of
+the section managers and the actual sales forces; nearly two thousand
+people all told. In other words, his job is the selling. To this great
+force and to the countless problems that must arise in its day-by-day
+direction there is added the oversight of the personal shoppers'
+service. Which means in turn the furnishing of guides throughout the
+departments to shoppers who ask for them; finding translators for folk
+to whom the intricacies of our tongue are unsolved mysteries and, in
+certain specific and necessary cases, the sending of merchandise with a
+member of the sales force into the homes of Macy's patrons.
+
+The second and the third assistant managers are the heads of non-selling
+organizations within the store, the fourth and the fifth handle the
+training and the educational departments, respectively. The second
+assistant has, as his especial responsibility, the merchandise checkers,
+the collectors, the stock clerks, the cashiers and the interior mail and
+messenger service. The other non-selling assistant general manager
+supervises the receiving department, the department of money orders and
+adjustments, the supply department, the delivery, the receiving, the
+time office, the manufacturing, and sundry other smaller specialties of
+the store; small, however, only in a comparative sense. Taken by
+themselves they quickly would be seen to be sizable indeed.
+
+The tasks of most of these departments are fairly obvious from their
+names. Some of the others we shall see in a bit of detail as we go
+further into the store and its workings. In other chapters we shall
+describe what the great delivery department is supposed to accomplish,
+and actually does accomplish, the scope and plan and reach of the
+departments of training and of employment, and some others, too. It
+takes no great strain upon the imagination to conceive of the importance
+of the detective bureau's work, nor that of the superintendent of
+buildings.
+
+So much, then, for a preliminary bird's-eye view of a mammoth machine,
+not a machine for turning out shoes or typewriters or paper, but for
+buying and selling all these things and many, many more. And as you read
+in the earlier part of this book, the huge mechanism did not spring into
+its being in a year, or in a decade, or even in a generation. It
+represents slow, hard, steady growth; and slow, hard, steady growth it
+is still having.
+
+There are now one hundred and eighteen departments in Macy's and yet,
+out of many thousands of separate and distinct items, there are some
+things that the store does not sell. Some of these commodities are
+handled by other great department-stores. But while Macy's may and does
+follow a charted path, it is its own chart and its own path. It never
+follows blindly the pathways of others. So, for instance, it does not
+sell pianos. In this particular case, at least, the reason is not hard
+to discover. Remember, all the while, that Macy's sells for cash and for
+cash alone--always and forever; and then consider that in ninety-nine
+cases out of a hundred, pianos are sold upon the installment plan. The
+installment plan is entirely outside of the Macy scheme of salesmanship.
+It may or may not be a good plan. But to adopt it Macy's would either
+have to change its selling policy or else dispose of so few pianos that
+it would not be profitable to maintain a department for them. This is
+the alpha and the omega of the piano, as far as Macy's is concerned. It
+has no intention either of changing its deep-rooted and well-founded
+selling policy, nor, on the other hand, of establishing a little-used
+and possibly unprofitable department. Upon this decision it stands quite
+content.
+
+Yet assuredly Macy's is organized to sell nearly all of the necessities
+of life--and an unusually large number of the luxuries in addition. From
+hosiery to ice cream, from women's suits to artists' materials, from
+eye-glasses to sausages, and from petticoats to ukeleles, the list of
+the store's wares is almost without limit. Other furniture is not hedged
+about by the same merchandising traditions and restrictions as are
+pianos; there are in the upper floor of this great market-place pieces
+of household furnishings whose prices run well into the hundreds and
+even thousands of dollars, to say nothing of rare Oriental rugs, fine
+paintings and other works of art.
+
+These one hundred and eighteen departments have been arranged after long
+study and experience and well thought out plans. In fact, so many
+conflicting and intricate features have entered into their planning that
+it is hardly possible within the space of these pages to give more than
+the broad general policy of the department organizations of the store.
+Yet it is another of these fairly obvious principles that upon its main
+floor--where its space, square foot by square foot, is by far at its
+highest value, and where there is a maximum of accessibility--should be
+displayed the items that sell the most quickly and the most readily.
+This follows the very reasonable theory that goods for which there is
+the most popular demand should at all times be the most accessible.
+Varying slightly in specific cases and conditions, as one ascends into
+the five upper selling floors of the store, the merchandise falls more
+and more into classifications that call for care and deliberation in the
+purchasing. Thus, upon the main floor, one will find such articles as
+umbrellas, books, candy, notions, and the like--to make but a few
+instances out of many--while upon the second, there will be yardage
+goods, linens, shoes and so forth.
+
+Parenthetically, it may be set down that in older days, yardage
+goods--meaning cloths and weaves of almost every sort--never used to be
+found above the ground floor of any department-store. Retail
+merchandising tradition in New York suffered a body blow some years ago
+when Macy's sent them upstairs. Even the men who worked in the
+department protested against the change. A sizable proportion of their
+income was and is in their commissions upon their total volume of sales.
+They could not see the sales upstairs.
+
+"For two cents I'd resign," said one of the veterans, just as the change
+was announced.
+
+No one offered him the two cents, however, and he remained. And the
+following year saw the department reach a new high level for total sales
+in its yard goods.
+
+One large reason for this in Macy's is the unusual accessibility of the
+upper floors from the street level. It required little or no effort for
+the customer to get to the second floor, or, for that matter, to the
+sixth. The store's unusual and fairly marvelous system of escalators,
+well-placed, smooth running, always available, and to be safely used by
+even a rheumatic or a cripple, bring these self-same upper floors at all
+times within easy reach of the street, and without the use of the firm's
+generous plant of elevators. With the exception of the abnormal stress
+and strain of the holiday season, the vertical system of Macy's
+transportation is never very seriously taxed.
+
+To those upper floors, also, go the folk whose purchases necessitate the
+fitting of something or other to the human frame. As we have just seen,
+shoes are upon the second floor. On the third is the women's wearing
+apparel, with special dressing-room facilities for trying on and
+fitting. Similar conveniences are to be found in the men's clothing
+department upon the fifth floor.
+
+Rugs, upholstery and art objects generally require more time for
+selection than do shoes and socks, more room for display as well. They
+go, then, quite naturally to the broad spaces of the fourth floor. The
+same qualities, only somewhat emphasized, apply to furniture, which is
+shown and sold upon the sixth. That the restaurant is relegated to the
+eighth floor is due in large part to the necessity for having cooking
+odors where they can be carried away without reaching other parts of the
+store; as well as to considerations in regard to the economy of floor
+space for an enterprise that is active during only a part of the day.
+
+Minor changes in the arrangement of all these departments are constantly
+and forever under way. A great market-place like Macy's never stays
+entirely put. Special considerations, special problems, unforeseen
+merchandising plans may at any moment make it not only advisable but
+necessary to change the location or the relative space of any or all the
+departments. At Christmas-time the unusual pressure upon some of them,
+accompanied by a slacking in others--unfortunately (or fortunately?)
+shoppers cannot be everywhere and at the same moment--means many
+temporary changes--so one department must give some of its space for a
+time to its neighbor--a debt possibly to be repaid at some other season
+of the year, when thoughts are not on toys, or candies or jewelry, but
+upon such serious things as carpets or refrigerators.
+
+An interesting sidelight upon the intensive study that Macy's gives the
+psychology of its interior arrangements is furnished in the fact that,
+on the theory that the less deadly of the species has an inherent
+aversion to department-stores, men's furnishing goods in these emporiums
+should generally be displayed upon the main floor, and just as close to
+a street entrance as is possible. Macy's has been no exception to this
+rule. A man, even when he is in a mood for spending, wants it over with
+as soon as possible. He is impatient of the slightest delay. On the
+other hand, his wife or daughter will make of shopping a kind of ritual.
+And, perhaps, because of that, she is often the more intelligent and
+discriminating buyer.
+
+Today, however, space on the main floor of the larger stores in New York
+is proving so valuable for goods that appeal to women shoppers, that
+some of them are trying to find a new method of appealing to the
+man-in-a-hurry. And so there has come to be a distinct trend toward
+putting men's goods upon a high upper floor, but with special express
+elevator service, so that their purchasers can get in and out with a
+minimum use of their valuable time.
+
+
+That part of the organization of Macy's which always has, always has
+had, and always will have the chief visual appeal to the public, is the
+staff of sales people with whom it comes in constant contact. Again and
+again, as we come to consider the minute workings of this great machine
+of modern business, we shall find its human factor looming larger before
+our very noses. We can not dodge it. We have no desire to dodge it. In
+fact, we find it at all times the most fascinating feature of our study.
+It is no part of this narrative to decide which part of the whole corps
+of workers in the store is the most important to it--it would be similar
+and quite as easy to try to give an opinion as to the relative
+importance of the mainspring and the balance-wheel of a watch--but it is
+enough to say here, as we shall say again and again, that the girl
+behind the counter--to say nothing of the man--is an absolutely
+indispensable feature. By her it rises; by her it might easily come
+tumbling down.
+
+Let me illustrate by the testimony of a young woman who recently was a
+girl behind the counter at Macy's:
+
+"It surely is true," she says, "that we salespeople can do a great deal
+to increase the business and the number of customers. Some of these last
+are, of course, nearly hopeless--they would try the patience of Job,
+himself--and then again there are the others who are most appreciative
+of your services. It was interesting to me, when first I went behind the
+counter, to see how many of my customers would say 'thank you.' I found
+that nearly all of them will, if only you make a real effort to please
+them. And the majority of the Macy salesforce does try to help a
+customer in any way that she needs help. One day I observed this
+incident, which is almost typical: A customer approached our counter and
+put her bag down upon it. A saleswoman went to her at once, saying:
+
+"'May I help you, madam?'
+
+"The customer shook her head, a negative; she was merely trying to
+adjust her veil, she explained. But our saleswoman was resourceful in
+her tact.
+
+"'Well, maybe, I can assist you with that,' she insisted, and
+straightway proceeded to do so. That was her notion of the service of
+our store."
+
+It is incidents just like this--seemingly small when you take them apart
+and place them out by themselves--but in the aggregate very real and
+very important, that make for a store its lifelong customers. Let the
+young woman continue. Like a good many other young women in the store
+she is a college graduate and also possessed of a power for shrewd
+observation.
+
+" ... One woman bought some gloves from me and while she waited for her
+change showed me her shopping-list. It was miles long, seemingly, and
+appeared to include everything from a safety-pin to a toy submarine. As
+she conned it, she said that she had shopped in Macy's for years, and
+nowhere else. In fact, I remember that she said that she would be
+completely lost in any other store.... Others came back, bringing a
+single glove that they had purchased a year or more before and wanting
+another pair just like them, they had been so satisfactory....
+
+"Not all of them are quite so cheery, however. Occasionally some
+unreasonable and irate customer would appear, storming at having to wait
+a few precious moments for her change, or at not being able to find the
+same glove that her friend purchased the week before--the chances being
+quite good that her friend might have bought the glove in another store.
+These are the times that test the wit and diplomacy and resource of the
+girl behind the counter.
+
+"A day behind a counter is filled to the brim with experiences--you have
+your finger on the pulse of a part of the life of New York--you are a
+part of a huge and important organization, and you come into contact
+with the world in general. Even customers coming to our glove counter
+furnished us with interesting moments. One in particular came to me to
+get some of our children's woolen gloves. He was a robust old man--about
+fifty-five, I'd have said--but he told me he was sixty-nine. He said he
+had just bought the same gloves elsewhere for over twice as much. (I
+said I didn't doubt that in the least.) And then he went on to say his
+wife and daughters shopped in stores where the name meant a great deal,
+but that he always came to Macy's because he came for the merchandise he
+got. He ended by saying he was a happy man, with three romping
+grandchildren, that he daily handled over two thousand men, but couldn't
+handle one woman. I should like to see him try to run Macy's and have to
+handle some six thousand men and women."
+
+
+The personnel of each of the selling floors of the store is under the
+direction of an organization captain, whose precise title is floor
+superintendent. He has an understudy--or, as he is known in the parlance
+of the place, a relief--so that the floor is never, even for a minute,
+without an executive head.
+
+This floor superintendent is a man of considerable discretionary powers.
+He must be. These powers are being constantly brought into play as he is
+called upon to decide the merits of this or that customer's claim. He is
+a man of tact and judgment, both of which qualities are kept in
+constant operation. Upon his floor he is the direct representative of
+the management and so looks out for its interests. From his desk upon
+the floor headquarters he directs and supervises, yet he constantly
+circulates throughout his various departments and sees to it himself
+that the matters for which he is responsible are thoroughly carried out.
+The orderliness of the floor is his special concern, and when, from time
+to time, it becomes necessary to shift salesclerks from one department
+to another--as in the case of the numberless special sales requiring
+extra help--it is he who engineers the details of the transfer.
+
+Acting as lieutenants to the floor superintendents are the section
+managers, who, as we have already seen, were in the store of yesterday
+known as "floorwalkers." But in the Macy's of today something
+considerably different is meant from the superannuated and somewhat
+pompous gentleman who used to condescend, when we asked for the location
+of silverware, to wave us away with a cryptic
+"second-aisle-to-the-right-rear-of-the-store." It now means a live,
+up-to-date, agreeable gentleman, with a man's-size job to fill.
+
+Not only must he ascertain the customers' needs and direct all of them,
+plainly and courteously, but he has direct supervision over all of the
+employees within his section. He is held responsible for their
+deportment and it is his duty to observe, as far as possible, their
+mental, moral and physical condition. He must be able to detect errors
+in the methods used by his salesclerks, and in order that he may be in a
+position to teach them correct methods, he must, himself, be master of
+the store system. Parts of this constantly are being changed, so that in
+addition to all of these other qualities, the successful section manager
+must possess an alert mind. The importance of his work may be visualized
+to some slight extent at least by the manual which is prepared for his
+guidance. This is a loose-leaf book of some fifty closely printed pages;
+the number varying according to the changes in the store system which
+are made from time to time. Just to give you a slight idea of what this
+captain of a merchandising army has upon his mind, consider that under
+the division entitled "Section Managers' Daily Duties" there are
+forty-six different items, and under "Miscellaneous Duties" thirteen.
+Moreover, he must have at his instant command all the technical
+procedure regarding transactions and forms, refunds, complaints,
+transfers, employees' shopping, the Internal Revenue Law, accidents, and
+then some more. I submit this as a job requiring all that a man has of
+fortitude and delicacy!
+
+
+Salesmanship is the thing that really made R. H. Macy & Company and it
+therefore is patent that they should consider the actual sellers of
+their goods as the very backbone of their organization. In another place
+it is related how, in the department of training, employees are taught
+to sell, and in another something of the working out of the psychology
+of the customer and the salesclerk. Education counts. It helps to make
+the salesclerk a vital factor of the store organization.
+
+Macy policy sees to it that the clerk is, in so far as it is possible,
+kept interested in his or her work. There are, as we have already begun
+to understand, as few rules governing their conduct, dress and liberties
+as are consistent with the smooth, economical operation of the business.
+On the other hand, there is all possible encouragement for them to
+become familiar and even expert with the things that they sell. In many
+of the departments special booklets have been prepared as aids in
+selling the particular line of merchandise carried. That for the
+stationery department, for instance, covers: Paper, with its history
+from the earliest times, its manufacture, sizes and characteristics;
+engraving, with a full description of the processes connected therewith;
+fountain-pens and their manufacture; desk accessories, commercial
+stationery and the like. Ambition to excel in salesmanship is further
+stimulated by taking clerks through factories where their lines are
+made, and by exhibiting motion pictures of the manufacturing of these
+goods.
+
+Here, then, is the store's most direct contact with its patrons. There
+are others, however, to be classed as at least fairly direct. Take that
+big and comfortable restaurant up on the eighth floor. It is one of the
+real landmark's among eating-places of New York, a world city of good
+eating.
+
+Its own magnitude may easily be guessed from the fact that in a single
+business day it feeds more people than almost if not any other in the
+town. Translated into cold figures this means that there is an average
+of twenty-five hundred lunches bought by customers each day that the
+store is open; with a maximum on extremely busy days reaching as high
+as five thousand. Figures are impressive. Yet these do not include
+either afternoon teas or late breakfasts for both of which there is a
+considerable clientele.
+
+To serve these hungry folk who come to Macy's there are two hundred
+waitresses, buss-boys and other employees upon the floor, besides fifty
+in the general kitchen, twenty in the bakery and eight in the ice cream
+factory. And if you still try to doubt that this restaurant is not of
+itself a real business and one to be reckoned with, consider that in the
+course of an average year its patrons consume--among other things--two
+thousand barrels of flour, fifty-two tons of sugar, seven hundred and
+fifty thousand eggs, ninety-three thousand six hundred pounds of butter,
+two thousand bags of potatoes, and nearly half a million quarts of ice
+cream. This latter item, however, covers the ice cream used at the soda
+fountain and in the employees' and men's club restaurants.
+
+The employees' lunchroom--conducted on the cafeteria plan--serves four
+thousand men and women each working day. It provides tasty and wholesome
+food at a cost that makes it entirely possible to eat to repletion for
+twenty cents or less. Soups, for instance, are three cents a portion,
+and meat dishes six, while other items, such as sandwiches, vegetables,
+desserts and the like are correspondingly low.
+
+Nor is this luncheon the sole restaurant resource of the employees
+within this institution. In the men's club nearly a thousand more of the
+Macy family eat their midday meal each day; and eat very well indeed.
+Here the meal is served at a flat rate: at the uniform and moderate cost
+of thirty cents.
+
+Under the same general management direction (the third assistant general
+manager) as the restaurant is the store's supply department--not
+different very much from the supply department of a big railroad or
+manufacturing unit--which supplies everything for its consumption, from
+coal to string; the manufacturing departments in which are produced
+glass, mattresses, printing, engraving, custom-made shirts, millinery,
+picture frames and paper novelties; the candy factory over near Tenth
+Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street, which completely fills a big modern
+six-story building; the telephone service; and the so-called public
+service department.
+
+These last facilities command our attention for a passing moment. The
+telephone is, of course, the nerve-system of the Macy organization;
+nothing else. Its chief ganglion is a far-reaching switchboard on which
+little lights twinkle on and off and at which at a single relay sit nine
+competent operators in addition to a corps of inspectors and
+supervisors. The big board, from which run fifty-nine trunk-wires to the
+neighboring Fitzroy exchange, is none too large. Year in and year out it
+handles an average of nine thousand calls a day. And in the Christmas
+season this number easily is doubled and trebled.
+
+The public service department means exactly what it is called. It is at
+the service of the public. In concrete form it is a free information
+bureau, where theater seats and railroad and Pullman tickets may be
+purchased at face value--and not one cent beyond, not even the usual
+moderate fifty-cent advance of the hotel agencies--where astute and
+marvelously informed young men and women, with a miniature library of
+reference books at their immediate command, stand ready and willing to
+answer all the reasonable questions that may be thrust at them. To it is
+added a postal office, a telegraph office and public telephones for both
+local and long distance service.
+
+
+The third assistant general manager of the store also has within his
+bailiwick the important department of mail orders and adjustments.
+Although in the technical sense of the word Macy's today has no mail
+order department--having been forced to abandon its once promising
+beginning along this line because of a sheer lack of room in which to
+handle it--the store each year actually receives thousands of orders for
+its goods by mail, from folk who, for one reason or another, find it
+inconvenient to visit it. These are received and systematically handled
+in this very department. Under its adjustment division comes the
+extremely interesting bureau of investigation, which concerns itself
+with all complaints, and the correspondence bureau, which handles more
+than ninety-five per cent. of the mail of the house.
+
+It requires no particular keenness of imagination to see that, even with
+complaints reduced to a minimum and letter-writing and handling to a
+fine science, there is an infinite amount of detail in these two
+departments alone--detail that reaches into every part of the store and
+that necessitates a clever combination of system and diplomacy.
+
+The exposition of the workings of the Macy organization is yet to lead
+us into other chapters in which various separate subjects of interest
+will be treated at greater length than here; but now is the time and
+place to focus our attention upon one of the small, but extremely
+important, departments that works unseen--but not unfelt--behind the
+scenes. It is known as the comparison department and the work that it
+does is of vast importance in the operation of the store. Its functions
+are unending--and continuous. Macy's policy of underselling its
+competitors is an unhalting one.
+
+I have before me a Macy advertisement from a New York newspaper of
+recent date. In a conspicuous place in it there is a card which says:
+"For sixty-two years we have sold dependable merchandise at lowest in
+the city prices. We are doing so now and shall continue to do so." This
+was published at a time when the recent reaction from the extremely high
+prices of the war period already had begun to set in; and yet this was
+the big store's sole acknowledgment of the deflation sentiment--to say
+nothing of hysteria--which was sweeping the town. Its competitors had
+been offering their wares at reductions of from twenty to fifty per
+cent. from their topmost prices, but, serene and secure in the knowledge
+that its policy in selling had been consistently adhered to, Macy's only
+reiterated that its prices would continue to be the lowest in the
+city--quality for quality.
+
+To hold fast to this policy, through thick and thin, has not always
+been easy. Macy's has fought some royal battles in its behalf--yet not
+so much because it was a policy as because with the big store in Herald
+Square it has become a principle of the most fundamental sort.
+
+More than twenty years ago the principle became extremely difficult to
+maintain, because of the growing tendency of the proprietors of
+articles, so patented or copyrighted as to make their imitation
+practically impossible, to attempt to fix their final retail sales
+price. It no longer became the mere question of whether Macy's or any
+other store would have the right to undersell its competitors; it became
+the fundamental question of whether the great centuries-old open market
+of the world could continue to remain an open market, in the interest of
+the consumer; and not a closed market, in the interest of the producer.
+To maintain the first of these positions, in behalf of its patrons,
+Macy's entered upon and won, almost single-handed, one of the notable
+legal battles in the history of this country.
+
+As far back as 1901--if you are a stickler for exact dates--this whole
+question of price maintenance became an acute issue with Macy's. It came
+to pass that when the prominent publishers of America formed an
+association, one prime purpose of which was to fix the prices at which
+their books would sell at retail, the store quickly saw that if this
+trust agreement was permitted to stand unchallenged, its cardinal
+principle of underselling its competitors, would have to be sacrificed.
+Macy's did not propose to make such a sacrifice--to permit its customers
+to be sacrificed--without a protest. And such a protest it prepared to
+make.
+
+Isidor Straus, then the head of the business, sat in the office of his
+friend and counsel, Edmond E. Wise, in a downtown office. Mr. Wise put
+the thing frankly and without equivocation before his client. He said
+that it would be a hard legal fight, no doubt of that, but that a great
+principle was at stake; the keen mind of the lawyer was convinced of the
+economic fallacy of the position of the publishers' association.
+
+Quietly Mr. Straus told his attorney to go ahead. He said that he would
+fight the fight, to the last ditch. No expense was to be spared. The
+case would be carried, if necessary, in every instance to the highest
+court of appeal.
+
+Accordingly, Mr. Wise prepared a suit against the American Publishers'
+Association which holds the record for appeal in the history of
+jurisprudence in this country. Three times it went up to the Court of
+Appeals of the State of New York; finally, after nine years of legal
+battle, it was carried to the United States Supreme Court, which, after
+due deliberation, decided every point in favor of R. H. Macy & Company.
+
+That was in December, 1913. Early in the following May the firm had the
+satisfaction of having the publishers hand over a check on the Park
+National Bank for $140,000. This sum represented a settlement for the
+difficulties that Macy's had had to undergo for more than a dozen years
+past in getting stock for its book department. Ofttimes it was
+necessary to follow devious paths indeed to gain this end--and still
+hold fast to the fundamental underselling policy of the store. Sometimes
+the store had to go so far as to send to other retail stores to buy a
+certain volume, at the full retail price, and then resell it to its
+patrons, at its customary ten per cent. off the price of the store at
+which it had just purchased it. So much if you please for the expense of
+standing by a principle!
+
+
+A short time after this signal victory of Macy's, certain large
+manufacturers of patented articles, who for a time had sustained in the
+lower courts their claim to a fixed retail price standard, sought
+definitely to control Macy retail prices upon their products. Macy's,
+however, defied them, and the Victor Talking Machine Company, one of the
+leading adherents of price maintenance, brought an action in the United
+States courts to compel Macy's adherence to the rules for resale at a
+certain price. Again there was a royal battle and again Macy's triumphed
+signally, for on final appeal, the United States Supreme Court again
+decided in favor of the store in Herald Square, on every one of its
+contentions. Macy's then retaliated and brought suit against the Victor
+Company, under the Sherman Law. In a bitterly contested action, which
+culminated in one of the longest trials before a jury on
+record--consuming more than ten weeks--Macy's recovered a judgment of
+$150,000, and a counsel fee of $35,000; after which no paths apparently
+were left open to the manufacturers who sought to maintain the retail
+prices that suited them best. Court decisions seemingly blocked all
+possible pathways.
+
+One path did remain, however--legislation. Effort was made to pass a
+measure down at Washington to permit and sustain retail price
+maintenance, which in reality meant the emasculation of the Supreme
+Court's decisions. When that measure came to a hearing before the
+Interstate Commerce Committee of the House one of the Macy partners,
+accompanied by Mr. Wise, the store's counsel, and Mr. E. A. Filene, the
+well-known Boston merchant, came before it in opposition. Up almost to
+that hour, Macy's had gone it alone. Now the attention of the country
+was focussed upon its fight and the National Retail Dry Goods
+Association came in with both its sympathy and its active
+co-operation--hence the appearance of Mr. Filene, who made a most
+excellent argument in support of the Macy contention.
+
+It was shown definitely to the members of this House committee that
+many, if not all, branded and patented articles took a retail profit of
+from fifty to seventy-five per cent. The member of the Macy firm took a
+watch nationally advertised at $2.50 and duplicated it with a watch
+which his store sold at sixty-five cents, going so far as to take the
+two watches apart so as to show conclusively that the one was quite as
+good as the other. Certain other commodities went under similarly
+critical analyses. When the hearing was completed, the committee laughed
+the bill out of court. Since then the question of price maintenance by
+the original producer has been permitted to drop. Macy's had won its
+hard-fought fight; won it cleanly and honestly. By performance it had
+made good its statements that it proposed wherever it was humanly
+possible to undersell its competitors. That was no idle phrase.
+
+
+It is indeed one thing to make a statement--whether in print or by word
+of mouth--and another and ofttimes a far more difficult thing to make
+good that statement by performance. No one knows this better than
+Macy's. Having set down such a definite and distinct statement it must
+be prepared to make good. It must be so covered and protected at every
+possible point that if challenged it can give a good account of itself.
+In fact, challenges come in every day--they have been coming in every
+day for a good many years now--and the house continues to make good its
+statement willingly--even joyfully. Here it is, then, that the
+comparison department functions; here it is that the original
+fundamental policy of Rowland H. Macy--to buy and sell only for
+cash--strictly adhered to during the sixty-four years' life of the
+business--makes it possible for the house to make good.
+
+How, then, is it done?
+
+The answer is easy.
+
+Suppose, if you will, that Smith, Brown & Jones are having a special
+sale of Mother Hubbard wrappers. There are advertised as their regular
+$4.97 stock, marked down (at a heartbreaking sacrifice) to $3.79.
+Manifestly, it is up to R. H. Macy & Company to sell the same quality of
+Mother Hubbard for less than $3.79, if they are to live up to their
+oft-stated policy. It is quite as patent that Macy's must know just
+what kind of wrappers Smith, Brown & Jones are selling, if it is to
+compete on an exact basis. Nothing simpler. One of the Macy staff of
+shoppers is hurried forthwith to the scene of the bargain and,
+purchasing one of the garments, brings it back post-haste to the Macy
+comparison department. Furthermore, it is in this department by ten
+o'clock of the morning of the sale. It is then matched as closely as
+possible with a Mother Hubbard from the Macy stock, and the two garments
+compared, point by point. If, after careful examination, it is found
+that Macy's is charging more, or even the same price, for equal quality,
+then its prices are immediately marked down to a figure at least six per
+cent. lower than that advertised by the other store. And this, mind you,
+is not an exceptional performance but a daily procedure in the carrying
+out of which an exceptionally alert woman manager and twenty expert
+shoppers are constantly kept busy.
+
+If you make inquiry regarding the ins and outs of this remarkable policy
+you will find that it is far broader than you may have imagined. Here,
+again, is proof of the pudding. It is a typical letter, received from a
+customer and copied verbatim, with only the name left out:
+
+
+     November 12, 1920.
+
+     R. H. Macy & Co.,
+     New York City.
+
+     Dear Sirs:
+
+     I purchased a banjo clock at $13.89 from you on Tuesday. Yesterday
+     I saw the same clock, with same works, etc., identical in every
+     way, at ----'s, for $11.25. Now, inasmuch as you claim that you
+     sell goods at the very lowest figure, I think that is too much
+     difference in price to overlook. I trust that I shall receive your
+     check for the difference in the amount, otherwise please call for
+     the clock at once. I purchased clock in the basement.
+
+     Yours very truly,
+
+     ----------------
+
+
+This letter was received by the store and acknowledged that very day. It
+then was turned over to the comparison department, from which a shopper
+was despatched to the store at which the customer claimed to have seen
+the clock for less money. The shopper reported that the claim was
+correct, and a check was immediately forwarded to the customer for the
+difference between the price which she paid for the clock and six per
+cent. less than the other store's price for it. Nor did the matter end
+there. All this kind of clocks in the basement were at once repriced to
+conform to the adjustment made with the customer.
+
+There are, too, the occasional tests made by customers who, while they
+are not dissatisfied, cannot believe that the low-price policy can be
+consistently carried out. As an example, this half-jocular letter:
+
+
+     November 15, 1920.
+
+     R. H. Macy & Company,
+     Broadway & 34th Street,
+     New York.
+
+     Gentlemen:
+
+     Lest you regard this as a complaint from an ordinary .22 calibre
+     chronic kicker let me say in the first place that I merely want to
+     see to what extent you will make good on your brazen claim to sell
+     goods at a lower price than other stores. Now then:
+
+     On November 10th, I purchased a toy "cash register" bank in your
+     toy department for $1.98. (I want the kid to learn frugality better
+     than I did.) On November 14th my wife saw the same toy at Hahne's
+     in Newark, N. J., for exactly the same price. So far, so good. It
+     was worth it. But, Mr. Macy, you said your prices were _less_.
+
+     Besides, I have an account at Hahne's. By the time I would have
+     needed to pay for that bank there would have been enough in it to
+     settle the bill.
+
+     Here is your chance, but I'm from Missouri.
+
+     Yours,
+
+     ------------
+
+
+The answer to this complaint was prompt and to the point. It reads:
+
+
+     R. H. MACY & CO.
+     HERALD SQUARE, NEW YORK
+
+     December 4, 1920.
+
+     Mr. ------
+     ------
+     ------
+
+     Dear Sir:
+
+     We acknowledge your letter of November 24th, with regard to a
+     toy-bank, which you purchased from us for $1.98. We have
+     investigated your complaint and find, as you state, Hahne & Co. in
+     Newark are selling this article at the same price at which you
+     purchased it from us. Our price on these banks is now $1.89, in
+     keeping with our claim that we sell dependable merchandise for
+     "lowest-in-the-city" prices.
+
+     We appreciate your courtesy in calling this matter to our attention
+     and also for the opportunity to demonstrate the upholding of our
+     policy. A refund of nine cents in stamps is enclosed.
+
+     Yours very truly,
+     (Signed) R. H. MACY & CO.
+
+     ------ Mgr.
+     Bureau of Mail Order and Adjustment.
+
+
+Of course this complaint was trivial, the sum involved small, and Macy's
+must quickly have realized that the man who wrote the letter was not
+particularly serious. Yet that made no difference. The matter was
+adjusted; even though the process of adjustment involved a shopper's
+trip to Newark and considerable clerical work--in all several times the
+cost of the tiny bank. Yet the matter _was_ adjusted and all the
+toy-banks of that kind were at once reduced in price, to say nothing of
+a satisfied patron made for the store.
+
+
+There is another sort of complaint that, at times, keeps the comparison
+department pretty busy. Women frequently will stop at a counter in the
+store, examine an article and then exclaim:
+
+"Hm-m--$6.74 for that! Why, I saw the same thing today at Jinx, Bobb &
+Company's for $5.90."
+
+A mere passing comment which, in the old days of merchandising, might
+easily have been ignored. In Macy's it is not ignored. The clerk who
+hears this remark makes a note of it and sends through to the comparison
+department what is technically known as a customer's complaint.
+Immediate investigation is made, the prices checked up, and, if the
+casual shopper is right, Macy's prices are at once readjusted to the six
+per cent. below the competitor's charges. It has been found, however,
+that nearly ninety per cent. of this sort of complaints are incorrect.
+Two articles, in separate stores, may look so nearly alike that a casual
+inspection will not reveal any difference, and, therefore, competing
+goods must often be subjected to expert examination and even to
+analysis. A magnifying glass is used to count the threads in a fabric;
+woolens are boiled in chemical solutions to determine whether there is
+any adulteration; and cotton goods, such as sheets and pillow cases, are
+weighed, washed and weighed again to ascertain to what extent they are
+loaded. For Macy's is just to itself, as well as to the public.
+
+
+As has been indicated already, there are some things that the store as a
+matter of policy does not sell--pianos, chief of all. But that does not
+mean that there is, in the minds of its managers, the slightest excuse
+for its shelves not holding the things that it ought to sell. A large
+difference, this, and one which is constantly being checked by members
+of the shopping staff of the comparison department--going through its
+floors and inquiring in the various departments for goods for which
+there is little ordinary demand, and so a considerable likelihood of
+their not being found in stock. If an article requested is not found in
+stock, the shopper immediately buys something else--so as to get the
+number of the salesclerk. Then a report is made to the department buyer
+in order that he may see whether or not the clerk has followed up the
+inquiry.
+
+Incidentally, the shopper's report upon this entire transaction takes
+into account all the details regarding the manner in which the sales are
+handled and even notes the speed with which the parcel is wrapped and
+the change returned. It is not a spying system, but part of the store's
+honest effort to keep its efficiency at the highest notch. Naturally the
+shoppers of its comparison department are not known as such to its
+salesforce--for this reason the personnel of the corps must be under
+constant change--and it is equally evident that their anonymity is
+carefully preserved in their dealings with other stores. They are all
+well-bred young women, ranging in type from the flapper to the matron,
+and each is so carefully trained to act her part that it is quite
+impossible to distinguish them from the store's bona fide shoppers.
+
+Another of their duties is to report upon the speed of Macy deliveries.
+Once a month, at a certain prearranged time of day, a similar purchase
+is made at each of the largest stores in the city, including Macy's.
+These are all ordered sent to the same address and a record is made of
+the length of time it takes each to arrive. In the report that is
+finally made of the test details are included showing the manner in
+which all the packages are wrapped in order that Macy service may at all
+times be held up at least to the standard of its competitors.
+
+In the highly scientific machine of modern business, the test is as
+valuable as in other machines. I have stood in a great sugar refinery
+and watched the workmen from time to time draw off tiny phials of the
+sweetish fluid in order that they might show under laboratory
+examination that the machine was functioning at its highest point. And
+so are the tiny phials of Macy service drawn from the machine. If they
+show that, even in the slightest degree, the great machine of retail
+merchandising is functioning below its highest efficiency, it becomes
+the immediate business of the management to correct the loss.
+
+"I tell my people not to come to me with reports that everything is
+going well," says its general manager, "I only want to know when things
+begin to slip. Then it is my job to set them straight once again."
+
+One thing more, before we are quite done with this sketch of the
+organization of a great merchandising institution. It is, in this case,
+a most important thing:
+
+With the credit system in force in nearly, if not quite, every other
+large store in the New York metropolitan district, Macy's for years has
+had to encounter a considerable sentiment against its policy of doing a
+cash business only. For there always has been a desirable class of trade
+represented by customers who, for one reason or another, find it most
+inconvenient to pay their bills monthly--people whose means and credit
+are unimpeachable. At one time it looked as if R. H. Macy & Company
+would either have to forego their custom or else make exceptions to
+their long established rule. The former they could do; the latter they
+would not. But--
+
+Out of this very need for furnishing customers with the convenience of
+some sort of a charge account grew a great Macy specialty--the
+depositors' account department which, while making no concessions to the
+store's rock-ribbed principle of selling for cash, solved a very great
+problem in its touch with its public. It turned the costly credit
+privilege into an asset both for the customer and for the store. The
+very thought was revolutionary! What, ask a customer to pay in advance;
+to have money on deposit with R. H. Macy & Company, private bankers, to
+pay for normal purchases for a whole thirty days to come! It couldn't be
+done. New York would never, never stand for it. Every one outside of the
+store was sure that it never could be done. And a good many inside, as
+well. Yet the thing deemed impossible has come to pass. The idea was
+sound. The plan today is successful, even beyond the dreams of its
+promoters. With fifteen thousand depositors, its total deposits--money
+placed into the store to be drawn against solely for merchandise
+purchases--have reached as high as $2,750,000 at a single time.
+
+Interest at four per cent. annually is paid upon these deposits, so that
+the customer's money does not lie idle in the Macy till. Moreover, the
+money may be withdrawn at any time, and without previous notice being
+given. Further than this, it has been a custom--not, however, to be
+considered invariable--to pay a bonus of two per cent. on net sales
+charged to the depositors' account department throughout the year.
+Compare the thrill of receiving a bonus check from your
+department-store, instead of a bill for dead horses!
+
+It has been estimated that in some of New York's most representative and
+most elegant department-stores something like eighty-five per cent. of
+all retail transactions are upon the credit accounts. Assuming even that
+all of these accounts are promptly collectible--or collectible at
+all--the expense of the machinery of their collection becomes no small
+item in store management cost. This item Macy's saves--entirely and
+completely. And so, to no small extent, the store justifies itself in
+that other rigid rule--the pricing of its merchandise at a uniform
+rating of six per cent. less than that of its competitors. Upon this
+thought, alone, a whole book might be written.
+
+
+
+
+III. Buying to Sell
+
+
+Up the broad valley of the Euphrates a caravan comes toiling upon its
+way. It is fearfully hot; frightfully dusty. For it has come to
+mid-September; the rains are long weeks gone; and with the crops
+harvested, even the sails of the great mills that pump the irrigation
+canals full are stilled. The time of great heat and of little work. But
+still the caravan--the long, attenuated file of horses and camels must
+press on.
+
+Ahead is Bagdad, that self-same ancient Bagdad which three thousand
+years ago was the commercial capital of the world. Through the heat
+waves and the blinding dust, the trained eyes of the Moslem can see the
+sun touching the gilded minarets and towers of her great mosques. Bagdad
+ahead. And at Bagdad the market-places which have stood unchanged for
+tens of centuries. Save that in recent years there have come to them
+these Americans--these shrewd agents of a little known folk, these
+rug-buyers of a far-away land of which they spin such fascinating tales.
+Tales far too fascinating ever to be believable. Yet Allah keeps his own
+accounting.
+
+
+In the foyer of a lovely new home in newest New York a Persian rug is
+being spread for the first time. Its owner dilates with pride upon his
+purchase; shows those roundabout him the symbolism of its rarely
+delicate design; even to the tiny fault purposely woven into the
+creation by its maker to show in his humble fashion that only Allah may
+be faultless.
+
+
+A great French city; this Lyons, by the bank of the lovely Rhone. For
+two centuries or even more its tireless looms have spun the rarest silk
+fabrics of the world. Nearby there is a little French village. Were I to
+put its name upon these pages, it would mean nothing to you. Yet out
+from it there comes a lace, so rare, so delicate, that one well may
+marvel at the human patience and the human ingenuity that conceived it.
+The silk comes to America, straight to the chief city of the Americas;
+so do the laces; and so in a short time will come once again the
+wondrous cotton weaves of Lille and of Cambrai--and will come as a
+tragic reminder of the five fearful years that were.
+
+
+In the hot depths of a South African mine, negroes, stripped to their
+very waists, are toiling to bring forth the rarest precious stones that
+the world has ever known. In the fearfully cold blasts of the far North,
+facing monotonous glaring miles of lonely ice and snow, trappers are
+after the seal and the mink. Why? In order that milady, of New York, may
+sweep into her red-lined box at the Opera, a queen in dress, as well as
+in looks and in poise.
+
+From the mine and from the ice-floes to her neck and back a mighty
+process has been undergone. The great multiplex machine of
+merchandising has accomplished the process. A thousand other ones as
+well. Herald Square sits not alone between the East River and the North,
+between the Battery and the Harlem, between five populous boroughs of
+the great New York, not alone between the four million other folk who
+dwell within fifty miles of her ancient City Hall, but between the shoe
+factories of Lynn, the cotton mills of Lowell and of the Carolinas, the
+woolen factories of the Scots and the nearer ones of Lawrence, the paper
+mills of the Berkshires, the porcelain kilns of Pennsylvania, between a
+thousand other manufacturing industries, both very great and very small,
+as well. Into Herald Square--into the red-brick edifice upon the
+westerly side of Herald Square and reaching all the way on Broadway from
+Thirty-fourth to Thirty-fifth Streets--all of these pour a goodly
+portion of their products. In turn, these are poured by the big
+red-brick store into the pockets and the homes of its tens of thousands
+of patrons.
+
+A mighty business this; and, as we shall presently see, a business made
+up of many little businesses. Merchandising, financing, transportation;
+each has played its own great part in the bringing of that silk sock
+upon your foot or the felt that you wear upon your head. Each has
+co-operated; each has correlated its effort. There are few accidents in
+modern business. Rule-o'-thumb has stepped out of its back-door. In its
+place have come cool calculation, steady planning, scientific
+investigation. If modern merchandising has tricks, these are they. And
+they are the tricks that win.
+
+In our last chapter we pictured R. H. Macy & Company as a machine of
+salesmanship. Now I should like to change the film upon the screen. I
+should like to show you Macy's as a machine of buying. Obviously one
+cannot sell, without first buying. Buying must at all times precede
+selling, while to meet competition and still sell goods at a profit, the
+keenest sort of shrewd merchandising must be used in purchasing. Your
+buyer must be no less a salesman than he who stands behind the retail
+counters and, what is more to the point, he must constantly keep his
+finger upon the pulse of the market. Which means, in turn, that he must
+not for a day or an hour lose his touch with manufacturing and financial
+conditions--to say nothing of the changeable public taste.
+
+For the one hundred and eighteen different departments of the Macy's of
+today there are now sixty-nine buyers; the majority of them women. This
+last is not surprising when one comes to consider that by far the larger
+percentage of the department-store's customers are of the gentler sex.
+Women know how to buy for women--or should know. How foolish indeed
+would be the merchant prince of the New York of this day who would not
+instantly say "yes" to the assertion that feminine taste in buying is
+the one thing with which his store absolutely could not dispense. So the
+woman buyer in our city stores is so much an accepted fact as to call
+today for little special comment, save possibly to add that in no store
+outside of Macy's has she come more completely into her own. The buyer's
+job covets her. And she covets the buyer's job. Well she may. For it is
+a job well worth coveting--in independence, in opportunity and in
+salary.
+
+In almost every case a buyer comes to the job from retail
+experience--although occasionally a knowledge of wholesale selling
+develops the required skill. In nine cases out of ten, however, he or
+she rises to the important little office on the seventh floor from the
+salesforce upon the retail floors beneath. From salesclerk he--or as we
+have just learned, usually she--is promoted to "head of stock," which is
+the title of the head clerk in a department having three or four or more
+clerks. This promotion comes from a superior knowledge of the stock, yet
+not from that alone: the clerk must have executive ability. An agreeable
+temperament is also a necessary ingredient to the potion of promotion.
+
+To the position of assistant buyer is the next and logical promotion for
+the ambitious and successful "head of stock." After this should come the
+step to the big job--which steadily grows bigger--of buyer, or as the
+Macy store prefers to call it, department manager.
+
+Department managers do no actual selling. They now have graduated from
+that. Yet none the less are they salesmen--in more than a little truth,
+super-salesmen. For not only must they know what to buy--and how to buy
+it at the most favorable price--but they are equally responsible for
+knowing what to do with their purchases, once made. They are the
+merchants of the departments; accountable for the saleability of their
+stock. It is very much their concern whether those departments show a
+profit or a loss. Little stores within a big store. A big store made up
+of more than a hundred little stores.
+
+As we have seen, it is not an uncommon custom for some department-stores
+to rent out or even to sell the privilege of many, if not all of its
+little stores. Macy's--in recent years at least--has not followed this
+policy. It has found that its own best organization comes from keeping
+the department as a unit; a pretty distinct and important unit, right up
+close to the very top of the business, where its three partners are
+specialists in merchandising; and passing proud of that.
+
+
+The foundation of all successful buying is built of the bricks of sales
+knowledge laid in the mortar of good judgment. It is squared up by a
+sixth sense that has no name--yet a qualification which, by its presence
+or its absence, makes or unmakes a buyer's value. In its various
+branches, however, this unnamed sense is required, to a varying degree,
+perhaps, least of all in the purchasing of staple goods.
+
+For the sake of a more convenient understanding, let us begin by
+classifying the various needs of the insatiable Macy's into three major
+divisions: We shall put down staples, as the first of these; luxuries,
+as the second; and novelties, as the third. Under staples we shall
+include notions, cotton goods (such as sheets, pillow-cases and muslins)
+and, in general, the absolute necessities of life, including wearing
+apparel of the commoner varieties, household articles and the like.
+These are in constant purchase almost every day of the year. Take, for
+instance, that heterogeneous collection of articles, grouped under the
+generic and whimsical head of notions. There is thread of all kinds,
+there are hooks-and-eyes, snap-fasteners, hair-nets, darners,
+button-hooks, tape-measures and what all not more--far be it from me
+even to attempt to mention the more than four thousand separate items
+that must be constantly carried in the notion departments.
+
+For all of these there is a huge daily demand, while a month's supply of
+any of them is all that can, as a rule, be conveniently handled in the
+store. It must be patent that, as there is never an equal demand for
+these small but essential articles, the buyers must be placing constant
+orders for them. So it is with everything else that people must
+have--irrespective of tastes, wealth or the season of the year--and the
+number of the list is legion.
+
+Therefore, the buyer of staples does not depend so much upon the sixth
+sense as upon common sense. He must have plenty for the latter, however,
+and it is sure to be kept working on a fairly even basis throughout the
+entire year.
+
+In the category of the luxuries are included such articles as jewelry,
+musical instruments, Oriental rugs, paintings, fine bric-a-brac and the
+like. Clearly the buyer in this branch must possess real taste and
+discrimination in addition to commercial ability, in order to be able to
+purvey these properly to the public. He handles goods which have to be
+bought by people who have already purchased the necessities of life--the
+buying of luxuries involves the spending of the public's surplus and so
+this division of the work is at all times attended with great or less
+hazard.
+
+But the real hazards, the real necessity for that sixth sense, which I
+just mentioned, the hardest and most nerve-racking buyer's job, comes in
+the purchase of those goods grouped under the common title of novelties.
+As one of the members of the Macy's merchandise council once observed,
+the departments devoted to staples sell what the people want, while
+those devoted to novelties make the people want what they have to sell.
+And this last is quite true of the luxuries, as well.
+
+Here, incidentally, is a very curious fact about merchandise: A staple
+is not a constant thing. In one department it is what everybody wants
+and in another it becomes a novelty. For instance, a cotton pillow-case
+selling for, let us say, a dollar, is a staple; while another
+pillow-case, of linen this time, embroidered with an old English
+initial, hand hemstitched and edged with lace--we hesitate to guess at
+its cost--is a decided novelty, in the understanding of the store, at
+any rate. It also may be classed as a luxury.
+
+Styles, fads, exclusive designs and seasons determine the work of the
+buyer of novelties. The job is one that requires quick decisions. The
+staple buyer can "play safe," but the buyer of novelties who pursued the
+policy soon would find himself in the rear of the procession. Nor can he
+afford to make mistakes, for they may be costly indeed to the house that
+he represents. There is, in consequence, a greater demand on his nerve,
+his ingenuity and his imagination than you find in other classes of
+buyers. He must circulate where there are people--at the theaters,
+country clubs, restaurants, churches, in Fifth Avenue--and he must keep
+his ear to the ground and both eyes wide open. Consequently, when it is
+reported in the Sunday paper that the women of Paris have taken up the
+fad of wearing jeweled nose-rings, he must see that New York's women of
+fashion may have the same opportunity of expressing their individuality,
+by visiting Macy's jewelry department.
+
+This, of course, is rank exaggeration, but it indicates what the novelty
+buyer aims at. And surprisingly often he hits the mark.
+
+
+In such a huge establishment it is but natural that the reception hall
+outside the buying offices should be crowded most of the time. Mahomet
+oftimes goes to the mountain--or sends a representative to it to buy
+some of its goods--yet more often the mountain comes to Mahomet. And so,
+I am told, for five days a week--Saturdays being generally recognized as
+a closed day for buying--an average of from four hundred to six hundred
+and fifty salesmen a day visit the buying headquarters on the seventh
+floor of the store. Taking into consideration the fact that the goods
+purchased are paid for in cash within ten days of their delivery, these
+headquarters are most popular with the emissaries of manufacturers and
+wholesale houses. Added to this is the uniform policy of courtesy to
+salesmen, which has been stated by the company in its precise fashion:
+
+"We have held, as far as within our power, the precept of which our
+late head, Isidor Straus, was a living personification--that business
+may be conducted between merchants who are gentlemen, in a manner
+profitable to both."
+
+It is one thing to write a thing of this sort. It is another to live
+strictly up to it, day in and day out. But that Macy's does live up to
+this high-set principle of its behind-the-scenes conduct is evidenced by
+the unsought testimony of a manufacturer who sought for the first time
+to do business with it.
+
+This man had made one of the mistakes into which all manufacturers are
+apt to fall, sooner or later. He had overproduced. And while,
+heretofore, his product had been chiefly, if not solely, sold in
+high-priced novelty shops he now needed an establishment of great
+turnover to help him out in his dilemma. Macy's came at once into his
+mind. The old house is indeed advertised by its loving friends. He went
+to it at once; by means of the special elevator, found his way, along
+with several hundred other salesmen, to the sample and buying rooms upon
+the seventh floor.
+
+A young woman at the door received his card and, without delay, told him
+that he could see the buyer of the department which would naturally
+handle his product, upon the morrow; at any time before eleven, but
+under no circumstances later than noon. Better still, she would make a
+definite appointment for him for the next morning. Mr. Manufacturer
+chose this last course. And at the very moment of the appointed time was
+ushered into the buyer's little individual room. Contact was
+established quickly. The buyer already knew of Mr. Manufacturer's line,
+regretted that they had not done business together a long time before.
+He inspected the proffered samples, quickly and with a shrewd and
+practiced eye; finally called into the little room two members of the
+salesforce from the department down upon the ground floor. They agreed
+with him as to the salability of the product. He turned toward the
+manufacturer.
+
+"Please bring your stock to No. -- Madison Avenue next Tuesday
+afternoon, at half-past two."
+
+Why Madison Avenue? The manufacturer was perplexed as he descended to
+the street once again. The curiosity was relieved on Tuesday, however,
+when he and his abundant goods were ushered into a big and sunlit room.
+
+"We shall not be subject to any interruption here," said Macy's buyer.
+
+And so they were not. For two hours the buyer and two of his assistants
+went carefully over the stock, then withdrew for a short conference
+amongst themselves. When they returned they handed Mr. Manufacturer a
+card. It read after this fashion:
+
+
+             CASH
+
+     The entire lot $____
+
+
+"The figure on that card, with the word 'cash' heavily underscored was
+just one hundred dollars in excess of my minimum," said the manufacturer
+afterwards, in discussing the incident. "I paused a moment and then
+said: 'Gentlemen, I mean to accept your offer. You have figured well, as
+your offer is just sufficient to buy the goods. R. H. Macy & Company
+have secured this merchandise of unusual quality and I congratulate
+you.'"
+
+
+At the beginning of this chapter we mentioned another form of the
+store's buying--where Mahomet goes to the mountain. This, being
+translated into plain English, means that Macy's must and does maintain
+elaborate permanent office organizations in Paris, in London, in Belfast
+and in Berlin. These in turn are but centers for other shopping
+work--shopping that may lead, as we have already seen, as far as the
+distant Bagdad.
+
+For instance, from his office in the Cité Paradis in Paris, the head of
+the French-buying organization of the store controls the purchase of all
+goods for it, not only in France, but in Belgium and Switzerland as
+well. He virtually combs these busy and ingenious manufacturing nations
+for their latest specialties; from France, _les derniers cris_ in
+fashionable gowns, millinery, perfumes and novelties of every
+description; from Belgium, fine laces and gloves; and from Switzerland,
+watches. These items, however, are merely typical; there are hundreds of
+others.
+
+A young American woman, of remarkable taste and gifted with a genuine
+genius for buying, is upon the Paris staff and is engaged practically
+the entire year round in visiting exhibitions of every sort and variety,
+in hunting the retail shops, great and small, of the French capital and
+at all times acting upon her own initiative as a free-lance buyer. A job
+surely to be coveted by any ambitious young woman who feels that she
+understands and can translate the constantly changing tastes of her
+countrywomen into the merchandise needs of a store whose chief task is
+always to serve them.
+
+For reasons that are not necessary to be set down here, the Berlin
+office of Macy's has been in _statu quo_ for some years past, although
+it is just now reopening. The London branch is steadily on the search
+for the clothing, haberdashery and leather specialties which are the
+pride of the British workman, while from right across the Irish sea, at
+13 Donegal Square, North, Belfast, come the fine Irish linens that so
+long have been a distinguished merchandise feature of the store's stock.
+
+So it is, then, that forever and a day, Macy's is engaged in bringing
+the cream of European merchandise to New York--goods of nearly every
+kind that can either be made better abroad or cannot be duplicated at
+all in this country. Importing is indeed a large branch upon the Macy
+tree.
+
+And in this branch romance oftimes dwelleth. The picture of the caravan
+toiling up the banks of the Euphrates is no idle dream at all. Upon the
+world maps of the merchandise executives of Macy's it is an outpost of
+trading as unsentimental as Lawrence, Massachusetts, or Norristown,
+Pennsylvania. Yet the buyer who goes to the old Bagdad from the new has
+a real task set for him. Obviously he must not only have a knowledge of
+his market and a keen sense of values, but he must also be a resourceful
+traveler; a merchant who can adapt himself to the ways of the people
+with whom he trades. His judgment, discretion and integrity must be
+above reproach, for often he is far away and out of touch with
+headquarters for long months at a time.
+
+Take such a buying trip as the Oriental rug-buyer of Macy's recently
+made into the Orient and back again. It lasted eight months. In that
+time he traveled more than thirty thousand miles--by steamship,
+motor-car, railroad, horseback and on foot. The rug region of Persia is
+a long way, indeed, from Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street and to reach
+it he went to London and Paris, then to Venice, where he took a steamer
+for Bombay, upon the west coast of India. Thence he proceeded by another
+steamer up the Persian Gulf to the city of Basra, which is at the
+confluence of those two ancient rivers, the Tigris and the
+Euphrates--between which the earliest Biblical history is supposed to
+have been made. Basra today is one of the world's great rug-shipping
+centers.
+
+Then he went to Bagdad itself--the fabled city of Haroun-el-Raschid and
+the Arabian Nights--from whence he started into the very heart of
+Persia. He was not content, however, to remain idly there and let the
+rugs be brought to him. He went much further. Through Kermanshah, the
+city whose name is given to the rugs which come from Kerman, seven
+hundred miles to the southeast, to Hamadan, one of the main
+marketing-centers of the rug-producing country--that, briefly, was the
+beginning of his itinerary. He went carefully through Persia, picking up
+rugs here and there, having them baled and sent to Bagdad by mules or
+camels and shipped thence to New York; and he established warehouses to
+which rug-dealers brought their wares. The light of the Red Star shone
+in the East.
+
+Roads in Persia leave much indeed to be desired, and as the chief means
+of travel, aside from beasts of burden, is by Ford cars, a buyer who
+covers much of its territory has a rather unenviable job. Gasoline in
+those parts costs four dollars a gallon, while if you hire a jitney you
+pay for it at the rate of a dollar a mile.
+
+On his return trip to New York this buyer went back once again to India
+and north as far as the border of Afghanistan to investigate the
+condition of the rug market in that region. At ancient Siringar, in the
+Vale of Cashmere, he bought marvelous felt rugs made in the mysterious
+land of Thibet. And yet all the way throughout this long journey he was
+buying goods for only one department of the great store that he
+represented.
+
+
+It used to be impressive to me when the hardware dealer of the small
+town in which I was reared would boast of the number of items that he
+held upon the shelves of his own center of merchandising. There were
+more than two thousand of them! He told me that with such an evident
+pride, as a Chicago man speaks of the population of his town, or one
+from Los Angeles, of his climate. And yet such a stock as that wonderful
+one that was told to my youthful imagination, is more than duplicated in
+Macy's--and is but one of one hundred and seventeen others. And the
+responsibility of buying these millions of articles is scarcely less
+great than that of selling them.
+
+
+
+
+IV. Displaying and Selling the Goods
+
+
+With Macy's goods once purchased, the next problem becomes that of their
+transport to the store in Herald Square. Obviously their reception must
+rank second only to their purchase. And when this is accomplished, as we
+have just seen, in every corner of a far-flung world--Pennsylvania and
+Massachusetts and Thibet and Korea and South Africa, to say nothing of a
+thousand other places--their orderly receiving becomes, of itself, a
+mechanism of considerable size. Almost equally obvious it is, too, that
+the store, no matter how carefully and fore-visionedly and
+scientifically its buyers may plan, cannot always dispose of its
+merchandise at precisely the same rate at which it comes underneath its
+roof. It cannot afford to gain a reputation for not carrying in stock
+the items either that it advertises for sale or that it has educated its
+patrons to expect upon its counters. Which means that alongside of and
+intertwined with the orderly business of merchandise reception there
+must be warehousing--reservoir facilities, if you please.
+
+In concrete form, these last of Macy's are not merely rooms upon the
+extreme upper floors on the main store in Herald Square--a space which
+in recent years, however, has shrunk to proportionately small
+dimensions because of the vast growth of the business and the
+increasing demands of the selling departments upon the building--but
+four structures entirely outside of the parent plant: the Tivoli
+Building on the north side of Thirty-fifth Street, just west of Broadway
+(which, as we saw in the historical section of this book was originally
+the notorious music hall of the same name until Macy's purchased it for
+its merchandising plans), the Hussey Building, in the same street, but
+just west of the store, a third also in Thirty-fifth, but close to
+Seventh Avenue and a fourth in Twenty-eighth Street between Seventh and
+Eighth Avenues. So can a great store spread itself, even in its actual
+physical structure, far beyond the bounds that even the most imaginative
+of its customers might ordinarily call to mind.
+
+
+It is in the rear of the selfsame red-brick building at the westerly
+edge of Herald Square--that same main structure that we have already
+begun to study in many of its fascinating details--that we find the core
+of the receiving department of the Macy store. It is a hollow core. A
+tunnel-like roadway, two hundred feet in length bores its way through
+the building, from Thirty-fifth Street to Thirty-fourth. Through this
+cavernous place, lighted at all hours by numerous electric arcs, there
+passes, the entire working-day, a seemingly endless procession of
+motor-trucks, wagons and other carriers. They enter at the north end and
+before they emerge at the south they have discharged their cargoes. A
+corps of men is kept constantly busy, checking off the merchandise as
+it is unloaded. Husky porters, with hand trucks, seize cases, barrels
+and miscellaneous packages of every sort and, presto! they are whirled
+into huge freight elevators which presently depart for upper and unknown
+floors. There are three of these, in practically continuous operation.
+In addition to them packages brought by hand--generally from local
+wholesalers and in response to emergency orders--are carried up into the
+offices of the receiving department upon an endless carrier.
+
+It is a source of wonder to the observer to see the way in which these
+men of Macy's work. The poise. The confidence. The system. It is
+terrifying even to think of the mess that would be the result of a day,
+or even an hour, of inexperience or carelessness. In fact, it would
+hardly take ten minutes so to jam that long receiving platform that
+straightening it out again would be a matter of days. But upon it every
+man knows just what to do; and every man does it, and does it fast. And
+system wins once again. It generally does win.
+
+For these incoming goods receipts are made out in triplicate--one for
+the controller, one as a record for the receiving office and the third
+for the delivery agent; the second of these acts as a sort of herald of
+the actual arrival of the merchandise so that within sixty seconds or
+thereabouts of the actual appearance of the goods under the house's main
+roof the man who is responsible for them may be advised.
+
+Every article purchased anywhere by R. H. Macy & Company, either for
+their own use or for resale, is received through this department,
+although there are a few other points than the tunnel-like interior
+street from Thirty-fourth Street to Thirty-fifth where they are
+received. The four warehouses that we have just seen have their
+individual receiving facilities: the coal that goes to heat and light
+and drive the big main building is poured through chutes under the
+Thirty-fourth Street pavement, while direct to the company's stables and
+garages go the fodder for its vehicles--hay for the horses of flesh and
+blood, and gasoline and oil for those of steel and iron; all the other
+miniature mountains of their incidental materials into the bargain. But
+even these are checked in at the main receiving department; and
+triplicate receipts issued upon their arrival.
+
+
+So, then, come in these goods--by hand, express, by parcel post and
+freight. The most of them have had their transport charges prepaid; a
+certain small proportion of them comes marked "collect." An especial
+provision must be made for the cash payment of these charges. The big
+machine of modern industry must indeed have many odd cams and levers
+adjusted to it. It must be designed not alone for the usual, but for the
+unusual, and in a multitude of ways.
+
+These, then, are the reception chutes of the Macy machine; the porters,
+who even while hastening their trucks toward the elevators are making a
+cursory examination of the arrival condition of the merchandise, are in
+themselves small automatic arms of inspection. For while some of these
+packages have come from nearby--perhaps not half a block
+distant--others will have come from halfway around the wide world. And
+the possibility of damage to the contents of the carrier is lurking
+always in the short-distance package, quite as much as in its brother,
+that has attained the distinction of being a globe-trotter. The crates
+from the Middle West, those stout and honest looking Yankee boxes from
+New England, this group of barrels from the heart of new
+Czecho-Slovakia, and that of zinc-lined cases from France--the
+_Lorraine_ has touched at her North River pier but two or three days
+since--those great bales and bundles from the Orient, with the seemingly
+meaningless (and extremely meaningful) symbols splashed upon their rough
+sides, all look sturdy enough, as if they had survived well the
+vicissitudes of modern travel. Yet one can never tell.
+
+Which means that the personnel of the order checking department up on
+the seventh floor must not only carefully verify the shipment as to
+quality and to price but as to the condition in which it actually is
+received. The hurried cursory examination of the platform porters
+becomes an unhurried and painstaking investigation in this last
+instance. The cases are not necessarily opened within the seventh floor
+headquarters of the order checking department. As in the case of the
+actual physical receipt, the unpacking is carried forward at the point
+of greatest convenience to the merchandise department to be served. But
+the results and records are kept at the one central headquarters.
+
+And the skilled and expert merchandise checkers from the selfsame
+headquarters are the men and women who oversee the
+unpacking--invariably. They pass the responsibility of their stamp and
+signature upon their receipts before the merchandise is turned over to
+the department manager, who himself, or through his responsibility,
+purchased it. Nothing is left to guesswork, or to chance.
+
+
+Now we see the full responsibility settled once again upon the broad
+shoulders--let us hope indeed that they are broad--of the buyer. With a
+full knowledge of the price that he paid for them, of market conditions,
+and of the prices of Macy's competitors he determines the prices at
+which his merchandise is to be sold. Clerks, known as markers, quickly
+attach these prices by small tags to the goods themselves.
+
+From the marking-rooms, where everything to be sold within this
+market-place is plainly and unequivocally priced, the merchandise goes
+without further delay either direct to the counters of the selling
+floors, or into the "reserves"--the warehouses that extend all the way
+from Twenty-eighth Street to north of Thirty-fifth, and from Broadway to
+Eighth Avenue. The stage is set. The show is ready. The performance may
+now begin.
+
+A trip through the hinterland of the Macy store is like a visit behind
+the scenes of a modern theater. You see there just the way in which the
+drama of selling actually is staged, from the settings to the
+properties. You rub shoulders with the actors and actresses, just off
+stage; with the electrician, the stage-manager, the carpenter and the
+stage-hands. And always your ear is waiting to hear outside the
+orchestra and the applause of the audience.
+
+Into that ear there comes the almost rhythmic thud of automatic
+machines; a sort of continuous drone. You turn quickly and find beside
+you a row of ticket-printers, the little electric presses in which are
+made the price-tags that you find pinned or pasted or tied on every
+piece of Macy merchandise you buy. Miles of thin cardboard are fed into
+one side of these machines and come out the other; in proper-sized
+units, with the selling price of the article to be tagged plainly
+printed on them. Where the article is subject to Federal tax, this is
+also included as a separate item and the total given. One of these
+machines combines the operation of printing the price and attaching the
+ticket to the garment. It is detail--necessary detail, detail upon a
+vast scale.
+
+
+Here, then, is the receiving department of this great single retailing
+machine of modern business. It keeps over three hundred human units
+constantly upon the move--and, mind you, all that these people are doing
+is merely making the merchandise ready to sell. The next step is the
+final one before actual sale; the display of proffered goods--upon the
+counters and within the plate-glass windows along the street frontages.
+
+This, in the modern department-store, is considered a feature of the
+utmost importance, and nowhere more so than at Macy's. Sixty-four years
+of salesmanship experience, in the course of which it has been the
+originator of many daring and successful display experiments, has shown
+the house their full value.
+
+Yet, even in Macy's, there are certain reservations to the strong house
+policy of attractive display. Certain fundamentals are stressed. The
+invitation to buy is forever put in the goods themselves rather than in
+the background against which they are shown. It requires no especial
+astuteness to see from this fact alone an enormous expense is saved; the
+benefit of which, according to the now well understood Macy plan, is
+passed on to buyer. Other stores spend many thousands of dollars in
+building and decorating special rooms and sections for merchandising
+which are far out of the ordinary. To give an air of extreme
+exclusiveness, _chic_, Parisian atmosphere--call it what you
+may--elaborate partitions are put up and expensive decorators given
+carte-blanche. The result is beautiful, almost invariably. Shopping in
+such surroundings becomes a peculiar delight--particularly to the woman
+patron. But milady pays. In the expressive, if not elegant, old phrase
+she "pays through the nose."
+
+That some New York shoppers may like to pay this way is not for a moment
+to be doubted, but that the majority do, Macy's stoutly refuses to
+believe. While the house has not hesitated to install certain very
+lovely "special" rooms--_vide_ the _salon_ for the display of its
+imported frocks--the main thought in the construction of its present
+home in Herald Square was to build a retail market-place which would
+afford honest, efficient, comfortable marketing at the lowest possible
+prices. This meant that it would be inadvisable, to say the least, to
+give the store the atmosphere of either a palace or a _boudoir_. This is
+a policy that has continued until this day.
+
+None the less, Macy goods are displayed with the taste that makes them
+most desirable to the customer; psychological forethought, in a word.
+Novelties, of course, take precedence over staples--the articles that
+make the customer stop and investigate. Except under unusual conditions,
+the demand for staples does not have to be stimulated, and ordinarily no
+especial attempt is made to give them more than ordinary display. One
+underlying factor in the successful display of goods is to preserve
+harmonious color relations between them and, so far as possible, this
+harmony pervades the entire floor. The buying public would not tolerate
+a store where they heard profanity among the employees; and at Macy's
+they do not have to endure colors that swear at one another.
+
+Held in high esteem by the public as well as by the store itself are the
+display windows which line the entire ground-floor frontage of the
+building on Broadway and on Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth Streets. Here
+merchandise is arranged by master window dressers under the general
+direction of the advertising department, for if the front windows of a
+house such as this are not advertising, what, then, is? Especially when
+the art of window dressing has come in recent years to be a finely
+developed art of its own. For many years before it left Fourteenth
+Street Macy's had a fame not merely nation-wide but fairly world-wide
+for its window displays--we already have referred to the wondrous
+Christmas pageants that it formerly held as a part of them. In this it
+was again a pioneer, blazing a new commercial path for its competitors
+to follow.
+
+Because window display is recognized as advertising, the ceaseless work
+of the master window dressers upon the outer rim of the Macy store comes
+under the direct supervision of the advertising department which in turn
+reports direct to no less an authority than the triple partnership
+itself. Publicity is the great right-arm of the super-store of the
+America of today. Publicity not in one channel, but in a thousand.
+Macy's not only helps to dominate the advertising pages of the
+newspapers of New York and a good many miles round about it, its red
+star not only gleams in Herald Square, but in these very recent days
+upon the high-set electric hoardings of Times Square that blaze forth
+far into the night; it finds its way into the public thought here and
+there and everywhere. And yet, with due appreciation of every other
+medium of publicity, the street window of the store still remains one of
+the most important phases of its appeal to possible patrons.
+
+Its displays are scheduled long in advance; are devised as carefully as
+the decoration of a home might be, or, better still, as Urban or Pogany
+would plan the stage-settings of a scene in the Metropolitan or at any
+one of the various "Follies" that one finds just north of the Opera
+House. A large staff of men is kept constantly at work dressing the
+windows, and this staff includes the carpenters, paper-hangers, painters
+and electricians who are needed to help prepare the special exhibits.
+Under the floor of the window next the principal entrance on
+Thirty-fourth Street there is a tank, which is used when a pool of water
+is required to carry out some scenic effect. It is capable of floating a
+canoe to suggest the joys of camping and the need of going to Macy's for
+one's vacation requisites--as well as for use in other capacities. Known
+in the store as the "parlor window" it has been made to represent pretty
+nearly everything from milady's bedroom to a glorified carpenter shop.
+
+Window displays are regarded by Macy's as an important auxiliary to
+newspaper announcements. Very recently, during the few weeks before
+Christmas, a sale of overcoats was advertised. All the windows were then
+dressed with Christmas merchandise, but from one of them this was all
+removed and the sale overcoats substituted. For one day only. For upon
+the very next one the Christmas window was returned to its holly and
+mistletoe flavor.
+
+Here is a pretty direct indication of the store's attitude towards its
+immensely valuable windows--if you do not consider them valuable inquire
+the price of the advertising signs in the Herald Square neighborhood. I
+asked its advertising manager if, in his opinion, the window space would
+not bring better returns if it were devoted to direct selling, instead
+of mere indirect selling through display. I had in the back of my mind
+some of the great Paris emporiums who think so little of window- and so
+much of selling-space that on bright warm days they spread some of their
+notions and novelty-counters right out upon the broad sidewalks of the
+Boulevards.
+
+"No," said he, "decidedly no. To be able to show one's goods to the
+multitudes that pass these windows nearly every hour of the day is an
+asset that cannot be overestimated."
+
+
+This is neither the time nor the place to go into the ethics or the fine
+principles of the most recently developed of American
+professions--advertising; the salesmanship of goods and of ideas not so
+much by the merchandise itself as by the representation of it. Neither
+is it the place to review the vast position that the modern department
+store has taken in the development of modern advertising of every sort:
+Newspapers, magazines, bill-boards, electric signs, other forms of
+display as well. There are folk who say that if it were not for the
+department-store advertising we should not have had the fully developed
+metropolitan newspaper of today; while, on the other hand, some of the
+larger merchants are not reluctant in saying that our modern
+metropolitan newspapers are the chief causes that have made the
+department-store as we know it in New York and other large cities of the
+United States possible. Be these things as they may, the fact does
+remain, however, solid and indisputable, that the co-operation between
+these two groups of interests has been more than profitable to their
+patrons, to say nothing of themselves. And not the least of the
+contributing causes to such profits is the fundamental honesty of the
+advertisements.
+
+Not so very many years ago the measure of integrity in advertising was,
+to speak charitably, a variable one. When they talked about them in
+print merchants were very likely to become overenthusiastic about their
+goods. Modesty was flung to the four winds. Printers' ink seemed to be
+taken as an automatic absolution for exaggeration--and oftimes absolute
+mis-statement--and, strangely enough, the public appeared to fall in
+with the idea. More often than not the merchant "got away with it"--or,
+if not, made good with bad grace, in which case the customer was
+satisfied. He had to be.
+
+But not so with Macy's. Early in its history an advertising policy was
+formulated that has endured to the present and will continue to endure.
+It is the house's stoutly expressed belief that there is no possible
+excuse whatsoever for misrepresentation and, following this out, it is
+its invariable rule to stand back of its advertising, to the last ditch.
+To this end it has inculcated such a spirit of conservatism into its
+advertising department that the superlative is eliminated and forbidden
+in describing Macy goods. "We may think that these articles are the
+best, or the most beautiful, or the greatest bargain, but we can't
+absolutely be sure of it." That is its attitude. The only possible
+criticism is the same that one applies to the man who stands so straight
+that he leans backward.
+
+Is the system flawless? Of course not--no system is. Not many weeks ago
+an incident occurred that shows how Macy's may slip up--and then make
+good; it put out a small newspaper advertisement featuring coats for
+small boys at $8.74. These were advertised as "wool chinchilla" and so
+potent was the appeal of the notice that by ten o'clock the entire
+stock of nine hundred coats was gone. Then one of the store executives
+discovered that the coats were not _all wool_ and things began to hum.
+
+"Never said that they were all wool," the responsible sub-executive
+cornered. "People ought to know that they can't buy an all-wool coat for
+that money."
+
+That made no difference with the big boss. Patiently and firmly he
+explained that in a Macy advertisement "wool" means "all-wool" except
+where it is clearly specified that it contains cotton. Another
+advertisement was inserted in the newspapers the following day. It
+explained and apologized for the mis-statement and said, "We would deem
+it a favor if our customers would bring in these coats and accept a
+return of their money." Out of the nine hundred coats sold one was
+brought back for credit, while another was brought in by a customer who
+wanted to keep the coat but thought that she might get a rebate. She
+didn't. Macy's may lean over backward but it doesn't drag on the
+ground--an instance of which is contained in the following:
+
+Christmas candy for Sunday Schools was advertised in a number of New
+York newspapers at the very low price of $7.44 for one hundred pounds.
+In one newspaper three pieces of type fell out of the form with the
+result that the advertisement went to press quoting a hundred-weight of
+candy at forty-four cents! It was patent that it was a typographical
+error, for the decimal point, as well as the dollar mark and the figure
+7 was gone and there was a blank space where the types were missing.
+Three would-be customers tried, however, to hold the store accountable
+for the very obvious error. And Macy's balked!
+
+The lowest-in-the-city-prices policy keeps the advertising department on
+its toes continually. Other stores' prices must be anticipated wherever
+it is humanly possible, which means constant revisions of the copy.
+Occasionally a price duel develops that becomes spectacular in the
+extreme. In a recent memorable one "hard water soap" figured as the
+_casus belli_. Macy patrons know their right now to expect lowest
+prices, so when another store began to cut Macy's advertised prices on
+this commodity, Macy's had to return in suite. Whereupon the other store
+cut under Macy's again; and Macy's in turn went its competitor one
+better. It then became a merry game of parry and thrust until, one fine
+day, Macy's was selling twelve dozen cakes of hard water soap for the
+inconsiderable sum of one copper cent. One came near godliness for a
+small amount that day. The public profited hugely, but Macy's lived up
+to its policy.
+
+
+As a rule advertisements originate with the department managers. Keeping
+in mind that they are the buyers, the merchants responsible for the
+moving of their stock, it can be seen that they know best the goods that
+ought to be featured. The value of the space used is charged against
+their departments, so that their requisitions are governed accordingly.
+The advertising manager is a large factor, however, in the allotment of
+space--not only the clearing-house, but practically the court of last
+resort--concerning the rival claims by the department manager for space
+upon a given day. After all, there is a limit to the size of a newspaper
+page.
+
+When a certain line of goods is about to be advertised, the comparison
+department is notified and the articles are "shopped." That is, one or
+more of the expert shopping staff is given the task of ascertaining what
+other stores are charging for the same things so that it may be made
+sure that the Macy price will be lower. The information then is passed
+on to the copy writing staff and samples of the goods are studied for
+selling points. While the description is being written, one of the art
+staff makes a drawing, either in the nature of a design or illustration,
+and when these are completed the advertisement is set in type. This,
+bear in mind, is only for one item. Macy advertisements, more often than
+not, cover an entire newspaper page and are made up of many separate
+items, each of which goes through practically the same process of
+creation. Their final collection and arrangement on the page are made by
+an advertising expert of skill and taste and from this fact, combined
+with the distinctive type faces that are commonly used, one might be
+reasonably sure of identifying a Macy advertisement even if the store
+name were to be entirely omitted.
+
+In addition to window display, newspaper and magazine announcements, it
+is the concern of the advertising department to provide the store with
+its sign cards and special-price tickets. These are all a part of the
+big problem of letting the public know about Macy goods. Yet above and
+beyond all of these things, the store's supreme advertisement, if you
+please, is the establishment itself, the service that it strives so
+sincerely to give. To use the current phrase of expert publicity men,
+the store, its salespeople and its prices must _sell_ Macy's to the
+outside world. Outside advertising is but supplementary to this; but a
+single horse in a team of four.
+
+
+With this fact firmly fixed in your mind, consider next the unbending
+problem of making the salesforce into a genuine salesforce; one that
+constantly and continually backs up the force of the printed
+advertisement by the skill of its real salesmanship. When we come in
+another chapter to consider the Macy family as a whole we shall see in
+some detail its remarkable educational and training opportunities. These
+have been brought to bear directly upon the creation, not only of
+thoroughness and accuracy on the part of the clerk, but for courtesy and
+persuasiveness and enthusiasm as well--the things that make the
+structure of morale; that quality that we first began to know and to
+understand as such in the days of the Great War.
+
+"If you are playing a game, such as tennis, or bridge, or baseball or
+what-not," said one of the department managers to his sales staff but a
+few mornings ago, "you are out to beat your best friend; if you can, do
+it fairly and squarely, otherwise never. The enjoyment you derive from a
+game depends on the spirit with which you play it. When you begin to
+regard business in a similar light, playing it as a game in a
+sportsmanlike manner, then you will begin to get fun out of it--you
+will begin to make progress."
+
+After the preliminary training which every salesclerk receives, he or
+she is assigned to a department. Thenceforward a good deal depends on
+personal initiative; for in dealing with customers no small part of the
+store's reputation for efficiency and courtesy depends upon the
+individual clerk. A salesperson may become not only a distinct asset to
+the house, but may develop a personal clientele through especially
+intelligent and courteous attention to the customers' wishes. And this,
+owing to the system of allowing a bonus on sales above a certain fixed
+quota, and a commission on sales up to that quota, may make it
+financially very much worth while to him or her.
+
+Salesmanship in a store as large as Macy's must of necessity include the
+knowledge of considerable detail in the making out of sales slips,
+procedure with regard to C. O. D. deliveries, depositors' accounts,
+exchanges and the like. This knowledge is a fundamental part of each
+salesperson's equipment. His or her efficiency must come, however, from
+a far wider development of the possibilities of the salesmanship, from
+the "playing of the game," as the department manager put it but a moment
+ago--the understanding use of courtesy, merchandise knowledge,
+helpfulness. Such efficiency pays. The Macy folk who come to use it
+regularly soon find themselves advancing to responsible and highly-paid
+positions.
+
+
+It is interesting to follow the career of a sales slip from the time it
+is made out--when the sale is made--until the time that it ceases to
+function. Here is one of the most important items in the mechanism of a
+large retail store. It is an essential unit of a carefully developed
+system to keep track of sales, from the minute that they are made until
+they are finally delivered and audited.
+
+The sales slip--the Macy clerk has three different ones of them in
+all--is made in three distinct parts--original, duplicate and
+triplicate. Each of these is divided into several parts; each of which
+in turn is destined for separate hands. The packer of the merchandise
+gets one part, which eventually goes to the customer, a second to the
+cashier, the third the clerk retains. Eventually these last two come
+together once again in the auditing department and are checked, the one
+against the other; after which one goes into the archives of the bureau
+of investigation, in case that there is any further question about the
+details of the transaction. This one example of the infinite detail in
+the conduct of a great store is a slight indication of the
+responsibility upon the shoulders of not only its managers but the rank
+and file of its salesforce as well. A single error in the making out of
+a sales slip may easily result in expensive and harassing complications
+all the way along the line.
+
+A system of transfer books enables the store's customer to make
+purchases in its various departments with the least possible waiting.
+The goods and prices are entered in a small book which is given the
+customer at the time of the first purchase of the day. While the
+customer is making his or her other purchases they are being sent to the
+wrapping room where they are held in a growing group until the customer
+presents the book to the cashier at the transfer desk on the main floor,
+pays the total and, a few minutes later, receives a neat package in
+which all of the items are wrapped together; or else it is sent to any
+designated address.
+
+
+Enough, for the moment, of detail. Some of it is necessary to a proper
+understanding of the workings of this great machine of modern business,
+but too much of it may easily bore you. Instead, quickly turn your
+attention to a Macy feature dear to the heart of the average
+shopper--male or deadlier. Here is the familiar, the time-honored
+"special sale." In holding these Macy does not lay claim to originality,
+except perhaps in the amount of merchandising involved and the
+spectacularly low prices. Sales are in a large measure opportunities for
+the store as well as for the customer. It takes a goodly amount of
+merchandise from a manufacturer who for some reason offers a large
+concession in price and passes on its advantage to its customers. This
+is not generosity. It is good business. It is sound business. It is
+progressive business.
+
+Take a sale of laundry soap that went on within the great store about a
+year ago. The soap was made in this country and contracted for by the
+city of Paris, upon a dollar basis. Exchange slumped, and with francs
+worth only a fraction of their former value, Paris couldn't afford to
+take it. Macy's offer for it was accepted and so marked was the
+reduction at which it was offered to the public that inside of two weeks
+the big store had sold twenty-two carloads of it. Figuring from the fact
+that a carload comprised six hundred cases, the turnover amounted to
+6,862 cases; or, counting a hundred bars to a case, 686,200 pieces of
+soap!
+
+The most successful sale of winter underwear that Macy's ever held took
+place during a very warm week in July, a twelvemonth before the laundry
+soap episode. A large manufacturer wanted to unload his stock and Macy's
+bought it for cash. Add to these facts the consideration that the goods
+were away out of season and you can readily see how it was possible to
+buy the goods at a very low price. Relying upon the public's ability to
+judge values, in and out of season, the store launched the sale--and
+launched it successfully. It was like a scene out of _Alice in
+Wonderland_ to see the crowds of men and women with perspiration rolling
+down their foreheads buying woolen "undies" against the needs of winter.
+Americans do like to be forehanded.
+
+Macy's ability to buy and sell huge quantities of merchandise is
+demonstrated through these sales. Very recently over seven thousand of a
+particular leather traveling bag were sold in less than four weeks, at
+an aggregate price of nearly $75,000. In one day seven hundred vacuum
+cleaners were sold for $29.75 each. This list might be continued
+indefinitely; for not only has Macy's proved that it pays to advertise
+but that it pays to follow the Macy advertisements.
+
+Down in the basement of this great mart of Herald Square there is a
+corner not often shown to the outer world, from which there constantly
+emerge noises which blend and combine to give the effect of a staccato
+rumble. Thud, thud, t-h-u-u-d, thud, thudity, thud, thud. Then a sound
+of air, as in a Gargantuan sigh. Thudity, thud, and so on, _ad
+infinitum_. These sounds seemingly are quite unending. If your curiosity
+draws you toward the door from which these sounds emerge and you finally
+are permitted to open it and go within, you will find a company of young
+women sitting along both sides of three sets of moving belts, quickly
+picking brass cylinders from the belts as they pass them. Except for the
+fact that there is another tube room on the fourth floor (for the upper
+floor selling departments) this basement place might truly be called the
+heart of the store, for it is these brass cylinders that contain the
+life-blood of the business, the cash which the customers pay for their
+purchases. Call the tube room the pulse of the store and the analogy is
+better--certainly their throbbing is a close index of its condition.
+
+Alert cashiers pick up the carriers from the upper belt as they pass,
+deftly make the required change, and drop them to the lower belt, on
+which they are conveyed to other young women who despatch them to the
+departments whence they came. This continues for approximately eight
+hours each working day. The cash carriers do considerable traveling in
+the course of a year. One of them might easily go from the new Bagdad to
+the old. Yes, it might. If you still scoff let us look at the system
+together and do a little figuring upon our own account.
+
+Throughout the store there are two hundred and fifty cash stations--the
+outer terminals of the line at one of whose common hearts we now stand.
+Each of these stations is connected with one or the other of the common
+hearts by two separate lines of tubing, one for sending and the other
+for receiving the carriers. There is a total of 125,000 feet of this
+tubing, or nearly twenty-four miles. Five thousand cash carriers are in
+use and the average number of round-trips made per day by all of them is
+150,000. Each round-trip averages two hundred and fifty feet. The
+average distance traveled each day by this host of travelers then comes
+to the astonishing total of 37,500,000 feet--7,155 miles. Now to your
+atlases and find how far the new Bagdad is from the old. And if that
+distance does not give you pause, consider that the peak-load of the
+system was carried on a day when its mileage ran to 12,120--an
+equivalent of one-half the distance around the world--in a little over
+eight hours.
+
+Truly it would seem that money goes far at Macy's.
+
+
+
+
+V. Distributing the Goods
+
+
+When milady of Manhattan finishes her purchases in Macy's, snaps her
+purse together once again and goes out of the store, the transaction is
+ended, at least as far as she herself is concerned. But not so for
+Macy's. Particularly not so when she has given orders that the goods be
+"sent," either to her own home or to the home of some friend. In such
+cases the largest part of the store's responsibility still is ahead of
+it. It must see to it that the package--or packages--shall be carried to
+the proper destination, quickly, promptly, correctly. Which means that
+the great business machine of Herald Square has another great function
+to perform.
+
+
+There is, in the sub-basement of the Herald Square store, where the
+greatest portion of its own great transportation system is situated, an
+ancient two-wheeled cart, somewhat faded and battered, yet still a red
+delivery wagon and showing clearly the name of the house it served, R.
+H. Macy & Company. It is a treasured relic of other days, which now and
+then again, at great intervals, is shown to the populace in the
+all-too-rare parades of the huge wagon equipment of the store today.
+
+The gentleman who gives the lecture which accompanies any public
+showing of this ancient equipage is Mr. James Woods, who, as we have
+already seen, has been with the store for nearly half a century and who
+has risen in its service to the important post of assistant
+superintendent of the delivery department. Mr. Woods regards the cart
+with tender affection, since it was he who once was the human horse who
+strode between its shafts. That was back in 1873, long years before the
+store had moved north from the once tree-shaded Fourteenth Street. Mr.
+Macy, himself, was still very much in charge of the enterprise and was
+passing proud of his delivery "fleet"--consisting of three horse-drawn
+wagons, and young Jimmie Woods with the cart. A good many prosperous New
+Yorkers then had their residences within a dozen blocks or less of the
+old store, and young Jimmie's legs--and the cart--could and did serve
+them, easily and expeditiously.
+
+That was almost the beginning of the Macy delivery department. In fact
+it had been but five years before that Mr. Macy had acquired the first
+horse-drawn rig for this purpose. From that beginning the growth was
+steady although slow. Ten years after Mr. Woods first came to it--in
+1883--there were but fifteen wagons. In 1902, when the great trek was
+made north to Herald Square, there were a hundred. Today there are more
+than two hundred and fifty, of which by far the larger number are motor
+driven. These last range all the way from the big five-ton motor trucks
+which, as we shall presently see, are used primarily for carrying
+merchandise between the store and its outlying distributing stations,
+down to the small one-ton truck, which is used at its greatest advantage
+in city street distribution. And an astonishing number of horse-drawn
+vehicles remain. That is, astonishing to the uninitiated layman, who
+perhaps has been led to believe that the motor truck in this, its heyday
+of perfection, could hardly be surpassed for any form of carrying. As a
+matter of fact, however, the department-stores as well as the express
+companies, skilled in the multiple distribution of small packages, have,
+after a careful and intensive study of the motor trucks--which has
+resulted in their ordering many, many hundreds of them for certain of
+their necessities--discovered that for certain forms of delivery the
+horse and wagon still remains unsurpassed. The time that a delivery
+wagon remains standing becomes an economic factor in its use. If it
+moved all the time it undoubtedly would be as cheap and certainly more
+efficient to use a small automobile truck. But when there are fairly
+lengthy stops and close together, where perhaps the vehicle is idle for
+four minutes for every one that it is actually in operation, the factor
+of having an expensive machine idle as against an inexpensive one comes
+into play.
+
+Business organizations reckon these things not alone from sentiment, but
+from hard-headed facts. Yet they are not entirely free from sentiment,
+even in such seemingly purely commercial matters as delivery. The very
+condition and upkeep of the vehicles of a high-grade department-store
+show this. "Spic-and-span" is hardly the phrase by which to describe
+them. Fresh paint and gold striping--the smooth sides so cleaned and
+polished, that one might see his face reflected mirror-like upon them,
+the horses to the last state of perfection--this is the Macy standard of
+delivery. A Macy truck and wagon is designed to be one of the store's
+best advertisements.
+
+A skillful trucking contractor from the lower west side of New York went
+to a department-store owner a dozen years or more ago and said:
+
+"Mr. A----, after a little study of your delivery service, I am
+convinced that if you would turn it over to me, I could save you more
+than fifty per cent. in its operation."
+
+Mr. A---- was a pretty hard-headed business man, "hard-boiled" is the
+word that might well be used to describe him. He turned quickly to the
+contractor.
+
+"You interest me," said he. "How would you propose to do it?"
+
+"At the outset, by making the wagon equipment a little less elaborate.
+It could be just as efficient without so much varnish and brass and
+gold-stripe."
+
+Mr. A---- shook his head negatively.
+
+"Oh, no," he said, "we know that much ourselves. If we were to do that,
+we should lose fifty per cent. of our advertisement upon the streets of
+New York."
+
+
+We have left milady's package where she left it, in the hands of the
+salesclerk who sold it to her. The purchaser does not see it thereafter,
+not at least until it has come to her home. With an astonishing celerity
+and according to a carefully set-down program and practice it is wrapped
+right within the floor upon which the selling department is situated,
+and then dropped into a chute which leads with a straight, swift run
+into that nether world of Macy's--the basement headquarters of the
+delivery department. In reality this chute is a carrier, so designed as
+to carry the small individual packages with safety and order, as well as
+with celerity.
+
+There are fourteen of these conveyors, coming down from all the selling
+floors save that of furniture which has its own special delivery
+organization on the ninth floor. Together they pour their almost
+constant stream of merchandise upon the so-called "revolving-ring" in
+the very center of the basement floor. This "revolving-ring," in purpose
+very much like the great and slowly revolving disc-like wooden wheels
+used in the freight stations of the express companies for a similar
+service, is, in reality, much larger than they. It is a
+"square-ring"--if I may use that paradoxical phrase--built of four
+slowly moving conveyor belts upon which a package may travel an
+indefinite number of round-trips. At various points upon the outer edge
+of this moving square the conveyor chutes drop their merchandise. Near
+the center are the wide-open mouths of other conveyors, which lead to
+distant corners of the basement.
+
+The nimble-fingered and nimble-witted young men who stand within the
+"revolving-ring" feed the packages from it into these last conveyors. To
+each individual package is affixed a duplicate portion of the leaf of
+the salesbook. On it the salesclerk has written, or printed, the address
+to which the merchandise is to go, the cost, whether or not it is
+collect on delivery (known hereafter in this telling as C. O. D.) and
+other essential information. It is the addresses, however, which attract
+the eyes of the genii of the "revolving-ring." In their minds these fall
+into four great categories: City, meaning those portions of Manhattan
+Island south of Seventy-second Street on the east side and Ninety-ninth
+Street on the west; Harlem and the Bronx, the incorporated city of New
+York north of those two streets; Brooklyn and New
+Jersey--self-explanatory; and Suburban: all the rest of the territory
+within the far-flung limits of Macy's own generously wide delivery
+service. While for those points that are unfortunate enough to lie just
+outside of it--Boston or Philadelphia or Kamchatka or Manila (There
+hardly is an address to stagger the Macy delivery department)--the
+packages go direct to the shipping room, in its own corner of the
+basement.
+
+Here these last are checked and wrapped for long-distance shipment. They
+are checked against the payment or the non-payment of transportation
+charges; the store has very definite rules of its own. A paid purchase
+of but $2.50 is entitled to free delivery within any of the Eastern
+States, of $5 and over to any of the Middle States as well, of $10 and
+over to any corner of the whole United States. Freight and express
+prepayments are arranged upon a somewhat similar basis. The majority of
+the long-distance shipments go by parcel post, however. Still, in the
+course of a twelvemonth, there are enough to go both by express and
+freight to make a pretty considerable transportation bill in themselves.
+
+Again we have neglected that precious package of milady's. It may be
+only an extra pair of corset-laces--in which case the saleswoman must
+have suggested that madam herself transport it to her habitat--or it may
+be an eight or ten-yard piece of heavy silk for her new evening gown, or
+the evening gown itself. In any case it receives the same care and
+attention. We have already seen how it is packed, sent through the
+conveyor-chute down into the basement and then upon the "revolving-ring"
+before the nimble eyes of the men with nimble hands and wits as well.
+
+Milady lives in West One Hundred and Fourth Street. The sorter's eyes
+catch that much from the address slip, torn originally from the
+salesclerk's book and pasted upon the package's outer wrappings.
+"Harlem" his mind reports back to his eyes. Into the chute-entrance
+labeled "Harlem and The Bronx" goes the package.
+
+"Harlem and The Bronx" is a sizable room for itself. The further end of
+the second conveyor to receive milady's precious package rests upon a
+table in its very center. Roundabout the table are small compartments or
+bins, each about the size of a small packing case; each numbered and
+corresponding to a definite wagon route or run. Run No. 87 (the number
+is purely fictitious) takes in West One Hundred and Fourth Street. Into
+compartment No. 87 goes milady's packages. But not, of course, until the
+clerical young man technically known as the sheet-writer has made a
+record of it. Into his records, also, go all the other packages destined
+that day for that particular room. If there should be, as sometimes
+happens, an overplus of packages for the single run, then it is the
+business of one of the assistant superintendents of delivery to meet the
+emergency either by stretching momentarily the runs of the adjoining
+routes or by sending a special wagon up from the main store. Experience
+and judgment must cut the cloth to fit the case.
+
+Under any ordinary procedure milady's package will go out early in the
+morning of the day following her purchase. That, at least, is the
+store's ordinary guarantee of delivery. As a matter of fact, it does far
+better than this. On ordinary days, when weather and street conditions
+in Manhattan have not gone in conditions of near-impassability, there
+are at least two regular deliveries to every part of the island south of
+One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street, with a single one at least to every
+other part of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, to say nothing of the
+downtown portions of Jersey City and Hoboken. Easily said, this thing.
+But when one comes to realize how tremendously widespread the
+metropolitan district of Greater New York is these days, the performance
+of it becomes a transportation marvel, a masterpiece of organization.
+
+I shall not bore you with a description of the printed forms, the checks
+and counter checks that accompany the delivery of milady's package. It
+is enough to say that they are both complete and necessary. The
+complications of C. O. D. add greatly to their perplexities. For,
+discourage it as they may and do, the department-store owners of New
+York never have been able to wean milady from the joys of this method
+of shopping. When she says "C. O. D." in Macy's the salesclerk
+immediately and courteously replies: "Have you tried having a
+depositor's account, madam?" A good many of them have, and all who have
+have liked the method. Yet the C. O. D. still has its great appeal. And
+out of all the deliveries from the big store in Herald Square more than
+half of them are collect-on-delivery. This means, in turn, a good deal
+of complication for the delivery department. Its drivers have to be
+cashiers, in miniature. When they report at the main store at half-past
+seven in the morning, each is furnished with five dollars in change; a
+sum which is doubled in the case of the suburban drivers. Moreover, for
+the correct handling of the forms, a double amount of care and
+understanding is required. One does not wonder that the department-store
+proprietors discourage the C. O. D.
+
+Yet it all requires a high type of wagon representative. Hardly less
+than the salesclerk does the wagon driver of the store have it in his
+power to make or lose friends for his house. His is no small opportunity
+for real salesmanship. The big stores realize this, and select these men
+with great care and discernment. They know that the man who shouts
+"Macy's" up the areaway or elevator-shaft once or twice a week is apt to
+become the same sort of good family friend and ally as the iceman or the
+butcher's boy. The man knows that, too: particularly in the vicinity of
+Christmas week. His own trials are many and varied. Apartment house
+superintendents and janitors, with prejudices of their own, are rarely
+co-operative, generally obstructive, in fact. Some people--even store
+patrons--are naturally mean. They take out all their meanness upon the
+department-store man who, because of his very position, is unable to
+strike back.
+
+Yet the job has its compensations, aside from the warm remembrances of
+the holiday season. People, in the main, are decent after all. If Mrs.
+Jinks, who lives in Albemarle Road, Flatbush, is out at the matinee or
+the movies for the afternoon, Mrs. Blinks, who lives next door, will
+take in her packages. The Macy man has been long enough on the route to
+know that by this time. Such knowledge is a part of his stock in trade.
+He must not only know the regular patrons of the store, but all of their
+neighbors. While by the correct and courteous handling of both he may
+not only retain trade for it but bring new customers to its doors.
+
+
+Let us now suppose that milady does not live in either Manhattan,
+Brooklyn or the Bronx, but in one of those smart suburbs: Forest Hills,
+New Rochelle, Englewood or the Oranges, to pick four or five out of
+many. She still is well within the limits of Macy's own delivery
+service. If she lives in the first of these--Forest Hills--she will be
+served, not direct from the Herald Square establishment, but from the
+little Long Island community of Queens. Fifteen wagon and motor truck
+routes run from the Macy sub-station there, which in turn is fed by the
+merchandise coming out over the great Queensborough bridge, each
+evening, on heavy five-ton trucks. And, to go back even further, these
+have been filled from the super-sized compartments at the end of the
+conveyor-chute marked "Suburban."
+
+Similarly, if she dwell in New Rochelle, she will be served by one of
+the fifteen motor trucks running out from the sub-station at Woodlawn,
+remembered by travelers upon the trains to Boston chiefly as the place
+of the enormous cemetery. It serves the great suburban territory north
+of the direct delivery routes out from the main store--a line drawn
+through Kingsbridge and Pelham Avenue--out as far as Ossining, Mt. Kisco
+and Stamford.
+
+Englewood and the New Jersey territory roundabout are served by Macy's
+Hackensack sub-station, with nine more routes; while the Oranges, mighty
+Newark, Montclair and that immediate vicinage draws its merchandise
+through a fourth sub-station, right in the heart of Newark, itself, and
+operating ten regular motor truck routes. The fifth and last
+all-the-year sub-station is at West New Brighton, Staten Island. It
+serves that far-flung and least populated of New York's five boroughs,
+Richmond.
+
+In the summer months another sub-station is added to the list, at
+Seabright, down on the New Jersey coast, and serving all those populous
+resorts from the Atlantic Highlands on the north to Spring Lake on the
+south. This is an expensive feature of Macy service, and one for which
+the store receives no extra compensation. It is one of the many
+expensive things that must be charged to profit-and-loss or the somewhat
+indefinite "_overhead_"--indefinite enough when one comes to consider
+its ramifications, but always fairly definite in its drain upon the
+daily financial balances of the store.
+
+At each of these sub-stations there are, in addition to the fairly
+obvious necessary facilities for re-sorting the merchandise, complete
+garage facilities for the wagons and trucks running out from them;
+these, of course, are in addition to the store's main stables and
+garages in West Nineteenth Street and also in West Thirty-eighth,
+Manhattan. Together all of these form a very considerable fleet upon
+wheels, with a personnel in keeping. For the delivery routes alone, and
+taking no account of the sizable force employed in the upkeep of
+vehicles and horses, there are employed, in the city service of the
+store, one hundred and ninety drivers and chauffeurs, with one hundred
+and eighty-six helpers, and in the suburban service, seventy-four
+drivers and eighty-six helpers.
+
+Through the hands of these there pours a constant and a terrific stream
+of merchandise. The conveying system in the basement of the Herald
+Square store has a generous maximum carrying capacity of five thousand
+packages an hour--a capacity which sometimes is actually reached toward
+the close of an exceptionally busy day, say toward the end of the
+pre-Christmas season. Twenty-five thousand packages is an average day's
+work for that basement room; upon occasion it has gone well over
+forty-one thousand. It should be borne in mind, moreover, that a package
+does not always represent a single purchase; in fact, it rarely does.
+Inside of one assembled package--generally assembled, as we saw in a
+previous chapter, at the store's transfer desk--there may be all the way
+from two to ten separate parcels. You may take your own guess as to the
+average number.
+
+
+Here, then, is the great and complicated system in its simplest form.
+Its ramifications are many and astonishing. For instance, milady is apt
+at times to change her mind. Yes, she is. And send the package back.
+Even though not as often in Macy's as in the charge account stores. Here
+is another decided benefit in the cash system--not alone to the store,
+but, because of its habit of passing on its economies, to its patrons as
+well. Yet in the course of a year a considerable number of packages must
+come back. Despite a thorough educational system and constant oversight
+and admonition there is bound to be a percentage of incorrect address
+slips. These and other causes produce a certain definite return flow of
+merchandise; which must have its own forms and safeguards, for the
+protection both of the store and its customer. They all make detail, but
+extremely necessary detail.
+
+In the basement there is a store room whose broad shelves hold a variety
+of merchandise, bought and paid for, but never delivered. The store
+makes at least two attempts to deliver every article given to its
+delivery department. That department is unusually clever with telephone
+books, club lists and other less used avenues of finding recalcitrant
+addresses. But there come times when even its resourcefulness is
+entirely baffled. Then the undelivered goods must go to the store room
+until some properly accredited human being comes up somewhere, sometime
+to demand them. In an astonishing number of cases the some one does not
+come up sometime or somewhere. In such a case after a fair length of
+time the goods themselves go back to stock. But the record of the
+transaction stays accessible in the store's files, so that its bureau of
+investigation, at any future time, may order a duplicate of the lost
+shipment out of the stock--out of the open market if the stock then
+fails to hold it--in order that Macy's may keep full faith with its
+patrons.
+
+Such a holdover is, of course, to be entirely distinguished from those
+which are held in advance of delivery; in certain cases up to thirty
+days without advance payment, in others up to sixty upon partial payment
+and in still others up to six months after full payment. This last,
+however, is a merchandising procedure quite common to most retail
+establishments.
+
+
+One feature of the delivery department remains for our consideration;
+the branch of it which is situated upon the ninth floor and which, oddly
+enough, handles the heaviest merchandise shipped out of the
+store--furniture. There are, of course, heavy shipments that go out of
+the basements--hundreds of them on an average that are entirely too
+heavy for the conveyor-chutes and the "revolving-ring." A notable one of
+these is an electric washing-machine, which, crated, will weigh slightly
+in excess of two hundred pounds. Shipments such as these go to the
+basement on hand trucks and by the freight elevators. There they are
+boxed and crated; often a considerable job. As a rule the expert packers
+of the delivery department can put even a fairly sizable or unwieldy
+purchase into boxing within twelve or fifteen minutes; an elaborate and
+fragile bit of statuary has been known to take a full hour and a half
+before it was safely prepared for wagon shipment.
+
+Likewise the furniture craters upon the ninth floor oftimes find their
+job a sizable one indeed. The boxing of a divan or a dining-room table
+is no easy task whatsoever. And in cases where the delivery is to be
+made within the limits of Macy service it is often avoided entirely. The
+freight elevators of the store are of the largest size ever designed; so
+big that a heavy motor truck is no particular strain upon their
+individual capacity. One of these trucks can be and is driven straight
+to and from the ninth floor. After it has reached the department the
+placing of fine furniture in its cavernous interior is merely a nicety
+of planning and arrangement, a skillful use of ropes and blankets and
+padding. The truck may run to any point within forty or fifty miles of
+the store at less cost than crating; even though crating be done at
+cost, itself.
+
+
+So spread the tentacles of Macy's, those long arms of distribution that
+keep the store from ever being a merely abstract thing. The bright red
+and yellow wagons and trucks--each bearing its good-luck symbol of the
+red star--carry Herald Square to the far limits of a far-flung city. The
+men who ride them are upon the outposts of salesmanship. Yet through
+system and through organization they are forever closely connected with
+it. The blood that courses through your finger-tips comes straight from
+your heart. The life-blood of understanding, of enthusiasm, of morale,
+that Macy's outriders bring with them is the life-blood of the humanized
+machine that functions so steadily there in the heart of Manhattan.
+
+
+
+
+VI. The Macy Family
+
+
+In the bazaars of ancient Bagdad, the human factor was not only the
+great but the sole dominating influence. The ancient Bagdadians,
+including those commuters and suburbanites, far and near, who came
+cameling into town at more or less frequent intervals, did business, not
+with a machine, not with a system, but with men. Which, being freely
+translated, meant bargaining. They not merely bargained, but haggled,
+and haggled at great length. Prices? There were none. The price was what
+you made it--you and the merchant with whom you finally came to
+agreement; if finally you did come to agreement.
+
+In the great bazaars of the modern Bagdad one does not need to bargain
+or to haggle. One is doing business primarily with a system. Prices are
+fixed, and firmly fixed. This is so generally understood and accepted a
+rule today that it would be a mere waste of time to discuss it at
+further length, save possibly to recall once again the large part which
+Rowland Hussey Macy and the men who followed him played in giving a
+Gibraltar-like firmness to this solid modern business principle.
+
+Yet even in these same modern, scientifically organized bazaars of
+today, the system rarely ever can be better than the men who direct it.
+Four thousand years of business progress between the two Bagdads have
+not taken from man his God-given power to make or break the best of
+systems. And Macy's, with its own business system organized, carefully
+developed and upbuilded through sixty-three long years, is still
+dependent to no little degree upon the faith and loyalty and interest of
+its men and women; that same thing which in the days of the war just
+past we first learned to know by that new name--morale.
+
+
+Under the sign of the Red Star there are at all times these days not
+less than five thousand workers; in the Christmas season this pay-roll
+list runs quickly to seven thousand or over. Then it is that the Macy
+family takes its most impressive dimensions. Seven thousand souls! It is
+the population of a good sized town! It is four good regiments--it is
+the New York Hippodrome with every one of its seats filled and eighteen
+hundred folk left standing up!
+
+Yet even the all-the-year minimum of five thousand men and
+women--roughly speaking, one-third men and two-thirds women--is an
+impressive array. It is a human force which only gains impressiveness
+when one finds that all but three hundred of it are employed beneath a
+single roof. The small outside group chiefly comprises those in the
+delivery stations.
+
+To bring action, foresight, co-operation, correlation--and finally
+morale--into such a force is a thing not gained by merely talking or
+thinking about it, but by long study, experimentation and great
+continued effort. Which means, in turn, that Macy's, among several
+other things, is a responsibility. For, as we shall presently see, there
+are any number of problems in addition to those of buying and selling;
+problems in the solving of which unceasing demands are made upon the
+store's time, money and heart. It is, in the last analysis a matter of
+mere good business at that. Yet at Macy's it has been considerably more.
+And the store's satisfaction in realizing that it was a very early and a
+very advanced pioneer in developing personnel--and morale--as necessary
+factors in modern merchandising is a very large one indeed.
+
+
+A machine or a family--or a department-store--is only as good as its
+component parts, and by the fact that there is a strict interdependence
+between the whole and its parts, the success of Macy's must mean that
+the rank and file of its employees maintain a high average of
+intelligence, initiative and loyalty. That these qualities are
+successfully co-ordinated in Macy's is due to real leadership, and it is
+to this same leadership that we may look for the basis of the store's
+morale.
+
+Little things indicate. And indicate clearly. Here on the wall of the
+passageway at the head of the main employee's stair is a placard which
+reads:
+
+"Once each month three prizes are given to the employees who make the
+best suggestions for the betterment of store service or conditions.
+Don't hesitate to try for a prize, even if your suggestion does not
+appear important. We need your ideas and like to have as many as
+possible presented each month. Write plainly and drop your suggestions
+in the boxes furnished for this purpose. The first prize is $10.00, the
+second $5.00, and the third $2.00."
+
+Here is only a single one of the many evidences of Macy co-operation
+with the employees. Yet it illustrates clearly the house's policy of
+making its workers feel an interest in and beyond the mere amount of
+money that they draw at the end of the week. Not a few of these prizes
+are awarded for suggestions as to procedure in technical matters
+relating to the details of the business. Some of them result in the
+saving of time--and consequently money--and others in the improvement of
+working conditions. For example: ten dollars was awarded to the man who
+suggested that the doors of fitting-rooms be equipped with signals to
+show whether or not they are occupied; five dollars went to the one who
+made the suggestion that the fire-axe and hook standing in the corner of
+the customers' stairway be placed on the wall in a suitable case so that
+children could not play with them; two dollars to her who advanced the
+very reasonable idea that a scratch-pad in the 'phone booths would
+prevent memoranda and art manifestations being made upon the walls. Here
+are a few suggestions that were proffered and acted upon. The entire
+list runs to a considerable length.
+
+There is another notice upon the big bulletin board at the head of the
+employees' stairs--a sort of town-crier affair with temporary and
+permanent notices of interest to the store's workers--which tells the
+working force that when vacancies occur within the big store they will
+be promptly posted on this and other bulletin boards. The workers are
+advised to apply for any position which they may feel they are competent
+to fill. Ambition is not curbed in Macy's. On the contrary, it is
+stimulated to every possible extent. The employee is restricted only by
+his own limitations, if he has them. It is a firmly-fixed house policy
+to promote, wherever it is at all possible, from its own ranks. Among
+its high-salaried men and women are not a few who have worked their way
+up from the bottom. In fact, among these six or eight of the best paid
+men in the store, is one who boasts that he first came to New York
+fifteen years ago, with but a suitcase and eleven dollars in his pocket.
+
+The employment department must have been very much on the job when it
+hired this man. It generally is very much on its job.
+
+Obviously, the hiring of workers for an enterprise as huge as Macy's
+cannot be conducted on any hit-and-miss plan. We have gone far enough
+with the store in these pages to see that hit-and-miss does not figure
+at any time or place in its varied functionings--and nowhere less than
+in its employment department. The hiring of new workers for the store is
+indeed a branch of the business machine that receives constant and great
+care and systematic attention. A store must employ the right sort of
+people in order to be a good store. This is fairly axiomatic these days.
+
+These workers are gathered in a variety of ways--by volunteer
+applications, by newspaper advertisements (in New York and outside of
+it), by outside free employment agencies, by circular appeals generally
+to educational institutions, and, best of all, through the solicitation
+of its regular employees. There is no appeal for a worker that, in my
+opinion, can compare with the suggestion made by an employee that the
+place of his or her employment is a good place for his or her friends,
+as well.
+
+I am warmly concurred with in this opinion by the store's employment
+manager, a big, upstanding man, who in his Harvard days was a famous
+football player. The rules of that fine game he has brought to the
+understanding of his present problem.
+
+"One of the most desirable class of applicants is that brought by our
+own employees," he says, frankly, "as in hiring these people we have a
+feeling of security; especially if they have been brought in by some of
+the old and most loyal employees. It has been our experience that such
+applicants enter more readily into the spirit of their work and develop
+more rapidly than those obtained from other sources. We advertise in the
+classified columns of the newspapers only when it is absolutely
+necessary. Our regular daily advertisements keep the store constantly
+before the public eye--and generally that is enough.
+
+"During the recent war period, however, we had no scruples about
+advertising, as nearly every other line of endeavor was in the same boat
+as we. Never before have the newspapers carried so much classified
+advertising. Yet when all is said and done, besides the moral
+undesirability of this source of supply, we found it also very expensive
+indeed.
+
+"Some people believe that the function of an employment department is
+merely to keep in touch with the labor market and engage employees," he
+continued. "This is erroneous. The duty of this employment department is
+to raise the standard of efficiency of the whole working force by the
+proper selection, placing, following up and promotion of employees and
+so bringing about a condition that will result in their rendering as
+nearly as possible one hundred per cent. service to the store. That is
+the real reason why employment departments such as this first came into
+existence. Business some years ago awoke to the realization of the fact
+that its indiscriminate handling of the entire labor problem was causing
+a tremendous economic waste, not alone to the employee and to society,
+but to itself. It then began for the first time to deal with the problem
+of its personnel in a scientific and practical way."
+
+
+The market for workers--like pretty nearly every other sort of
+market--is, as we have just seen, subject to fluctuations; there are
+seasons when the employment manager--ranking as the store's fourth
+assistant general manager--must look sharply about him for the
+maintenance of its ranks, other seasons when long files of would-be
+workers present themselves each morning at his department doors. For the
+five or six years of the World War period the first set of conditions
+prevailed. It was difficult for any department-store, ranked by the
+Washington authorities in war days as a non-essential industry, always
+to maintain its full working force, to say nothing of its morale.
+Recently the pendulum has swung in the other direction. America is not
+exempt from the labor conditions which are prevailing in the other great
+nations of the world. And there are plenty of people who would work in
+Macy's. Yet the store has refused to use this situation as a club over
+its workers. Throughout the darkest days of the business depression it
+told them that it had no intention either of reducing its force of
+workers (beyond the usual lay-off of extra Christmas people) or of
+reducing their individual salaries. Which was a considerable help to its
+_Esprit de corps_.
+
+Yet even in the hardest days of labor shortage Macy's never ceased to be
+most particular as to the quality of its help. Applicants for positions
+underneath its roof were scrutinized with great care to make sure as to
+their desirability as additions to the organization. And before they
+finally were accepted and turned over to the training school, they were
+examined, with as much thoroughness as if there were hundreds of others
+in the file behind them, from whom the store might pick and choose.
+
+All this is part and parcel of the definite management policy of the
+employment department, just as it is part of its policy to make sure
+that the prospective member of the Macy family has more than one arrow
+to his or her quiver. Alternate capabilities are assets not to be
+scorned. And there is an obvious store flexibility in being able to use
+its human units in a variety of endeavor that the management can hardly
+afford to ignore. And it does not.
+
+There is a function of the employment department of the modern business
+machine that Macy's recognizes as second in importance only to that of
+engaging its workers. I am referring to that moment when they may leave
+its employ, either from choice or otherwise. If "otherwise"--in the
+colloquial phrasing of the store being "laid-off"--there is the greatest
+of care and discretion used.
+
+"Remember the Golden Rule," says its general manager to his assistants,
+and says it again and again. "Do unto others as you would have them do
+unto you. And remember that there is never a time when this Golden Rule
+is more necessary or applicable in business than in the moment of
+discharge."
+
+Translated into the terms of hard fact this means that in Macy's no
+buyer, no department head, no department manager has the power to
+dismiss one of his workers. He may recommend the "lay-off" but only the
+general manager himself may actually accomplish the act. In which case
+he first refers the case to one of his five assistants, for personal
+investigation and recommendation.
+
+When the saleswoman--or man, as the case may be--leaves of her own
+volition the matter becomes, in certain senses, more serious. Why is she
+dissatisfied? Are the conditions of labor more onerous at Macy's than in
+the other stores of the city, the remuneration less satisfactory? Macy's
+does not intend that either of these causes shall obtain beneath its
+roof. So the retiring employee, before she may leave its pay-roll, is
+carefully examined as to her reasons for going. The last impressions of
+the store must be quite as good as the earliest ones--even upon the
+minds of its workers. And a careful system of observation and of record
+has been upbuilded to make sure that this is being obtained; which may
+often lead to valuable opportunities for the correction of store system,
+particularly in the relationship between Macy's and its employees.
+
+
+We come now face to face with the training department--another
+individual organization strong enough and important enough to demand as
+its head an officer of the rank and title of assistant general manager.
+But before we come to consider it in some of the many aspects of its
+workings--before we come to see how in these recent years education has
+come to be the hand-maiden of merchandising, let us consider the actual
+experience of a young woman who recently entered the employment of the
+store. She was a college woman--a good many of the store people are
+these days. The mass of young women who come trooping out of our
+colleges each June are apt to find their employment bents trending more
+or less to a common course and in great cycles. Yesterday the cycle was
+teaching; the day before, literature or the sciences; today it is
+merchandising. The great department-stores of our metropolitan cities in
+America are, as we already know, today paying their executives and
+sub-executives salaries more than commensurate with the earnings of
+those in other lines of industry and well ahead of those in the learned
+professions. Moreover, they have brought their hours of employment down
+to a point at least approaching those of other business organizations.
+Their appeal thus has become measurably greater. And they are reaping
+the reward--in the attraction of a higher grade of executive young
+women.
+
+[Illustration: THE SCIENCE OF MODERN SALESMANSHIP
+
+Education places the saleswoman of today at highest efficiency.
+
+A Macy schoolroom]
+
+This young woman was of that type. And here is how she came to
+Macy's--told in her own words:
+
+"Not at all long, long ago, I went rather hesitatingly into the rooms
+labeled 'employment office' at Macy's. 'Hesitatingly' because, if you
+have ever gone around very much looking for a job, you know that
+'Welcome' is not always written on the door-mat that receives you. But
+it is at Macy's--and a woman, who made me feel that she was my friend by
+the warmth of her smile, talked with me and after filling out the usual
+blanks I was told when to report for work. They were mighty decent, too,
+about trying to place me selling the kind of merchandise that _I_ wanted
+to sell--and that means a lot!
+
+"The Monday morning that I came to work was, of course, rather
+hard--it's not easy to go into any strange and new place and be crazy
+about it right at first! There were a lot of us--all new girls--and it
+was fun to see what they did to us. We went from the employment office,
+where there is a good sign reading 'Say "we" not "I" and "ours" not
+"my",' to our locker room (which, by the way, is the best of any of the
+places I have ever worked in) and then up to the training department for
+a little first time; after which they sent us to our respective
+departments. We felt rather like ping-pong balls, being knocked hither
+and thither, and though we didn't know why we were doing any of these
+things we trusted that those holding the ping-pong bat did.
+
+"While we were waiting up there in the training department, we had a
+chance to get to know each other a little--two or three of us were
+charmingly Irish--and time to note the people busy about that
+department. Nice efficient-looking people they were--and of course we
+labeled and cubby-holed them. One man, we all decided, could well be a
+matinee idol and another might have hailed from down Greenwich Village
+way.
+
+"At last we parted and went down through the store to our own
+departments--and on the way any importance which we may have felt was
+quickly submerged in seeing what a distressingly small part we were of
+the large Macy organization. Even so, we later found out how many, many
+other 'we's' like each of us could make a deal of trouble for it, should
+we fail to carry on our work correctly. A talk we had from the store
+manager, a little later on, made me feel directly responsible to the
+poor fellows who are the Macy delivery men. If I were not careful to
+write the address clearly in my salesbook, the delivery man would get in
+trouble--and all because of my handwriting! Funny, how we were all
+linked up together.
+
+"Well, to go back, I got to my department feeling decidedly unimportant,
+and was put to work behind a counter which sold women's and children's
+woolen gloves and women's kid gloves. That was the first counter I had
+ever sold from. In other stores I have sold from what are known as
+'open departments'; the counter trade was a revelation to me. Did you
+ever notice the lack of space behind the counters in the stores? Well,
+with the Christmas rush and all the extra salesgirls, it is lucky indeed
+that some of us have a sense of humor.
+
+"I had not been behind the counter for two whole minutes before a
+customer came along and asked for something. I tried to look wise and
+answer. It was all terribly new. The customers are always so plentiful
+in Macy's that a new girl hardly has time to have the old girls tell her
+about the stock. Moreover, our counter was very near the store's main
+entrance--which meant that we were an informal but very busy little
+information bureau on our own account--not only about Macy's but
+apparently anything else in the city of New York.
+
+"Of course, I didn't have a salesbook that day; I didn't receive one
+until after I had had some training and was beginning to know something
+about the Macy system. However, customers could not see the
+'new-and-green' written on my face, so I waited on them thick and fast;
+even through that first morning. And a wild time I had of it--gym was
+never so exhausting as stooping down to look for a certain pair of
+gloves which must be a certain color combined with a certain size, plus
+a certain style and so on. Some people must stay up nights figuring
+along the lines of permutations and combinations, so as to work out some
+unheard of ones for the things they ask for in Macy's. The other girls
+were mighty nice to me, though, and as helpful as could be. And our
+having to almost walk upon one another and squeezing past and bumping so
+often--why, you all get clubby, mighty soon. At the end of that first
+day I was rather wrecked, though happy--for in my desire to find things
+for customers speedily I had, in bending down, burst through the knee of
+one stocking, broken a corset-stay and ripped loose a garter! Henceforth
+I managed to dress in a manner prepared for doing gymnastic stunts, such
+as deep-knee-bending and leap-frog.
+
+"My first lesson on the store system came on my first day in the
+store--and then one every day for an hour, during the whole first week.
+I liked that--for then I knew how things were supposed to be done. They
+even took us out into departments that were not busy early in the
+morning and had us make out certain kinds of sales right behind the
+counter, and carry the whole thing through--all that was lacking being
+the _real_ customer. It gave us confidence and showed us things that we
+thought we knew, but that, when it came right down to it, we didn't know
+at all. The training department also gave us pamphlets and notices about
+how to use the telephones and telling us to do certain things, as well
+as how our salary and commission were to be figured. Also one leaflet
+told us about Macy's underselling policy, and what we should do in case
+a customer reported merchandise as being cheaper somewhere else--and,
+although I had heard before of this policy of Macy's, I came to believe
+in it faithfully, after I had read the booklet.
+
+"When you're new in a department the 'higher up' man can do much to
+make you feel glad that you are there. My section manager and buyer were
+both fine. The buyer told us in a talk she gave us all about how she'd
+been with Macy's for twenty-five years; that she had worked for several
+years, when she first began, at six dollars a week. She made us feel
+that there surely must be a chance for every one of us--that a firm that
+is worth staying with that long must be pretty fine indeed--and that it
+was just up to us individually, whether or not we would go ahead. As for
+our section manager, he was always so nice in the way he handled any
+transaction with us--giving us an extended lunch-hour or signing any
+sales checks that needed his 'O. K.' In many stores the section managers
+are so disagreeable about doing their work that the salesgirls hate to
+have them 'O. K.' things--but I have found it quite the opposite at
+Macy's. And when he had the time and saw any of us looking glum or tired
+our man would talk to us and succeed in cheering us up.
+
+"There are many things, too, that I discovered Macy's doing for its
+employees--all sorts of clubs and parties. One of the most useful of the
+first of these I found to be the umbrella club. All I had to do one day
+when it began unexpectedly to rain was to go up to the training
+department, deposit fifty cents and receive an umbrella. If I left
+Macy's within the month, I would get my fifty cents back. Of course, I
+was to return the umbrella the very first clear day but any time
+thereafter that I needed one I could go upstairs and get it.
+
+"Then, too, there's the recreation room--you have two fifteen-minute
+relief periods a day in the store in addition to your lunch time. You
+can go to the dressing rooms and wash up a bit and then go to the
+recreation room, where there are plenty of large, comfy chairs, a piano,
+books and the like. The room is a veritable social center all the day
+long--I always found lots of friends there, no matter at what time I
+took my relief periods. And you go back to your work refreshed and 'full
+of pep' once again. Another place where you have a chance to see your
+friends is the employees' lunchroom--and it certainly is a popular
+place. Despite the clatter and rush, the Macy folks have a good time in
+their cafeteria; the crowds that eat there every day prove the
+wholesomeness of its food. It is good home cooking and, as far as its
+cheapness is concerned--well, I've eaten veritable dinners there at the
+noon hour, day after day, and never had my check total more than
+twenty-five cents; with thirteen or fifteen nearer the average.
+
+"One morning we all came early to the store--to a courtesy rally.
+Thousands of us--yes, literally thousands of us--gathered on the main
+floor, on the central stair and everywhere roundabout it, and we sang
+songs about smiling; and other optimistic things. Then, after good
+addresses by Mr. Straus and Mr. Spillman, we all sang again and, in
+response to an inquiry from one of the store executives, all shouted
+that we would try to carry on with the new Macy slogan of 'A smile with
+every package' and 'a thank you as goodbye.'"
+
+Frank testimony, indeed. And honest.
+
+To bring this atmosphere about the worker in the store may no more be
+the result of hit-and-miss than the right sort of hiring. In the modern
+marts of the new Bagdad the creation of morale, not merely the retention
+of a good industrial relationship between a store and its workers but a
+constant bettering of it, has come to be as important a problem as that
+of the buying or the delivering of its merchandise, or even its problems
+of making its public constantly acquainted with its offerings and
+advantages.
+
+The work of such a department--in Macy's the department of
+training--divides itself quite logically and clearly into two great
+avenues; the one educational, the other recreational. Each takes hold of
+the newcomer to the store almost from the very moment that he or she
+enters upon its lists of employment. The new salesgirl's name is hardly
+upon the rolls of the department to which she is assigned before a
+member of the store's reception committee is upon her heels and steering
+her straight through all the maze of fresh experiences that necessarily
+must await the novitiate. She is told all about her time disc of
+brass--the individual coin that bears her distinctive number (built up
+of her department number plus her own serial one) which she must drop
+into its allotted slot at the employees' entrance when she comes to it
+in the morning and which she must see is returned to her before the day
+is done in order that she may have it to use again upon the morrow; how,
+going from the locker room to her department at the day's beginning, she
+must sign its own time-roll, which then becomes accountable for her
+comings and goings through the rest of the day; how she can go and when
+she must return; how she is paid--her salary, her quota, her
+commissions, her bonuses.
+
+All of this might sound complicated, indeed, to the new girl, were it
+not for the kindness of her assigned "committeeman." Complications in
+the hands of a woman who has been through the mill, herself, and who has
+come to see how they are really not complications at all, but cogs in
+the grinding wheels of a great and systematic machine, are easily
+explained. The new girl catches on. The simple but accurate
+psychological tests through which she was put before she was accepted
+for Macy's assure this. She catches on and within a year--perhaps within
+a space of but a few months--she, herself, is on the reception committee
+and helping other new girls through the maze of first employment.
+
+The new girl catches on--
+
+There lies before me, as I write these paragraphs, a neatly typewritten
+loose-leaf memorandum book. It is the work of a girl who has yet to
+round out her first year in Macy's and it is a work that all must
+produce before they may hope for very definite advancement.
+
+This typewritten book is, in itself, a book of the Macy store. Its pages
+are a brief, succinct and thorough account of the store's organization,
+its selling policies--including, of course, the stressed under-selling
+policy--and its methods. Yet it is much more, too. It is, if you please,
+a manual of salesmanship. Under a heading, "Steps in an Ideal Sale,"
+these are not only enumerated but are given relative values in
+percentages. Thus we see that "attracting attention" is twenty per
+cent.; "arousing interest," twenty; "creating desire," fifteen; "closing
+sale," twenty; "introducing new merchandise," ten; and "securing good
+will," fifteen. Under each of these sub-heads, the salesclerk has
+collected a group of points necessary to their attainment. Thus, under
+"attracting attention" one finds "facial expression" and under it, in
+turn, "pleasant and expectant."
+
+All of these things have been taught the salesgirl author of this
+book--the volume, itself, is the result of her notes at her lecture
+classes. When she is taught "attracting attention" she is told that
+alongside of "facial expression" there comes "tone of voice," and under
+this last there are five distinct classifications: "audible, distinct,
+sincere, rhythmical, suited to customer." Truly the science of
+salesmanship goes to far lengths these days. From time to time the store
+has engaged a professional teacher of elocution to take up and carry
+forward this last function of its work. Here is this saleswoman being
+taught that "swell" is a word forever to be avoided over the counter,
+"smart," "stylish," "fashionable," "original," and some others being
+substituted. Similarly "elegant," "grand," "nifty," "classy," "cheap,"
+"awfully" and "terribly" are under the ban, appropriate synonyms being
+suggested to replace them. "Flat" is not to be used, when "apartment" is
+meant. The entire list of words to be avoided in a Macy sales
+conversation runs to a considerable length.
+
+This particular saleswoman was trained to textile salesmanship.
+Consequently, although the first half of her book, which treats of the
+store's methods and policies, is common to those that are being prepared
+by her fellows in all the other selling departments, the second half is
+the result of the special training that was given her in the department
+of training along the lines of her own merchandise. Not only did she
+spend long hours of the firm's time in its classroom upon the third
+floor of the store and surrounded by cabinets in which were displayed
+textile materials of every sort and in every stage of development, but
+she was given a printed booklet which told her much about her
+merchandise, its history, its production fields and the details of its
+manufacture.
+
+From it she evolved her own history of textiles, setting down with
+accuracy the four fundamental cloths--cotton, linen, silk and wool--and
+not alone tracing their development and manufacture, but by means of
+carefully hand-made diagrams, pointing out the difference between the
+different textures and weavings. "Warp" and "weft" and "twill" have come
+to be more than mere words to her. They are a part of her business
+capital, which she can--and does--turn to the good account of the store.
+So she is to her compeer of twenty-five years ago--selling dress-goods
+in the old Macy store down on Fourteenth Street--as the electric light
+of today is to the old-fashioned lamps of that day and generation.
+
+
+Back of this little black-bound notebook there is system--organization
+if you would read it that way. Education, of a truth, has become the
+handmaiden of merchandising. And the store's school has become one of
+its ranking functions.
+
+As teachers in this school there is a specially trained corps of men and
+women who do nothing but instruct and then follow up their pupils to see
+that they put into practice the things that they have learned. The
+educational work consists of individual instruction, informal classes
+and practical demonstrations. And the result of it all is not merely to
+make the employee valuable to the house, but to lend interest to
+merchandising, itself, and to lift the salesperson out of the mere
+mechanical process of taking orders for goods.
+
+The moment that a new employee comes into the Macy store his or her
+instruction in its system, organization and salesmanship begins. We have
+just seen how one typical new saleswoman began receiving her training
+from the first day of her employment. She was no exception to an
+inflexible rule. The training is given invariably. It does not matter
+whether the applicant has had experience in other large
+department-stores. Even a former Macy employee, accepting re-employment,
+must go through the department of training for, like everything that
+grows, the store system changes steadily from year to year and from
+month to month.
+
+
+A school such as this must have teachers. It is futile to add that they
+must be specially trained and thoroughly competent in every way to
+fulfill the unusual task set before them. And this, of itself, has been
+a problem, not alone with Macy's, but with the other large
+department-stores of New York. They have co-operated to solve it, with
+the direct result that some two or three years ago retail store training
+became a practical factor in the city's educational system. Under the
+enthusiastic aid of Doctor Lee Galloway, its head, the successful and
+rapidly expanding business division of New York University created the
+school of retail selling, bearing the name of and affiliated with the
+parent institution. The merchants of New York raised a fund of $100,000
+for the establishment and promotion of this enterprise and from it last
+June came its first graduating class--young men and women qualified to
+teach store training in the great bazaars of our modern Bagdad.
+
+The purposes of this school are set forth succinctly in its first
+manual, which has come off the press. Its object is "to dignify retail
+selling through education in the following ways: To train teachers in
+retail selling for public high schools and for retail stores, to train
+employees of retail stores for executive positions and to do special
+research work for the department managers of retail stores."
+
+In accordance with the first of these expressed avenues of its endeavors
+the Board of Estimate of the city of New York already has begun to move
+in full co-operation. A high school in the lower west side of
+Manhattan--the Haaren High School at Hubert and Collister Streets--has
+been designated as training center for this work. Girls are there being
+taught retail selling. Nearly one hundred already are entered in the
+course and within a few short months the larger stores of the city will
+begin to benefit by this highly practical educational work.
+
+That this experiment will prove successful seems now to be well beyond
+the shadows of doubt. Yet such success will be in no small measure due
+to the individual efforts of Dr. Michael H. Lucey, principal of the
+Julia Richman High School--in West Thirteenth Street, just back of
+Macy's original store--who has devoted great energies to its launching.
+Convinced, from the outset, of the real necessity of a training course
+in retail selling in the city schools, Dr. Lucey makes no secret of his
+dubious fears at the beginning of the experiment:
+
+"I honestly didn't see how we were going to do it," he says, in frankly
+discussing the entire matter, "the tradition in favor of an office
+career rather than a selling one in a store has so long ruled in the
+high schools of the city. There are several reasons for this--the most
+important one, in my mind, the feeling in the average high school girl's
+head that less education having been required in past years for the girl
+behind the counter than for the girl behind the typewriter, she lost a
+certain definite sort of caste, if she followed the first of these
+callings. Of course, that is utter rubbish. I have no hesitancy today in
+telling my girls that if they are looking for a genuine career retail
+selling is the thing for them. In office work, if they are very good,
+they may get up to forty or even fifty dollars a week but there they
+are pretty nearly sure to come to a standstill."
+
+The skilled educator shakes his head as he says this.
+
+"You see the difficulty is that so many girls coming out of schools such
+as these look upon business not as a boy would look at it, as a career
+with indefinite and permanent possibilities, but rather as a bridge
+between schooling and matrimony--a bridge of but four, or five, or six
+years. And when they are frank with me--and they often are--and tell me
+of this bridge that is in their minds, I am frank to advise office work.
+It offers better immediate returns--yet in the long run none that are
+even comparable with those of a high-grade department-store."
+
+
+Following the successful plan of the University of Cincinnati in its
+technical engineering courses, the students down at Haaren are grouped
+into working pairs, which means that, in practice and working in
+alternation, each goes to school every other week. In the week that one
+is in the classroom, her partner is in one of the city stores studying
+retail selling at first hand. When, at the end of six days, she returns
+to her schoolroom she has many questions derived from her actual
+practice to put to her instructor. So the practice and the principles of
+this new hard-headed science are kept hand in hand with its actual
+workings.
+
+Nor is this all: some six or seven hundred young women--and young men,
+too--are also making a special study of retail selling in the city's
+evening schools. A single course at the DeWitt Clinton High School is
+quite typical of these. Four evenings a week, for two hours each
+evening, a huge class is being taught--in an even more detailed way than
+is possible under a department-store roof--the principles and
+manufacture of textiles. In these classes a goodly number of the Macy
+family are enrolled. Another goodly enrollment goes into the special
+lectures given by a museum instructor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
+on certain evenings and Sunday afternoons.
+
+Truly, indeed, education has become the handmaiden of merchandising.
+
+
+As teachers in Macy's department of training there are enrolled today
+only those men and women who have received a thorough normal school
+education in this great new science of retailing. They do nothing but
+instruct the store's workers and then follow up to make sure that these
+are putting into practice the principles in which they have just been
+instructed. Except for the training of the future executives the school
+time is taken entirely from regular business hours and so, at the
+expense of the house, itself. This schooling--under the Macy roof,
+please remember--consists of individual instruction, informal classes
+and practical demonstration.
+
+Specialized training under the roof includes instruction under the
+direct supervision of the Board of Education in fundamental school
+subjects to those classed as "juniors" and "delinquent seniors"; a
+junior salesmanship course given to all employees promoted from the
+non-selling divisions of the store to its selling divisions; a senior
+salesmanship class--including the study of textiles and non-textiles,
+and covering three busy months; the instruction of special groups of
+salesclerks to be transferred for special sales; "demonstration sales,"
+in which teacher and pupil "play store," with the teacher impersonating
+various types of customers; the executive course to prepare employees
+for high executive positions of different rank and order; and the
+specialized instruction for dictaphone and comptometer operators,
+correspondence and file clerks and the like.
+
+
+In the limited space of this book, I shall have no opportunity to carry
+you further into the details of this fascinating department of the
+modern store. The saleswoman's little black book that we saw but a few
+minutes ago ought to show it more clearly to your eyes than any
+elaborate presentments of schedules and curriculums. The result's the
+thing. And Macy's has the results. It has already achieved them. Not
+only has it lifted retail selling from the hard and rutty road of cold
+commercialism but it has lifted the individual seller, himself--which,
+to my way of thinking, is to be accounted a good deal of a triumph. In
+such a triumph society at large shares--and shares not a little.
+
+It is house policy--sound policy--to encourage employees to look out not
+only for the store's interest, but for their own. An ambitious salesman
+is indeed an asset; and there are ways of keeping him ambitious. There
+is, for instance, the system of bonuses for punctuality, which takes the
+final form of extra holidays in the summertime. A week's holiday with
+pay is given without fail to each and every employee of eight months'
+standing. But a record of good attendance and punctuality for fifty long
+weeks brings another week of vacation, also with full pay.
+Department-stores not so long ago used to penalize their workers for
+tardiness. The new Macy plan works best, however.
+
+The list of those bonus possibilities is long. There is, of course,
+chief amongst them, the bonus which takes the concrete form of a sales
+commission. The salesclerk is set a moderate quota for his or her week's
+work. On sales that reach above this figure he or she is paid a
+percentage commission. And, lest you may be tempted to dismiss this
+statement with a mere shrug of the shoulders, as a perfunctory thing
+perhaps, permit me to tell you that but last year a retail salesman in
+the furniture department earned in excess of $6,000 in wages and
+commissions.
+
+One other thing before we are done with this main chapter on the Macy
+family and starting up another which shall show the super-household at
+its play; it is a thing closely associated both with department-store
+employment and training: this "special squad" which has become so
+distinctive a feature of the big red-brick selling enterprise in Herald
+Square. Concretely, it is a group of college graduates--the heads of the
+firm are themselves college men and have none of the contempt for
+education that has become so blatant a thing in the minds of so many
+"self-made business captains" of today--who desire to enter upon this
+fascinating and comparatively new field of department-store service.
+
+As one of the executives of the department of training himself says,
+"Many of these young grads come in here with the rattle of their
+brand-new diplomas so loud in their ears that for quite a while they
+can't hear anything else."
+
+Yet they are good material--as a rule, uncommonly good material. So Dr.
+Michael Lucey says, and Dr. Lucey knows. As a supplement to his
+educational work in the commercial high schools he entered Macy's last
+summer and spent the two months of his vacation in the special squad,
+studying the store from a variety of intimate and personal angles. On
+his first day in it, the distinguished educator sold clothing--men's
+clothing--and he sold to his first customer, an accomplishment which he
+notes with no little pride. His pride at the moment was large. But the
+next moment was destined to take a fall. A floor manager down the aisle
+espied the new clerk.
+
+"Don't let those trousers sweep the floor," he admonished.
+
+And the educator had his first taste of store discipline.
+
+
+Sooner or later all these young men out of college get that first taste.
+It does not harm them. And it is not very long before they begin to
+observe that, after all, there are still a few things about which they
+know practically nothing. After which their real education begins.
+
+A department-store is, among other things, a great melting pot. An
+Englishman who came into Macy's special squad last year inquired just
+what work might be expected of him. He was told.
+
+"Manual labor," he protested, "I can't think of it. I wear the silver
+badge."
+
+Which meant that he was one of the King's own--a pensioner of the late
+war. The store executive who first handled this bit of human raw
+material possessed a deal of real tact; most of them do. He smiled
+gently upon the Britisher.
+
+"After all," he suggested, "you know you don't have to tell your King
+that you had to use your two good hands in hard work."
+
+The Englishman saw the point. He laughed, shook hands and went to work.
+In six months he was an executive, himself. It's a way that they have at
+Macy's. And here is part of the way.
+
+Manual labor is demanded invariably of those who enlist in the special
+squad. It has a regular system through which each of its workers must
+pass. First he is given the history and development of the store and of
+its policies. This work is followed by a week on the receiving platform
+and then a good stiff session in the marking-room. The college boy
+follows the merchandise along a little further. He proceeds for a while
+to sell it--then does the work of a section manager. After which there
+come, in logical sequence, the delivery department, the bureau of
+investigation, the comptroller's office, the tube system, an intensive
+study of the departments of employment and of training. These are not
+only studied but written reports are made upon them. After which he
+should have a pretty fair idea of the store and the things for which it
+stands.
+
+The course is only varied in slight detail for the woman college
+graduate. Macy's has naught but the highest regard for the gentler
+sex--not alone as its patrons but as members of its staff--yesterday,
+today and tomorrow. A woman may not be able to handle heavy cases upon
+the receiving platform. But there are other sorts of cases that she may
+handle--and frequently with a tact and diplomacy not often shown by the
+more oppressed sex. I might cite a hundred instances from within the
+store where she has shown both--and initiative as well. But I shall give
+only one--where initiative played the largest part. Some few months ago
+a young woman who has climbed high in the store organization, to the
+important post of buyer of a most important line of muslin wearing
+apparel, found herself in France, but a few hours before the steamer
+upon which she was booked to sail to the United States was to depart
+from Southampton. To take a steamer across the Channel and then catch
+her boat was quite out of the question. She did the next best thing. She
+hopped on an aëroplane and flew from Paris to London; seemingly in
+almost less time than it here takes to tell it. She caught her boat. Her
+instructions were to catch the boat. And long since she had acquired the
+Macy habit of obeying orders.
+
+Upon this, again, a whole volume might be written--upon the thoroughness
+of an organization which really organizes, a training department that
+really trains, a system which really systematizes. And all under the
+title of a family group--in which affection and tact and understanding
+come into play quite as often as discipline and energy and initiative.
+
+
+
+
+VII. The Family at Play
+
+
+In the business machine of yesterday there were no adjustments for play.
+It prided itself upon its efficiency. And in the next breath it
+proclaimed that such efficiency left no room whatsoever for such
+foolishness as recreation. Today we know much better. We know that
+play--healthy, uniform play in a decent amount--is one of the very
+finest of tonics for the human frame. And so count it as one of the very
+highest factors in our modern schemes of efficiency.
+
+Macy's plays and makes no secret of the fact. On the contrary, it is
+intensely proud of its provisions for the welfare of its workers.
+Industrial recreation is no mere idle phrase to it. In hard fact no
+small portion of the remarkable esprit de corps of the store is due to
+its well organized recreational and social service work. In a large
+measure this part of the operation of the store corresponds to what the
+War and Navy Departments did through their Commissions on Training Camp
+Activities during the great war. Bearing in mind our likening Macy's to
+an army in an earlier chapter, the parallel now becomes a close one
+indeed. Organized recreation promoted better team work in the war; it
+now promotes better team work in business. Ergo, it is for the welfare
+of Macy's that it shall promote organized recreation beneath its own
+roof.
+
+And yet that very phrase, "welfare work," is not often used underneath
+that roof. It has the flavor of patronage which is so wholly lacking in
+this family of thousands, and so it is thrust forever into the discard.
+"The bunch" gets together--you see, you may call the family by almost
+any name that pleases you best--various groups are forever assembling at
+the Men's Club or the Community Club and making plans for their numerous
+activities. And these last cover a surprisingly large range.
+
+Any male employee of the store may join the Macy Men's Club. It is a
+wholly self-governing body and, aside from making up the inevitable
+deficits that accrue, the store has no paternalistic or direct attitude
+whatsoever toward it. The club itself is situated at 156 West
+Thirty-fifth Street, just west of the store, but entirely separated from
+it. It occupies two floors of an extremely comfortable building. In its
+externals it differs very little from any other sort of men's club.
+There are a reading room and a smoking room where, toward the close of
+the day and well into the evening, its members may relax. And there is a
+restaurant serving extremely good meals.
+
+It is only as one pokes beneath the surface that he begins to find out
+how very real this small institution, that is an offshoot of the larger
+one, really is. Its restaurant serves meals at considerably less than
+cost. And the fact that this club is regarded as something more than a
+mere combination of eating-place and rest-room is shown by its
+organization activities in other directions. For example, its members
+interest themselves in general athletics to the extent that, in the
+proper seasons, they have very creditable teams of baseball, basketball,
+football and the like, while occasional outings with suitable field
+events are arranged. Each Thursday evening there is organized athletic
+work in a large private gymnasium that is especially hired for the
+purpose.
+
+In fact it is at this last point that the Men's Club comes in contact
+with the Community Club, which is the nucleus organization covering
+other recreational activities among the women, the girls and the younger
+men of the store family. For, by careful planning, both of these clubs
+manage to use the big gymnasium of a single evening, while, after the
+athletic work is over, the floor is cleared and there is dancing until
+going-home time.
+
+These comforts are not given without some cost to the Macy folk. That
+would be very bad business indeed. It has been so decided long since.
+And so, while it may be human nature to be ever on the lookout for
+"something for nothing," it is quite as human to derive very much
+additional enjoyment from the things for which one pays. Even the
+suggestion of charity is not pleasant. And with this in view these clubs
+charge nominal sums for their privileges. In so doing they earn the
+respect of those who share in them.
+
+Dues for the Men's Club are placed at three dollars a year--that surely
+is a nominal figure. These go toward the development of club activities
+outside of its actual running expenses (rent, the restaurant, etc.). The
+gymnasium fee is another three dollars, which is much less than one
+would pay for a similar facility elsewhere in New York.
+
+The scale of charges for the Community Club is quite different. The dues
+here are but twenty-five cents a year--its membership is made up mainly
+of lower-salaried folk--with small extra charges for special activities.
+For instance, the Spanish class, which is taught by one of the Spanish
+interpreters in the store and which has a constant attendance of about
+forty, costs its pupils the very inconsiderable sum of five cents a
+lesson. The gymnasium charge is kept in a like ratio. There are a few
+others in addition. The aggregate cost, however, of as many activities
+as an average employee can take up is of little moment or burden to him
+or to her--nothing as compared with the sense of independence that goes
+with the small act of payment.
+
+The Choral Club, under the direction of a competent leader, meets
+Wednesday evenings in the big recreation room on the third floor of the
+store, with a usual attendance of about two hundred men and women who
+are trained in part singing and in chorus work of various sorts. This is
+not only enjoyable and popular for its own sake but it has an added
+value in leading toward the organizing of the store's talent for
+concerts and for musical plays.
+
+And it has such talent. Do not forget that--not even for a passing
+moment. It would be odd, indeed, if a family of five thousand folk did
+not develop upon demand much real histrionic and artistic ability of
+every sort. And when such potentialities are fostered and encouraged,
+the results--well, they are such as to warn Florenz Ziegfeld and the
+rest of the Forty-second Street theatrical producers to keep a sharp
+eye, indeed, upon Macy's.
+
+On Monday evenings, the entire winter long and well into the spring, the
+Dramatic Club meets and here every budding Maxine Elliott or Ina Claire
+has her full opportunity. On Tuesday there is a get-together
+evening--one begins to think with all these evenings so neatly filled of
+the calendar of a real social enterprise--and then one sees the store
+family at its fullest relaxation. Here was a recent Tuesday night. It
+was just before Christmas and the store was approaching the annual peak
+load of its year's traffic. Yet it had no intention whatsoever of
+relaxing a single one of its social endeavors.
+
+On this particular Tuesday evening our salesgirl--the one whom we saw
+but a moment ago being inducted into the selling organism of the
+store--made her first personal acquaintance with the Community Club. Let
+her tell her own story, and in her own way:
+
+"Up in the recreation room a few hundred of us gathered for a regular
+party. Some few of us had gone home after store hours for our dinner;
+the others had had it right in the store's own lunchroom. It surely is
+great the way that you _can_ get a meal there in Macy's at any time you
+are staying late--either on duty or on pleasure.
+
+"At about six-thirty the evening's program got under way--so that the
+many friendly, chattering groups of girls in the big room finally had to
+simmer down to something approaching silence. Then the Choral Club
+began singing for us--some good, old-time Christmas carols first, and
+then some other songs. All of us joined finally in the chorus, leaving
+the club to carry the difficult parts. They could do that all right,
+too. Mr. Janpolski, their leader, finally gave us a solo and after that
+there was a grand march led by our own beloved Marjorie Sidney.
+Everybody joined in--not only in body, but in spirit. It was like
+Washington's Birthday in the big gym up at Northampton. Messenger girls,
+college graduates, salesfolk, deliverymen, managers--everyone was just
+the same in that blessèd hour. Distinctions of the store were gone. We
+were boys and girls--some of us a bit grown up and grayed to be sure,
+but all with Peter Pannish hearts--having a real party once again.
+
+"The grand march ended in dancing for every one--with a jolly negro at
+the piano doing his level best to uphold the reputation of his race for
+really spontaneous music. Finally, after many encore dances, everybody
+withdrew from the floor and out came Mr. Salek, the director of the
+Men's Club, and Miss Knowles, doing an almost professional dance. The
+Castles had very little on this couple--the way Salek lifted his partner
+and then let her down--slowly, slowly, still more slowly--reminded me of
+Maurice and Walton. Their performance brought down the house. Of course
+they had to respond to encores; again and again and again.
+
+"Following this--for Macy's believes that variety is the spice of all
+life--a Junior recited the unforgetable ''Twas the night before
+Christmas and all through the house.' She really was a darling. And how
+Christmassy she looked, with her big butterfly sash and her hairbow of
+scarlet tulle.... Next on the program came dancing--for everybody.
+First, however, there was another march, so that each couple received a
+number--while every little while certain numbers (the couples that held
+them) were eliminated from the floor. The nicest part about this
+elimination dance, as they called it, was that instead of only the last
+couple getting the prize, as is generally done--every couple, as soon as
+its number was called and it left the floor, went over to a big
+chimney-top, with a proverbially jolly 'Santa' peering out of it. There
+Santa gave to each one a little gift, such as a whistle, a stick of
+candy, or a jolly little rattle. Then, after more dancing, refreshments
+were served by gaily garbed Junior waitresses. After which the dancing
+continued until the merry Community Club Christmas dance was entirely
+over."
+
+
+Already I have touched upon the annual vacation of the Macy worker--one
+week with pay after eight months continuous employment, two weeks after
+two years, three weeks after five years, and a month after twenty-five
+years of service. A charming retreat among the hills of Sullivan County,
+eighty-seven miles from New York and, through the foresight of the
+management of the store, purchased long ago, provides an ideal vacation
+spot for the Macy girls who wish to spend their holidays among truly
+rural surroundings. For this purpose a large farm house and a hundred
+acres of surrounding land were acquired by Macy's and more than fifty
+thousand dollars spent in enlarging the house, beautifying the grounds
+and otherwise making them suitable for their summertime uses. In
+addition to the big and immaculately white farm house there are three
+cottages upon the property. As many as sixty-five girls can be
+accommodated at a single time upon it.
+
+Three jumps or so from the main house and stretched out in front of it
+is a lake; a regular lake, if you please, big enough for boating and for
+bathing, although not so large that one of the keen-eyed chaperones may
+keep her weather eye on those of her charges whose tastes run toward
+water sports. In this Adamless Eden bloomers and middy blouses are _de
+rigueur_, and as the few restraints imposed are only those inspired by
+ordinary good sense, the girls experience the real joys of living.
+
+
+All of these activities and interests--and many, many more besides--are
+faithfully chronicled in the Macy house organ, _Sparks_. Here is a
+monthly magazine--of some sixteen pages, each measuring seven by ten
+inches--that in appearance alone would grace any newsstand, while its
+contents almost invariably bear out the attractiveness of its cover
+designs. Practically the entire publication is prepared by its staff,
+which, in turn, is composed of members of the Macy family.
+
+House organs, such as this, are, of course, no novelty in the American
+business world of today. There probably are not less than fifty
+department-stores alone which are now printing brisk contemporaries of
+_Sparks_. The internal publications of a house, such as Macy's, have
+long since come to be recognized as one of its most valuable media for
+the promotion of morale. It costs money, but it is money well expended.
+So says modern business. And modern business ought to know. For it has
+tested the results. And the house organ long since became one of the
+really valuable aides.
+
+Here, then, in _Sparks_ is not only a medium in which the Macy folks may
+come the better to know about one another, a bulletin board upon which
+the heads of the house may from time to time carry very direct and
+sincere messages to their big family, but a mouthpiece in which the
+embryo literary genius may become articulate. And, lest you be tempted
+to believe that I have permitted simile to carry me quite away from
+fact, let me show you a single instance--there are a number of others
+beside--in which a real literary genius has come to bloom underneath the
+great roof that looks down upon Herald Square:
+
+His pen name is Francis Carlin--but his real name, the one under which
+he entered Macy's, is James Francis Carlin MacDonnell. Of him _Current
+Opinion_ but a year or two ago said: "The writer (Carlin) ... was until
+a few weeks ago a floorwalker in one of the big department-stores of New
+York City (Macy's) and was discovered by Padraic Colum. He had his book
+obscurely printed and it has been unobtainable at bookstores until
+recently.... It has the true Celtic quality. The dedication alone is
+worth the price of admission: 'It is here that the book begins and it is
+here, that a prayer is asked for the soul of the scribe who wrote it for
+the glory of God, the honor of Erin and the pleasure of the woman who
+came from both--his mother.'"
+
+Mr. MacDonnell has written two books: this first, _My Ireland_, and more
+recently the _Cairn of Stones_. That he has great talent is again
+attested by _The Boston Transcript_ which said recently: "Mr. Carlin's
+Celtic poems, ballads and lyrics are nearer the fine perfection of the
+native poets belonging to the Celtic renaissance than those produced by
+any poet of Irish blood born in America."
+
+After which, who may now dare say that genius may not blossom in a
+department-store? And even were it not for the gaining glory of Carlin,
+the pages of any current issue of _Sparks_ would show that there is more
+than a deal of artistic merit in the widespread ranks of the Macy
+family. The desire for self-expression is never stunted. And the pages
+of its avenue of expression are read by none more closely than the
+members of the family who hold the ownership of Macy's.
+
+
+And yet these men--the heads of the great merchandising house--are not
+only accessible to their business family through the printed word. They
+are not standoffish. On the contrary, they are most widely known
+throughout the store; most reachable, both within their offices and
+without. Take the single matter of grievances, for a most important
+instance: A Macy worker may feel that justice on some point or other is
+being denied him by a superior. In such a case he has immediate recourse
+to any one of three expedients: he may take his case to the department
+of training, to the general manager of the store, or to one of the
+officers of the corporation. As a rule, however, the difficulty can be
+straightened out in the first of these avenues of appeal, which is an
+automatic clearing-house for all matters of personnel. The heads of this
+department have been chosen as much as anything for the sympathy which
+enables them to review any employee's case intelligently and fairly and
+for the influence that makes it possible for them to see at all times
+that full justice is being done. While the fact that the worker,
+himself, may take the matter to the general manager or even to one of
+the three members of the firm, is a practical guarantee against
+persecution of any sort.
+
+[Illustration: THE SUMMER HOME OF THE MACY FAMILY
+
+Recreation in the modern store stands side by side with education in
+perfecting the individual employee]
+
+Just off the corner of the recreation room on the third floor is the
+private office of the assistant superintendent of training. Her title
+sounds rather formidable and does justice neither to her job nor to her
+personality: for in reality she combines the qualities of a charming
+hostess, an efficient manager and a mother confessor.
+
+In the Macy book of information for employees there is a paragraph under
+the heading, "Department of Training," which says: "It is the purpose of
+this department to interest itself in all the employees of this
+organization. Do not hesitate to go with your troubles to the assistant
+superintendent of training, whose duty it is to interest herself in you:
+both in the store and at your home. She will be glad to give you advice,
+both in business and in personal matters."
+
+And so she has her hands full, and sometimes her heart as well; for,
+among five thousand folk of every sort and kind, there are bound to be
+many perplexing personal problems and troubles, to which the very best
+kind of help is the kindly and disinterested advice of a sympathetic and
+understanding person. And when that person is a woman--a woman of rare
+tact--the problem is generally apt to approach its solution. Which makes
+for friendship, not merely between the worker and that woman, but
+between the worker and the store. And so still another rivet is clinched
+in the great morale bridge between the business machine and the human
+units that enable it to function so very well indeed. And the Macy
+spirit becomes an even more tangible thing.
+
+
+As one goes through the store he finds many evidences of the things that
+go to upbuild that spirit. It may be only a printed sign cautioning
+courtesy and cheerfulness, not merely between the store workers and its
+patrons, but between the members of the Macy family, themselves. "A
+smile with every package and a 'thank you' as good-bye," rings one. And
+remember that other, again more cautious: "In speaking say 'we' and
+'our,' not 'I' and 'mine.'" It may be the warm hand of friendship from
+the member of the reception committee to the new girl that comes to work
+under the Herald Square roof, or it may be any of the long-planned,
+coolly devised methods of social justice to the store employee. These
+last are never to be overlooked.
+
+For instance, three months after the day that a new employee first
+arrives to work at Macy's, membership in the Macy Mutual Aid
+Association becomes automatic. In no small way it becomes a real part of
+his job. It is the object of the M. M. A. A. to provide and maintain a
+fund for the assistance of its members during sickness and of their
+families or dependents in case of death. Dues in this association are
+graded according to the worker's salary, consist of one per cent. of the
+salary up to thirty dollars; while the sick benefits are two-thirds of
+the salary, limited by a benefit of twenty dollars. The death benefits
+are five times the weekly salary, with a minimum of sixty dollars and a
+maximum of one hundred and fifty dollars.
+
+It is obvious that these dues do not of themselves pay the benefits. The
+house "chips in." Yet not through sympathy, but through one of the
+tenets of good business as we moderns have now begun to know it.
+
+"It would be poor business for me, indeed," said a silk manufacturer of
+Connecticut to me not long ago, "to let my people become sick. I want no
+germ diseases in my mills. Neither do I want the mills to cease their
+continuous operation. That, too, is poor business. And so the sickness
+that may cost my worker ten dollars may easily cost me twenty-five--in
+the stoppage of my plant, alone."
+
+The control of the Macy Mutual Aid Association is, moreover, vested
+solely in the hands of the store employees. An itemized statement of its
+receipts and its disbursements as well as its proceedings is posted each
+month on the store bulletin boards and printed in _Sparks_, so that
+every member of the organization may know its exact affairs. It
+decidedly does not work in the dark.
+
+
+I should be derelict, indeed, in regard to this whole question of health
+in modern industry--and of the particular modern industry of which this
+book treats--if I neglected in these pages that corner of the high-set
+eighth floor--flooded by sunshine during the greater part of each
+pleasant day--where sits the Macy hospital, conducted by the Macy Mutual
+Aid Association. It is, of course, solely an emergency hospital, yet one
+where doctors, nurses, dentists and a chiropodist are constantly on
+duty. Three doctors--two men and one woman--consult with and prescribe
+for the patients, two dentists look after their teeth, and a chiropodist
+takes care of that prime asset to all salespeople--the feet. Those
+members of the hospital staff are professional men and women of the
+first rank and they work with the best and latest equipment. Although
+the emergency hospital is primarily for the services of the store
+workers it stands also at the service of any one who may come into the
+building and need its services. For instance, in case a customer becomes
+ill, a wheelchair is sent, and he or she, as the case may be, is taken
+to the hospital for immediate restorative treatment.
+
+
+One or two final phases of this family life upon a huge scale in the
+very heart of New York and I am done with it. Thrift, in the Macy
+category of the making of a good worker, comes only next to good health.
+Under that same widespread roof there is a savings bank for the sole
+use of Macy folk. Any amount from five cents upward is accepted as a
+deposit and the fact that good use is made of this constant incentive to
+thrift is evidenced by the continued and prosperous operation of the
+institution. It has not been necessary to organize it as a full-fledged
+savings bank. At the end of each day it transfers its funds, by means of
+a special messenger, to one of the largest of New York savings banks
+which handles the accounts directly. The law does not permit a savings
+bank in the State of New York to open branches--else that would have
+been done at Macy's long ago. The messenger method was the only feasible
+substitute.
+
+Believing that even the most provident may occasionally have good
+reasons, indeed, for wishing to borrow money, the heads of the house
+have set aside a permanent fund as a loan reserve for the Macy folk. Any
+one who has been in the store's employ for at least three months may,
+upon advancing even ordinarily satisfactory reasons, borrow from this
+fund. The limit is a sum which can be repaid in ten weekly installments.
+No security is required nor is any interest charged. The employee is
+bound by nothing but his honor.
+
+
+That sixty-four years of continuous operation have established the
+commercial success of Macy's should be patent to you by this time. But
+now that you have known of the present-day family that dwells beneath
+its roof, you may ask: Has this policy toward its personnel worked out
+in hard practice? The question is indeed a fair one. To carry it still
+further, is this machine of modern business humanized and inspired in
+fact as well as in theory? One cannot help but think of the machine.
+Machines _are_ hard. Generally they are fabricated in that hardest of
+all metals--steel. Can steel be warmed and tempered? Can the fact be
+recognized that the units of the Macy store are human and warm; and not
+steel and cold?
+
+I think so. I imagine that you would have the answer to all these
+questions if you could talk for a little time with Jimmie Woods, whom we
+saw, but a short time hence, as a push-cart horse for the early Macy's
+and who has come today to be the assistant superintendent of the store's
+delivery department. His new job requires much more push than that
+old-time one. As a caption-line in a recent issue of _Sparks_ aptly
+said: "Jimmie Woods delivers the goods." Metaphorically speaking, the
+house of Macy does the same thing. And at no point more than in its
+treatment of its human factors.
+
+The day was not so very long ago when the life of a salesperson, even in
+a New York store of the better class, was not a particularly enviable
+thing. We saw, when we discussed the earlier Macy's, the long hours and
+the low wages of the rank and file of the organization. These things
+have changed today--in all department-stores that are worthy of the
+name. Public opinion was partly responsible for the change. But I think
+quite as large a factor was the realization that gradually was forced
+upon the minds of the merchants themselves that the old methods were
+poor business methods. Macy's knows that today. We have seen the man
+who came to New York fifteen years ago with eleven dollars and a
+suitcase come to a high-salaried position with the house today; the
+retail furniture salesman earning over six thousand dollars a year, the
+twenty-five buyers at ten thousand a year and upward, as well as those
+at twenty-five thousand a year and upward. And we know that every one of
+these men and women have been the product of the Macy organization--from
+the moment that they began at the very bottom of the ladder.
+
+And, lest you still think I befog the question, permit me to add that
+the minimum weekly wage of the woman employee in Macy's today is $14.00;
+and the average pay--apart from that of the executives and
+sub-executives--the men and women who, in the store's own nomenclature,
+are classed as "specials" and exempted from the time-disc record of
+their comings and their goings--is $25.00.
+
+Have I now answered your question fairly? If still you wobble and are
+uncertain, permit me to call your attention to the service records of
+the store. They speak more eloquently than aught else can of the loyalty
+and the interest of its workers. Qualities such as these are not
+generated under bad working practices of any sort.
+
+The records tell--and tell accurately, as well as eloquently. A Macy man
+was recently retired on a pension--the store's list of pensioners runs
+to a considerable length--after a round half-century of service. Others
+will soon follow in his footsteps. There are today upon the rolls
+ninety-two men and women who have been with it for more than
+twenty-five years. In the delivery department alone there are
+twenty-three men who have records of twenty years or more; and of these
+there are three who have been there more than forty years. Three hundred
+members of the Macy family have records of fifteen years or over,
+fifteen hundred have been with it upwards of five years and--despite the
+recent after-the-war difficulties of maintaining labor morale and
+organization--only about one-quarter of the force have come within the
+twelvemonth. The labor turnover in Macy's is low indeed--and constantly
+is growing lower.
+
+These figures, it seems to me, are the surest indication that the
+store's workers are treated fairly. Moreover, they alone show clearly
+the workings of its announced policy to give its own people every
+possible opportunity to grow within its ranks. In fact, no man or woman
+can stand still long at Macy's and continue to hold his or her job.
+Progress is a very necessary requisite there. And in order that progress
+may be recognized, steadily and fairly, system comes in once again to
+stabilize a very natural phase of human development. As the Macy
+employee shows new capabilities or additional industry, recommendations
+for increases in his remuneration are made by his department manager to
+a salary committee, appointed for this sole purpose. Periodically this
+committee receives a list of all the store folk who have not received an
+increase for a period of six months. The list is carefully reviewed and,
+whenever and wherever it can be justified, the pay envelope of the
+employee is fattened.
+
+Macy's is, after all, a very human institution. The machine may be
+steel-like, but it is not steel. It is flesh and blood and human
+understanding. I sometimes think of it as a country town, rather than as
+a family--one of those nice, old-fashioned sorts of country towns, where
+most of the residents know one another, where there is an efficient
+governing body and where the community spirit is one of the strongest
+factors in its progress. Being human it is fallible, being fallible it
+still has something for which to work; and in fulfilling this obligation
+of work it is carrying out its destiny.
+
+
+
+
+_Tomorrow_
+
+
+
+
+I. In Which Macy's Prepares to Build Anew
+
+
+Yesterday, when Milady of Manhattan went for her shopping along the
+tree-lined reaches of Fourteenth Street, and found her way into that
+perennially fascinating shop at the corner of Sixth Avenue which
+specialized in its ribbons and its gloves and its rare exotic imported
+perfumes, she dreamed but little, if indeed she dreamed at all, of a
+Macy's that some day should stand intrenched at Herald Square and
+embrace a whole block-front of Broadway. Today Milady, finding her way
+into that small triangular "Square" in the very heart of
+Manhattan--still on the sharp lookout for ribbons and gloves and rare
+exotic perfumes--and Heaven only knows what else beside--may little
+dream of the changes that a tomorrow--
+
+Tomorrow--what business has a book such as this to be talking of
+tomorrow; a vague, fantastic thing that only fools may seek to interpret
+in advance?
+
+We have seen between these covers quite a number of things--some of them
+passing odd things--yet classified among the factors of good business,
+according to all of its modern definitions. And to them we shall now add
+another--the understanding and the correct interpretation of tomorrow. I
+think that when I depicted Mr. Macy standing with his daughter,
+Florence, at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway half a
+century ago and explaining how there would be the business center of New
+York fifty years hence, I called attention to the sharp commercial fact
+that a great machine of modern business goes ahead quite as much upon
+the vision and the foresight of the men that guide it as upon their
+prudence. Which means in still another way, the proper understanding of
+tomorrows. And that understanding today is quite as much an asset of
+Macy's as its real estate, its cash balances in the banks, or the
+millions of dollars standing in the stock upon its shelves.
+
+
+More than a decade ago the big store in Herald Square first began to
+feel its own growing pains. The fact that ten years before that it had
+been planned as the largest single department-store building in the
+United States, if not in the entire world, availed nothing when business
+came in even greater measure than the most far-sighted of its planners
+had dared to dream. Within three or four years after the time that the
+caravans of trucks and drays had moved Macy's the mile uptown from the
+old store to the new, changes were under way in the new building,
+changes seeking to make an economy of space here, another economy
+there--everywhere that an odd corner could be utilized to the better
+advantage of the store and its patrons, it was at once so used. Finally
+it became necessary to abandon the exhibition hall that was originally
+located on the ninth floor and thrust that great space into one of the
+larger non-selling departments of the enterprise; and two or three
+years later an entire extra floor was added atop of the big
+building--adding a goodly ten per cent. to its million square feet of
+floor space already existing.
+
+Yet even these changes could not solve the final problem. Macy's still
+refused to stay put. Its growth was relentless, unending. Each fresh
+provision made for its expansion was quickly swallowed up, with the
+result that the proprietors of the store finally faced the inevitable:
+the need of making a real addition to their plant, not a series of
+picayune little extensions, but one fine, sweeping move which should be
+as distinct a step forward in Macy progress as the mighty hegira that
+occurred when the store moved north from Fourteenth Street to
+Thirty-fourth--a little more than eighteen years ago.
+
+And, facing the inevitable, Macy's quickly made up its mind. It never
+has been noted for any particular hesitancy. It decided to step ahead.
+
+
+Forecasting tomorrow in New York is not, after all, so vast a task as it
+might seem to be at a careless first glance. That is, if you do not put
+your tomorrow too far ahead--say more than ten or a dozen years at the
+most. I am perfectly willing to sit in these beginning days of 1922 and
+to assert that to attempt to forecast 1952 or even 1942 is not a
+particularly alluring pastime--if one has any real desire for accuracy.
+But 1932 is not so difficult. It is the business of skilled experts to
+interpret 1932 in 1922; a business which incidentally is rendered vastly
+easier in New York today than it was ten years ago by two hard and
+settled facts--the one, the wonderfully efficient new zoning plan of the
+city, and the other, the construction of the Pennsylvania Railroad
+Station on Seventh and Eighth Avenues, from Thirty-first to Thirty-third
+Streets.
+
+The first of these factors should hold the strictly commercial
+development of the city--save for local outlying hubs or centers--south
+of Fifty-ninth Street. The block-a-year uptown movement of Manhattan for
+whole decades past has finally been halted; and halted effectually.
+Central Park has of course proved no little barrier in fixing
+Fifty-ninth Street as the arbitrary point of stoppage. But the zoning
+law, protecting the fine residence streets north of that point, and the
+Pennsylvania Station are also factors not to be overlooked.
+
+True it is that at the very moment that these paragraphs are being
+written whole groups of new business buildings are being opened, in
+Fifty-seventh, Fifty-eighth and Fifty-ninth Streets, in the center of
+Manhattan. But other and bigger buildings are going up in the
+cross-streets far to the south of these. Count that much for the
+Pennsylvania Station. For it, and it alone, has proved the salvation of
+Thirty-fourth Street. Macy's, Altman's, McCreery's, the Waldorf-Astoria,
+the Hotel McAlpin--none of these alone nor all of them together--might
+have been able to save Thirty-fourth Street from becoming another
+Fourteenth, or another Twenty-third--a dull, wide thoroughfare given
+almost entirely in its later days to wholesale trade of one sort or
+another.
+
+The Pennsylvania Station could do, and did do, the trick. Opened in
+1910--but eight years after Macy's came first to Thirty-fourth Street
+and that brisk thoroughfare of today was in the very youth of its
+prosperity--the traffic which it handled day by day and month by month
+at that time was more than doubled in 1920. Not only has the business of
+the parent road that occupies it practically doubled in that decade, but
+the inclusion of the important through trains of the Baltimore & Ohio
+and the Lehigh Valley Railroads, to say nothing of the traffic of the
+huge suburban Long Island system increasing by leaps and bounds each
+twelvemonth, has begun at last to tax the facilities of a structure
+seemingly far too big ever to be severely taxed. In recent months the
+cementing of a closer traffic alliance between the New Haven and the
+Pennsylvania systems renders it a foregone conclusion that more and more
+of the through trains from New England will be brought to the big
+white-pillared station in Seventh Avenue.
+
+You cannot down a street on which there stands a city gateway,
+particularly if the city gateway be one through which there sweeps all
+the way from fifty to sixty thousand folk a day. Thirty-fourth Street
+cannot be downed. Remember that, if you will. It will not be compelled
+to share the rather bitter fate of its former wide-set compeers just to
+the south. This much is known today.
+
+And being known, it settles forever even the possibility of Macy's
+moving uptown once again. It, too, is fixed. It has cast its die with
+the street called Thirty-fourth and with Thirty-fourth it is going to
+remain. So Macy's buys the realty to the west of its present building
+and prepares thereon to erect, in connection with its present edifice, a
+great new store building--in ground space one hundred and twenty-five by
+two hundred feet--in height, nineteen full floors above the street (and
+two basements beneath)--in all, some 500,000 square feet of floor-space
+or close to fifty per cent. added to the 1,100,000 square feet of the
+present store.
+
+Offhand, it would seem to be a comparatively easy matter for the
+proprietors of a store, such as Macy's, to go to their architect and say
+to him:
+
+"Here is a fine plot, one hundred and twenty-five feet by two hundred.
+We want you to design and build for us upon it a modern retail
+building--high enough to provide all necessary facilities and scientific
+enough to bring it not merely abreast of other stores across the land,
+but a good long jump ahead of them."
+
+After which the architect would call for his young men and their
+draughting-boards and proceed, upon white paper, to erect his
+department-store.
+
+But his problem in this case is not white paper--at least white paper
+undefiled. The real problem is a perfectly good store building at the
+east end of the Macy plot--a building far too good and far too modern to
+be "scrapped"--in any recognized sense of the word. It was built to last
+all the way from half a century to a full century and its owners have
+not the slightest intention of pulling it down. It must remain the chief
+front of the enlarged Macy store. The caryatides upon either side of
+its main doors, the red star that surmounts them, must continue to look
+down into busy Broadway, as they have been looking for nearly two
+decades past.
+
+It happens, too, that the store itself was never designed for extensions
+toward the west. In the conception of its original architect there was a
+distinct section set out at the west end of the present building for
+purely service and non-selling purposes. These included, upon the
+ground-floor, the great tunnel and merchandise unloading docks for
+incoming trucks, similar ones for the outgoing merchandise, freight
+elevators a-plenty; and in between them and through them a truly vast
+variety of working provision, shops, offices, school and comfort rooms,
+and the like. A good feature, this section--which occupies almost the
+exact site of the former Koster & Bial Theater--but tremendously in the
+way when one comes to consider the extension of the store toward the
+west.
+
+A final factor of this particular reconstruction problem--and perhaps
+the greatest of all--lies in the fact that it must be carried forward
+while the store is doing its regular business. Even when the peak load
+of its traffic is reached--those fearfully hard weeks that immediately
+precede the Christmas holiday--the workaday routine of Macy's must not
+be seriously disturbed. Which complicates vastly the architect's
+problem. It is one thing to design and to erect a store building whose
+tenant does not approach the structure with his wares for sale until the
+merchant has given his final release, and another--infinitely
+harder--thing to build, and build efficiently, as business goes forward
+all the while. The machine as it grinds must be rebuilded. And all the
+while it must lose none of its efficiency.
+
+
+Yet, when all is said and done, an architect's life is made up of a
+number of things of this sort. And the associated architects of the new
+Macy store--Messrs. Robert D. Kohn and William S. Holden--have not
+permitted the overwhelming problem of its reconstruction to fill them
+with anything even remotely approaching a state of panic. For that is
+not an architect's way.
+
+They have, from the beginning, come toward the big problem quietly,
+sanely and efficiently. At the very beginning and in company with two of
+the officers of the corporation they went upon an extended trip through
+the more modern department-stores across the land. Here, there,
+everywhere, they found features worth noting and collating. When they
+were done with their journeys they had, as a foundation for their
+studies upon the new Macy store, a sort of standardized practice of most
+of its fellows across the land.
+
+This preliminary completed, the engineering member of the partnership,
+Mr. Holden, began an intensive study of the fundamental factors of the
+business machine that he was to enlarge. To begin with there was its
+traffic--divided, as we have seen in earlier chapters, into three great
+and fairly distinct avenues: the merchandise, the shoppers who come to
+purchase it, and the employees who wait upon their needs.
+
+It is fairly essential that these three streams of traffic be kept
+separate, save at such points where, for the conduct of the business,
+they must be brought together.
+
+Here, then, was a real opportunity for study. Mr. Holden began with the
+traffic streams of the shoppers.
+
+Obviously, and despite the growing importance and activity of the
+Pennsylvania Station, to say nothing of the west side subway, which runs
+down Seventh Avenue in front of it, the main traffic streams of shoppers
+must continue to come into Macy's from Broadway. The star of Broadway is
+even more firmly set in the heavens of New York than that of
+Thirty-fourth Street.
+
+These main traffic streams within the store are, then, roughly speaking,
+three in number; one comes from the northeast corner--at Thirty-fifth
+Street--another from the southeast corner at Thirty-fourth Street--the
+third still shows a decided fondness for the impressive center doors
+upon Broadway. Within the store they unite and then separate into a
+variety of smaller currents. A goodly portion of these violate all the
+similes of streams and proceed upstairs at the rate of about 10,300 folk
+an hour at the busiest times of busy days. And there are an
+astonishingly large number of these times. Of these 10,300, about 7,400
+will ascend upon the great escalator, which reaches up into the sixth,
+or last selling floor, of the present store.
+
+When this escalator was first built, eighteen years ago, it was looked
+upon as hardly less than a transportation marvel. Every similar device
+that had preceded it was known as a single-file moving-stairway, with
+the capacity estimated at sixty persons a minute, or 3,600 an hour. By
+making its escalator double-file, Macy's not only slightly more than
+doubled its capacity but rendered it the full equivalent of at least
+twenty-five passenger elevators of the largest size.
+
+
+The man whose business it is to have a sort of first-hand acquaintance
+with 1932 said that by that year Macy's would need to take close to
+twenty thousand folk an hour to its upper floors. He was not only
+estimating upon the growth of New York, but upon the growth of the store
+itself.
+
+"You will have to add another of the double escalators," said he, "that
+will bring your lifting capacity upon the two moving stairways up to
+almost fifteen thousand persons an hour."
+
+An elevator of modern size and speed in a department-store with seven or
+eight selling floors ought to lift two hundred and forty persons an
+hour. This, as you can quickly find out for yourself, means that there
+will be needed for the new store but twenty passenger elevators to make
+good that deficit between increased escalator capacity and the total
+number of folk to be carried upstairs. And this, in itself, is a most
+moderate increase. The store already has fourteen modern passenger
+elevators. Credit this much, if you will, to the escalator.
+
+So it goes, then, that the new Macy's will have a second double-file
+escalator on the opposite side of the main aisle, which is the store's
+own Broadway, and in the same relative relation to it. It will run as
+far as the fourth floor which in the new scheme of Macy things is to be
+devoted to the important business of toy selling.
+
+What goes up must come down. Shoppers are no exception to this old
+rule. If you still think that they are, stand late some busy afternoon
+at the main stair of Macy's and watch them descend. They frequently come
+at the rate of one hundred to the minute. And yet this is but a single
+stair!
+
+It is neither practical nor modern greatly to increase stairway capacity
+in remodeling Macy's and so the question of a descending escalator
+thrusts itself upon the architects' attention. Despite a certain
+old-fashioned prejudice against it on the part of some old-fashioned New
+Yorkers, a descending escalator is not only practicable but entirely
+safe. Otherwise Macy's would not even consider its installation. The
+store planning experts went out to Chicago a few months ago, however,
+and into a great retail establishment there which boasts twelve selling
+floors. Escalators were its one salvation--descending, as well as
+ascending. The Macy party saw old ladies, women with children in their
+arms--everyone who walked, save only those walking upon crutches, using
+this quick and constant method of descent. They found the same devices
+in Boston--in subway stations as well as department-stores--and being
+used with equal facility. Straightway they decided that the New York
+shopper was neither more timid nor more reluctant to use a new idea than
+was her Boston or her Chicago sister. A descending escalator was placed
+in the plans for the new Macy's--for the use of the store's patrons.
+
+Still another ascending and descending escalator; this time for the
+store's own family. Remember that here is a second stream, whose prompt
+and efficient handling is quite as important as that of the shoppers.
+The broad stair in Thirty-fourth Street at which the majority of the
+family arrives, between eight-thirty and eight-forty-five of the
+business morning, is frequently choked with the rush of incoming
+employees. It will never be choked once the new Macy's is done. For then
+the workers will be handled in great volume upon a double escalator, not
+merely double-file, but double in the sense that ascent and descent are
+handled simultaneously and in compact space, very much as the double
+stairways that are installed in modern school-houses and industrial
+plants.
+
+In the enlarged building the locker rooms and the other facilities of
+the arrival of the store's employees will be placed upon the second
+floor and the first and second mezzanines; retained from the present
+plan, but very greatly enlarged. The Macy worker comes to them by means
+of the escalator, quickly and easily, and in a similar fashion ascends
+or descends to his or her department. It sounds simple and easy but it
+is not quite so easy when one comes to plan for a maximum of 8,800
+employees--in 1932.
+
+
+A third traffic stream remains for our consideration--and the
+architect's. In many respects it is the most difficult. Human beings, to
+a large extent at least, can move themselves. Goods cannot. Yet
+obviously the great stream of merchandise into the building and then out
+again must never be permitted to clog its arteries--not for a day, nor
+even for an hour. This means that there must be not only plenty of
+channels and conduits for it, but ample reservoir space as well. Which,
+being translated, means of course generous warehousing rooms, of one
+sort or another.
+
+Perhaps it would be well before we come to the ingenious plans for
+making this inanimate stream most animate indeed, to consider the
+general plan of Macy's as it will be after its structural renaissance.
+The exterior of the present great building will remain practically
+unchanged. Just back of it and to the west of it on the new plot, one
+hundred and twenty-five feet in depth in both Thirty-fourth and
+Thirty-fifth Streets, and extending the full two hundred feet between
+them, will be erected a new steel and concrete building, harmonizing in
+its façade and of the most modern type of construction; as we have
+already seen, nineteen stories in height with two sub-basements in
+addition. The first ten stories of this structure, at the exact floor
+levels of the old, will be thrown into the existing building and the
+lower seven of them used for selling purposes. The uppermost three
+stories of the combined building--covering the entire Macy site--will be
+used, as we shall see in a moment or two, for the reception and the
+warehousing of the merchandise, and other non-selling activities of the
+store.
+
+The nine stories of the new addition which will rise tower-like above
+the parent building are destined to be used entirely for non-selling
+functions. Thus from the architects' plans we see the executive and
+financial offices, including that of advertising upon the thirteenth and
+the fifteenth floors of this super-cupola; and the store's own great
+laundry upon the high nineteenth. The department of training and the
+bureau of planning, with an assembly room, will share the sixteenth. The
+more purely recreational features, however, the Men's Club and the
+Community Club and the lounging rooms and library, are placed as low as
+the accessible eighth floor. The general manager's and employment
+offices will be as low as the second mezzanine--for obvious reasons of
+convenience.
+
+None of these departments will be hampered for a long time to come, as
+they have been hampered for a number of years past, by a fearful lack of
+elbow room. The new plans have provided for abundant facilities of this
+and every other sort. The employees' cafeterias also are to go into the
+new section--also upon the eighth, or public restaurant floor. They will
+be greatly enlarged over their present capacity.
+
+These non-selling facilities are given their own elevator service from
+the street; a separate and distinct entrance there. The purpose of this
+last quickly becomes evident. There are many occasions--nights and
+Sundays even--when some or all of the recreation facilities are in use
+far beyond the regular store hours. Access to them, entirely free and
+separate from the store itself, is an enormous working convenience, and
+the new Macy's has been planned to be filled with working conveniences.
+
+
+The elevator as well as the escalator will play a vastly important part
+in the fabrication of the new Macy's. The one has by no means been
+overshadowed by the growing importance of the other. There are to be in
+all fifty-six elevators, of one type or another, in the reconstructed
+building. Of all these none is more interesting than the ingenious lifts
+by which whole motor trucks, laden as well as empty, are carried into
+the structure, up eleven floors to the merchandising reception rooms and
+down into the basement and sub-basement for filling for the city
+delivery.
+
+Now are we back again to the handling of that merchandise stream which
+we first began to consider but a moment ago. At the beginning we can
+make assertion that in the entire history of retail selling no more
+ingenious scheme has been devised for the orderly and rapid movement of
+goods in and out of a department-store.
+
+This flow is kept normal and downward by the simple process of first
+taking the loaded incoming trucks up to the eleventh floor of the
+building for unloading. In the present store--as well as in a good many
+other stores--a great amount of immensely valuable ground floor space is
+given over to the various functions of receiving and distributing
+merchandise. We have seen long ago how a modern store values this ground
+floor space. For instance, in relation to the value of, let us say, the
+third floor, it is about as ten to one.
+
+Neither does Macy's propose to clutter the sidewalk frontage of even the
+least important of its frontage streets--Thirty-fifth Street--by long
+lines of motor trucks or drays, receiving or discharging goods. In fact
+this sort of thing has become practically impossible in the really
+important cities of the America of today. If municipal ordinance
+permits it, public sentiment rarely does. And the keen merchant of
+today--to say nothing of tomorrow--never ignores public sentiment.
+
+So, to the eleventh floor the motor trucks must go--on two huge
+high-speed freight elevators which open directly into Thirty-fifth
+Street. Our horseless age makes this possible. The modern architect,
+planning for the congested heart of the island of Manhattan, can indeed
+and reverently thank God for the coming of the gasoline engine and the
+electric storage battery--to say nothing of the engineers who helped to
+make them possible.
+
+Upon that eleventh floor there will extend, for the full width of the
+building, a giant quay, or high-level platform, with its stout floor at
+the exact level of the floors of the standardized motor trucks of Macy's
+(the comparatively small proportion of "foreign" or outside vehicles
+that bring merchandise to the store are to be unloaded at the
+Thirty-fifth Street doorways and not admitted within the building). The
+unloading under the present well-developed system is a short matter; the
+trucks may quickly be despatched back to the street once again; while
+the refuse and debris of the packers goes to appropriate bins behind
+them.
+
+
+Through chutes and sliding-ways the merchandise descends a single floor
+to the great tenth story--extending through both the present building
+and the new one to come. Here it will be quickly classified and placed
+upon a conveyor which moves at the level of and between the two sides of
+a double table some five or six hundred feet in length which will
+extend the greater part of the length of the enlarged store. From this
+center table--the backbone of the whole scheme of this particular
+distribution--will extend in parallel aisles at right angles to it,
+whole hundreds of bins and shelves and compartments. The entire
+arrangement will resemble nothing so much as a huge double gridiron,
+with many tiny interstices.
+
+Now do you begin to see the operation of this scheme? If not, let me
+endeavor to make it more clear to you. This miniature and silent city,
+whose straight and regular streets are lined in turn with miniature
+apartment houses of merchandise, is zoned--into six great zones. Every
+selling department of the store--118 in the present one--is assigned to
+one or the other of these zones. There it keeps its reserve stock. It
+is, in truth, a reservoir.
+
+Now, see the plan function! The men's shoe department is out of a
+certain small part of its highly diversified stock. It sends a
+requisition up to its representative upon the tenth floor. It is a
+matter of minutes--almost of seconds--to locate the necessary cartons in
+the simplified and scientifically arranged compartments and shelves; a
+matter certainly of mere seconds to despatch them down to the selling
+department.
+
+For this, the second thrust of the goods-stream through the new Macy's,
+especial provisions have been made by the installation of six so-called
+utility units. Three of these are placed at equal intervals along the
+Thirty-fourth Street wall of the enlarged building; the other three at
+equal intervals upon its Thirty-fifth Street edge. Each unit consists of
+one elevator (large enough to hold two of the rolling-carts,
+standardized for the floor movement of merchandise through the aisles of
+the selling departments of the store), one small dummy elevator (for the
+handling of single packages of unusual size or type), and a spiral chute
+(this last for the despatch of sold goods).
+
+The selling-floor location of these utility units determines the zoning
+system of the warehouses on the tenth. There is a zone to each unit.
+While from that zone the requisitioned merchandise descends to the
+selling department which has asked for it by its own unit--which always
+is closest to it. Haul is reduced to a minimum. And system becomes
+simplicity.
+
+
+With the actual selling of the goods in the store that is to come we
+have no concern at this moment. It is quite enough to say that the
+methods and the ideals that have brought Macy selling up to its present
+point are to be continued there, in the main at least, although
+broadened and advanced as future necessity may dictate. But with the
+despatch of the goods once sold in the new store we have an intimate and
+personal interest.
+
+We have bought our pair of shoes. The financial end of the transaction
+is concluded. We have asked--as most of us ask--to have them delivered.
+Now follow their movement:
+
+The clerk takes them to the packer. This, however, is but a mere detail.
+It is their future course that interests us. And if we had eyes properly
+X-rayed and farseeing we might observe that from the hands of the
+packer they will go presently to the spiral descending chute of the
+nearest utility unit.
+
+Now we shall indeed need our new X-ray eyes. They follow the package for
+us--down the chute--with its gradients and curvatures so cleverly
+devised as to bring our purchase to the basement in just the right time
+and in just the right order--and into and upon the next stage of its
+progress.
+
+Steadily moving conveyor-belts along each outer wall of the building
+receive the constant droppage of the packages from the six spirals of
+the utility units. Together these two long belts converge upon a
+terminal, the revolving-table, in the terminology of the present store.
+And here our packages receive fresh personal attention.
+
+In the chapter upon Macy's delivery department we paid a careful
+attention to this revolving-table--which really is not a table at all
+and does not revolve. We saw it, then, as the very heart of the complex
+clearing-house of Macy distributions. It is, however, in itself a
+wonderfully simple thing, and yet when it was first installed it was
+regarded as nothing less than a triumph of efficiency.
+
+Fortunately we do progress in this gray old world. Today we see how the
+revolving-table can be improved. For one thing, today we see it cramped
+and inelastic--no more than eight men may work at it at a single shift.
+Yet when it was built no one in Macy's dreamed that more than eight men
+would ever be required to work at it at a single time. And even in
+times of great emergency, but eight!
+
+At the revolving-table in the new store, not eight but forty men may
+work simultaneously--when necessity dictates. The change has been
+effected by the simple process of elongating the "table." If a
+revolving-ring may be changed from round to square--and this was the
+very thing that Macy's accomplished in its present basement--why not
+from square to oblong? There is no negative answer to this question. And
+oblong it will become. And a present handling capacity of forty thousand
+packages a day can be increased to all the way from seventy-five
+thousand to ninety thousand.
+
+Yet the main principle changes not. It is only in detail that one sees
+one's shoes traveling outward on a different path in 1931 from that of
+1921. The great conveyors that lead from the revolving-table of today to
+the various delivery classifications as they are now made, will so lead
+in the new arrangement of things to such classifications as may then be
+made: only they will no longer be revolving-tables, but will in due time
+become the moving backbone of very long tables in the basement
+mezzanine, similar to the one which we saw extending the full length of
+the great tenth floor. And from those long tables, running the entire
+width of the building and up just under the basement ceiling, the
+sheet-writers will recognize their individual group of packages (by
+means of the clearly written numerals upon them), lift them off the
+slowly moving belt and make record of them, for the delivery
+department's own protection. After which, it is but the twist of the
+wrist to thrust them into the bins, separately assigned to each driver's
+run.
+
+So go our shoes, or come, if you prefer to have it that way. Rapidly,
+orderly, systematically. System never departs from their handling. Even
+in the driver's own little compartment-bin there are four levels, or
+shelves, and each is inclined gently and floored with rollers so that he
+can pick out the packages for his run with greater facility. And in
+placing the packages upon each of these levels, the sheet-writer, well
+trained to his job, begins a rough process of assortment by streets.
+
+
+Now we are come to wagon delivery, itself. Now we shall see why Macy's
+will not have to clutter Thirty-fourth Street with a long row of its
+delivery trucks. The length of such a row may easily be estimated when
+one realizes that sixty electric trucks will stand simultaneously at
+sixty loading stations in the new basement, with a reserve or reservoir
+space there for twenty-two more. Moreover, this basement will serve as a
+garage at night and on Sundays for these trucks. There is no fire risk
+whatsoever in the storage of an electrically driven motor vehicle. So
+the new Macy basement will not only be able to store this considerable
+fleet but to charge its batteries and make necessary light repairs upon
+it from time to time.
+
+Access to and from this basement--and the sub-basement--is by means of
+elevators; not only the two which we have seen reaching aloft to the
+eleventh floor, but two more just beside them for sole service between
+the level and the two basements. As a matter of operating expediency it
+will be easy indeed to arrange in the early morning rush, or at any
+other time when emergency may so demand, to operate all four elevators
+in exclusive service between the street and basements. With such a
+battery Macy's can perform a genuine rapid-fire of discharging
+merchandise.
+
+To the mind of the novice there immediately flashes the thought: why not
+use ramps--long, sloping driveways--from the street level to the
+basement? Long ago the architects of the new building asked themselves
+that very question. It was, in this particular case at least, rather
+hard to answer. The main basement of Macy's is very high. To install a
+ramp--double-tracked, of course, for vehicles both ascending and
+descending--of any easy practical grade would therefore have required a
+great deal of valuable floor-space. So, for the moment, they dismissed
+the ramp idea for motor trucks and held to that of elevators. The Boston
+Store in Chicago solved the problem. It is the same store that has
+successfully installed descending escalators, floor upon floor.
+
+Out of the sub-basement of that Chicago store the Macy investigators saw
+thirty-two cars come, all inside of eight minutes; and all upon
+elevators. That settled the question for the big shop in Herald Square.
+Elevators it should have for this service, and elevators it will have,
+even for the big five-ton trucks that go into the deep sub-basement for
+the hampers for suburban delivery as well as large special packages.
+Furniture, however, as in the present store, will be both sold and
+packed and shipped from an upper floor of its own, the large truck
+elevators to the eleventh floor being also used for this purpose.
+
+The sub-basement of the new plan is in so many respects a replica of the
+main basement delivery service that it requires no special description
+here. It, too, has been designed, not only amply large enough for the
+present needs of Macy's, but for that mythical traffic of 1932, which we
+now know is really not mythical at all, but a matter of rather exact
+scientific reckoning.
+
+
+Architects' drawings are indeed fascinating things; doubly fascinating
+when one comes to consider all the infinite thought and labor and
+patience which have entered into their fabrication. I shall not,
+however, carry you further into the details of the plans for the new
+Macy's. You now have seen enough to give you at least a fair idea of the
+main structure for the enlarged store. You have seen how carefully and
+how ingeniously the great main traffic streams through the huge edifice
+are to be carried--to be brought together, when they needs must be
+brought together, and kept apart when properly they should be kept
+apart. Add, in your own mind, to this fundamental structure, all of the
+refinements which you expect to find in the modern retail establishment
+today and you may begin to depict for yourself the Macy's that is to
+come--to construct for yourself at least a partial vision of the year
+1932 in Herald Square.
+
+
+
+
+II. L'Envoi
+
+
+Yesterday Milady of Manhattan in her hoopskirt and crinoline; today
+Milady in thick furs above her knees and thin silk stockings and
+high-heeled pumps below them: tomorrow....
+
+Why will you persist in dragging in tomorrow? Is it not enough to know
+that tomorrow Milady of the great metropolis of the Americas will still
+be shopping? You may set tomorrow a year hence, twenty years hence,
+fifty years in the misty future that is to come upon us and still make
+that statement in perfect safety. And twenty years, fifty years, a
+hundred years hence, even, Macy's should still be in Herald Square ready
+to wait upon her needs and upon the needs of her men and children, too.
+
+To forecast far into the future is indeed dangerous. Only rash men
+undertake it. We know that 1932 is one thing, but that 1952 or even 1942
+is quite another one. A savant of uptown Manhattan, who has a nice
+facility for handling census figures, not long ago predicted that by
+1950 little old New York would hold within its boundaries sixteen
+million people. He may know. I don't. And you are privileged to take
+your guess--with one man's guess almost if not quite as good as
+another's.
+
+A New York of sixteen million souls is an alluring picture, if a
+bewildering one, withal. It is a fairly bewildering town with its six
+million of today. But I have not the slightest doubt that Rowland Hussey
+Macy said the selfsame thing of the New York of six hundred and fifty
+thousand souls, to which he first came, away back there in 1858.
+
+And the Macy's of 1952, serving its fair and goodly portion of those
+sixteen million souls, is indeed an alluring picture, which you may best
+construct for yourself. The store, itself, does well when it plans so
+definitely for 1932. Nevertheless, before you finally close the pages of
+this book, I should like to have it record a final picture upon your
+mind. It is the picture of a really great store. It runs from Broadway
+to Seventh Avenue, perhaps all the way to Eighth. It begins at
+Thirty-fourth Street and runs north--one, two, possibly even three or
+four blocks, or goodly portions of them. It employs ten, twelve, fifteen
+thousand workers. There are a thousand motor trucks in its delivery
+service--and a hundred aëroplanes as well. It has sixteen sub-stations,
+instead of six. Its own delivery limits run north to Peekskill and east
+to Bridgeport and to Huntington and west and south through at least half
+of New Jersey.
+
+Yet, above all this new enterprise there still towers the high addition
+which 1923 saw completed and added to the edifice, with the huge and
+flaming word "MACY'S" emblazoned by white electricity upon the blackened
+skies of night, visible all the way from Seventh Avenue to the thickly
+peopled range of the Orange mountains.
+
+"Macy's," whistles the small boy upon the North River ferryboat, who
+has traveled afar with his geography book. "Macy's! That's a regular
+Gibraltar of a store!"
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Romance of a Great Store, by Edward Hungerford
+
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+
+Project Gutenberg's The Romance of a Great Store, by Edward Hungerford
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
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+Title: The Romance of a Great Store
+
+Author: Edward Hungerford
+
+Illustrator: Vernon Howe Bailey
+
+Release Date: February 18, 2012 [EBook #38921]
+
+Language: English
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF A GREAT STORE ***
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+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/coverpage.jpg" width='468' height='700' alt="cover" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="bold2">THE ROMANCE OF A GREAT STORE</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="center"><a name="z005.jpg" id="z005.jpg"></a><img src="images/z005.jpg" width='700' height='431' alt="THE NEW YORK TO WHICH MACY CAME IN 1858" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">THE NEW YORK TO WHICH MACY CAME&mdash;IN 1858<br />
+Looking south from 42d Street&mdash;The old Reservoir and the Crystal Palace in the foreground</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i">[Pg i]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1><span><i>The Romance of a<br />Great Store</i></span><br /><span id="id1"><i>by</i></span> <span><i>Edward Hungerford</i></span></h1>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Author of<br />"The Personality of American Cities," "The Modern Railroad," etc.</i></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Illustrated by<br />Vernon Howe Bailey</i></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>New York<br />Robert M. McBride &amp; Company<br />1922</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii">[Pg ii]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center">COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY<br />ROBERT M. MCBRIDE &amp; CO.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Printed in the United States of America</i></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p class="center">Published, 1922</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[Pg iii]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>To<br />the Men and Women<br />of<br />
+The Great Macy Family<br />Whose Fidelity and Interest,<br />
+Whose Enthusiasm and Ability<br />Have Upbuilded<br />
+A Lasting Institution of Worth<br />in<br />The Heart of a Vast City<br />
+This Book is Affectionately Dedicated<br />by its Author.<br /><br />E. H.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CONTENTS</span></h2>
+
+<table summary="CONTENTS">
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2" class="left"><span class="smaller">CHAPTER</span></td>
+    <td><span class="smaller">PAGE</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2" class="left"><span class="smcap">Introduction</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_ix">ix</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="3" class="center"><i>Yesterday</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>I.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Ancestral Beginnings of Macy's</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>II.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The New York That Macy First Saw</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_7">7</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>III.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Fourteenth Street Days</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_31">31</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>IV.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Coming of Isidor and Nathan Straus</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_47">47</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>V.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Store Treks Uptown</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_63">63</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="3" class="center"><i>Today</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>I.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">A Day in a Great Store</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_87">87</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>II.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Organization in a Modern Store</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_109">109</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>III.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Buying to Sell</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_145">145</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>IV.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Displaying and Selling the Goods</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_163">163</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>V.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Distributing the Goods</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_185">185</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VI.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Macy Family</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_201">201</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VII.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Family at Play</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_233">233</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="3" class="center"><i>Tomorrow</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>I.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">In Which Macy's Prepares to Build Anew</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_255">255</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>II.</td>
+    <td class="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">L'Envoi</span></td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_279">279</a></td>
+  </tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>ILLUSTRATIONS</span></h2>
+
+<table summary="ILLUSTRATIONS">
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">The New York to Which Macy Came&mdash;in 1858</td>
+    <td><a href="#z005.jpg"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left"></td>
+    <td><span class="smaller">FACING PAGE</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">The Beginnings of Macy's</td>
+    <td><a href="#z036.jpg">18</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">The Fourteenth Street Store of Other Days</td>
+    <td><a href="#z054.jpg">34</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">The Herald Square of Ante-Macy Days</td>
+    <td><a href="#z088.jpg">66</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">The Macy's of Today</td>
+    <td><a href="#z106.jpg">82</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">Where Milady of Manhattan Shops</td>
+    <td><a href="#z140.jpg">114</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">The Science of Modern Salesmanship</td>
+    <td><a href="#z238.jpg">210</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">The Summer Home of the Macy Family</td>
+    <td><a href="#z272.jpg">242</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>Introduction</span></h2>
+
+<p>"Caveat emptor," the Romans said, in their day.</p>
+
+<p>"Let the Buyer beware," we would read that phrase, today.</p>
+
+<p>For nearly four thousand years, perhaps longer, <i>caveat emptor</i> ruled
+the hard world of barter. Yet for the past sixty years, or thereabouts,
+a new principle has come into merchandising. You may call it progress,
+call it idealism, call it ethics, call it what you will. I simply call
+it good business.</p>
+
+<p><i>Caveat emptor</i> has become a phrase thrust out of good merchandising. It
+is a pariah. The decent merchant of today despises it. On the contrary
+he prides himself upon the honor of his calling, upon the high value of
+his good name, untarnished. The man or the woman who comes into his
+store may come with the faith or the simplicity of the child. He or she
+may even be bereft of sight, itself&mdash;yet deal in faith and fearlessly.</p>
+
+<p><i>Caveat emptor</i> is indeed a dead phrase.</p>
+
+<p>How and whence came this murder of a commercial derelict?</p>
+
+<p>You may laugh and at first you may scoff, but the fact remains that the
+development of the department<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span> store as we know it in the United States
+today first began some sixty or sixty-five years ago. And almost
+coincidently began the development of a code of morals in merchandising
+such as was all but undreamed of in this land, at any rate up to a
+decade or two before the coming of the Civil War. Not that there were no
+honest merchants in those earlier days of the republic. Oh no, there was
+a plenty of them&mdash;men whose integrity and whose sincerity were as little
+to be doubted as are those same qualities in our best merchants of
+today. Only yesterday these honest men were in the minority. The moral
+code in merchandising was yet inchoate, unformed.</p>
+
+<p>It might remain unformed, intangible today if it had not been for the
+coming of the department store. The enormous consolidation and
+concentration that went to make these enterprises possible brought with
+them a competition&mdash;bitter and to the end unflinching&mdash;which hesitated
+at no legitimate means for the gaining of its end. But competition
+quickly found that the best means&mdash;the finest battle-sword&mdash;was honest
+commercial practice, and so girded that sword to its belt and bade
+<i>caveat emptor</i> begone.</p>
+
+<p>The great department store around which these chapters are written
+assumes for itself, neither yesterday, today nor tomorrow, any monopoly
+of this virtue of commercial honesty. But it does assert, and will
+continue to assert that it was at least among the pioneers in the
+complete banishment of <i>caveat emptor</i>, that its founder&mdash;the man whose
+name it so proudly bears today&mdash;fought for these high principles when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span>
+the fighting was at the hardest and the temptations to move in the other
+direction were most alluring.</p>
+
+<p>Of these principles you shall read in the oncoming chapters of this
+book. There are many, they are varied&mdash;in some respects they vary
+greatly from those upon which other and equally successful and equally
+honest merchandising establishments are today operated. Macy's has no
+quarrel with any of its competitors. It merely writes upon the record
+that, for itself, it is quite satisfied with the merchandising
+principles that its founder and the men who came after him saw fit to
+establish. Upon those the store has prospered&mdash;and prospered greatly.
+And because of such prosperity&mdash;social as well as commercial&mdash;because it
+feels that its selling principles are quite as valuable to its patrons
+as to the store itself, it has no intention of giving change to them.
+Macy's of today is like in soul and spirit to Macy's of yesterday;
+Macy's of tomorrow is planned to be like unto the Macy's of today&mdash;only
+vastly larger in its scope and influence.</p>
+
+<p>For the convenience of the reader this book has been divided into three
+great parts, or books. Time has formed the logical factor of division.
+Time, as in the theater, forms these three books, or acts&mdash;Yesterday,
+Today, Tomorrow. They move in sequence. The stage-hands are placing the
+setting for the New York of yesterday&mdash;the New York that already has
+begun to fade, far from the eyes of even the oldest of the humans who
+shall come to read these pages. It is a charming New York, this American
+city of the late 'fifties, the city whose ladies go shopping in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span>hoopskirts and in crinoline. It has dignity, taste, bustle, enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>But anon of these. The stage is set. The director's foot comes stamping
+down upon the boards. The curtain rises. The first act begins.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span><i>Yesterday</i></span></h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>I. The Ancestral Beginnings of Macy's</span></h2>
+
+<p>Interwoven into the history of the ancient island of Nantucket are the
+names and annals of some of the earliest of our American families&mdash;the
+Coffins, the Eldredges, the Myricks, and the Macys. Their forbears came
+from England to America fully ten generations ago. They settled upon the
+remote and wind-swept isle and there to this day many of their
+descendants ply their vocations and have their homes.</p>
+
+<p>In the beginning the vocation of these settlers was found to lie almost
+invariably upon a single path; and that path led down to the sea. They
+were sea-faring folk, those early residents of Nantucket: God-fearing,
+simple of speech and of action, yet mentally keen and alert. And from
+them sprang the segment of a race which was soon to grow far beyond the
+narrow barriers of the little island and to spread its splendid
+enthusiasm and energy far into a newborn land.</p>
+
+<p>Among the very earliest of these Nantucket settlers was one Thomas Macy,
+who, from the beginning, took his fair place in the development of its
+fishing and its whaling industries. From him came a long line of
+descendants&mdash;a clean and sturdy record&mdash;and in the eighth generation of
+these there was born&mdash;on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> August 29, 1822&mdash;as the son of John and Eliza
+Myrick Macy, the man whose name chiefly concerns this book&mdash;Rowland
+Hussey Macy.</p>
+
+<p>The record of this young man's youth is not so consequential as to be
+worth the setting down in detail. It is enough perhaps to know that at
+the age of fifteen he followed the common Nantucket custom of those days
+and went away to sea; upon a whaling voyage which was to consume four
+long years before again he saw the belfried white spire of the South
+Church rising through the trees back of the harbor and which was to make
+him in fact as well as in name, Captain Macy.</p>
+
+<p>Three years later he married. He chose for his wife, Miss Louisa
+Houghton, of Fairlees, Vermont. Their pleasant married life continued
+for thirty-three years, until the day of Mr. Macy's death. Mrs. Macy
+lived for several years afterwards, dying in New York City in 1886. They
+had three children, one of whom, Mrs. James F. Sutton, the widow of the
+founder of the American Art Galleries in New York, still survives and is
+living at her suburban home in Westchester County.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the simple statistical record of the man who lived to be one of
+New York's great merchant princes, who, upon the simple foundations of
+good merchandising, of strength, integrity and initiative, upbuilded one
+of the great and most distinctive businesses of the greatest city of the
+two American continents. Back of it is another record&mdash;not so simple or
+so quickly told. It is the story of successes and of sorrows, of
+triumphs and of failures&mdash;but in the end of the final<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> triumph of New
+England conscience and energy and vision. It is with this last story
+that this book has its beginning.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It was not many moons after his marriage that young Macy started in
+business, in store-keeping in Boston. He was convinced that the sea was
+no calling for a married man, and, with the Yankee's native taste for
+trading, decided that the career of the merchant was the one that had
+the largest appeal to him. So he made immediate steps in that direction.</p>
+
+<p>The record of that early Boston store is meagre. It is enough, perhaps,
+to say here and now that it failed, and that if its collapse had really
+dismayed the young merchant, this book would not have been written. As
+it was, the failure seemed but to stir him toward renewed efforts. He
+stood in the back of his little store and flipped a coin. It was a habit
+of his in all periods of indecision.</p>
+
+<p>"Heads up, and I go north," said he. "Tails and next week I start
+south."</p>
+
+<p>Heads came. And Rowland Macy and his wife went north. They went to
+Haverhill and there upon the bank of the Merrimac he set up his second
+store. This venture was far more successful than the first. It
+prospered, if not in large degree, at least far enough to encourage its
+proprietor. But he did not cease regretting that the coin had not come
+tails-up. Then he would have gone to New York. For New York, he was
+convinced, was about to become the undisputed metropolis of the land.
+Already it was going ahead,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> by leaps and bounds. And men who slipped
+into it quickly and who possessed the right qualities of commercial
+ability would go ahead quickly. Rowland Macy was convinced of this.</p>
+
+<p>He was not a man who lost much time in vain repinings. To New York he
+would go. He suited action to thought, sold his Haverhill business at a
+fair profit, again bundled his wife and small family together and set
+out for the metropolis of the New World.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>II. The New York That Macy First Saw</span></h2>
+
+<p>In 1858 New York was just beginning to come into its own. It was ceasing
+to be an overgrown town&mdash;half village, half city&mdash;and was attaining a
+real metropolitanism. It had already reached a population of 650,000
+persons, and was adding to that number at the rate of from twelve
+thousand to fifteen thousand annually. Its real and personal property
+was assessed at upward of $513,000,000. New building was going apace at
+a fearful rate. Already the town was fairly closely builded up to
+Forty-ninth Street, and was paved to Forty-second. Above it up on
+Manhattan Island were many suburban villages: Bloomingdale, where Mayor
+Fernando Wood had his residence, upon a plot about the size of the
+present crossing of Broadway and Seventy-second Street, Yorkville,
+Harlem and Manhattanville. To reach the first two of these communities
+one could take certain of the horse railroads. John Stephenson had
+perfected his horse-car and these modern equipages&mdash;how quaint and
+old-fashioned they would seem today&mdash;were already plying in Second,
+Third, Sixth, Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Slowly but surely they were
+displacing the omnibuses, which dated back more than half a century. A
+goodly number of these still remained, however; twenty-six lines
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>employing in all 489 separate stages&mdash;New York certainly was a
+considerable town.</p>
+
+<p>To reach the more remote communities of Manhattan Island&mdash;Harlem or
+Manhattanville&mdash;one took the steam-cars: either the trains of the Hudson
+River Railroad in the little old station at Chambers Street and West
+Broadway, from which they proceeded up to the west side of the island
+and, as to this day, through a goodly portion of Tenth Avenue, or else
+the trains of the New York &amp; Harlem, or the New York &amp; New Haven, from
+their separate terminals back of the City Hall and Canal Street up
+through Fourth Avenue, the tunnel under Yorkville Hill and thence across
+the Harlem Plain to the river of the same name. A little later these
+railroads were to consolidate their terminals, in a huge block-square
+structure at Madison and Fourth Avenues, Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh
+Streets, the forerunner of the present Madison Square Garden; but the
+first of the three successive Grand Central Stations was not to come
+until 1871.</p>
+
+<p>Fifth Avenue, too, was just beginning to come into its own. Some of the
+handsome homes in the lower reaches of that thoroughfare and upon the
+northern edge of Washington Square which have been suffered to remain
+until this day had already been built and an exodus had begun to them
+from the older houses to the south. All of the churches were gone from
+down town with but a few exceptions, the most conspicuous of which were
+the two Episcopalian churches in Broadway&mdash;Trinity and St. Paul's&mdash;the
+Roman Catholic Church of St. Peter's in Barclay Street, St. George's in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
+Beekman, the North Dutch in William, the Middle Dutch in Nassau and the
+Brick Presbyterian, also in Beekman Street. This last, in fact, had
+already been sold for secular purposes and had been abandoned. The
+congregation was building a new house up in the fields at Fifth Avenue
+and Thirty-eighth Street, a step which was regarded by its older members
+as extremely radical and precarious, to put it mildly. The ancient home
+of the Middle Dutch Reformed had also gone for secular purposes. In it
+was housed the New York Post Office, already a brisk place, which soon
+was to outgrow its overcrowded quarters and to expand into its ugly
+citadel at the apex of the City Hall Park.</p>
+
+<p>The two great fires&mdash;the one in 1833 and the other in 1845&mdash;had removed
+from the lower portions of the city many of their more ancient and
+unsightly structures. The rebuilding which had followed them gave to the
+growing town much larger structures of a finer and more dignified
+architecture. Six and seven story buildings were quite common. This
+represented the practical limitations of a generation which knew not
+elevators, although the new Fifth Avenue Hotel which already was being
+planned upon the site of the old Hippodrome, at Broadway and
+Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Streets, was soon to have the first of
+these contraptions that the world had ever seen.</p>
+
+<p>Gone, too, were other old landmarks of downtown&mdash;some of them in their
+day distinctly famous&mdash;the City Hall, the Union Hotel, the Tontine
+Coffee House, the Bridewell and the reservoir of the Manhattan Company
+in Chambers Street. The new Croton Works, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> their wonderful
+aqueduct, the High Bridge, upon which it crossed the ravine of the
+Harlem, and the dual reservoirs at Forty-second Street and at
+Eighty-sixth, had rendered this last structure obsolete. The State
+Prison had disappeared from its former site at the foot of East
+Twenty-third Street. A new group of structures at Sing Sing had replaced
+the old upon the island of Manhattan.</p>
+
+<p>Even then the elegant New York was moving rapidly uptown. Union Square,
+still known, however, to older New Yorkers as Union Place, was the heart
+of its life and fashion. It was lined by the fine houses of the elect
+and two of the most superb hotels of the metropolis, the Brevoort and
+the Union Square, while the Clarendon, which was destined soon to house
+the young Prince of Wales, stood but a block away. At Irving Place and
+Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets had just been completed the new Academy
+of Music. New York at last had a real opera-house, with a stage and
+fittings large enough and adequate to present music-drama upon a scale
+equal to that of the larger European capitals. She had plenty of
+theaters, too: the Broadway, the Bowery, Laura Keene's, Niblo's Garden,
+and Wood &amp; Christy's Negro Minstrels, chief amongst them. While down at
+the point where Chatham Street (now Park Row) debouched into Broadway,
+Barnum's Museum already stood, with its gay bannered front beckoning
+eagerly to the countrymen.</p>
+
+<p>And how the countrymen did flock into New York&mdash;in those serene and busy
+days before the coming of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> tragic war. New York harbor was a busy
+place. For not all of them came by the well-filled trains of the three
+railroads that reached in upon Manhattan Island. There were
+sailing-ships and steamboats a plenty bumping their noses against the
+overcrowded piers of the growing city; ferries from Brooklyn and
+Williamsburgh and Jersey City and Hoboken and Astoria and Staten Island;
+steamboat lines down the harbor to Amboy and to Newark and to
+Elizabethtown; and up the Sound to Fall River, to Providence and to the
+Connecticut ports. But the finest steamers of all plied the Hudson.
+There the rivalry was keenest, the opportunities for profit apparently
+the greatest. And despite the fact that New York was already the port of
+many important ocean lines&mdash;the Cunard, the Collins, the Glasgow, the
+Havre, the Hamburg and the Panama steamers, for the fast-growing fame of
+the metropolis of the New World was already attracting great numbers of
+travelers from overseas&mdash;the fact also remains that when the <i>Daniel
+Drew</i>, of the Albany Night Line, was first built, in 1863, she exceeded
+in size and in passenger-carrying capacity any ocean liner plying in and
+out of the port of New York.</p>
+
+<p>So came the countrymen and the residents of the other smaller towns and
+cities of the land, along with many, many foreigners, to this new vortex
+of humanity. They found their way, not alone to the hotels of the Union
+Square district, but to such equally distinguished houses as the Astor,
+the Brevoort, the St. Nicholas, the Metropolitan, the New York. They
+went to the theaters and almost invariably they climbed the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>brown-stone
+spire of old Trinity, in order to drink in the view that it commanded:
+the wide sweep of busy city close at hand, the more distant ranges of
+the upper and lower harbors, the North and the East Rivers, Long Island,
+Staten Island, New Jersey and the western slopes of the Orange
+Mountains. And some, loving New York and realizing the fair
+opportunities that it offered, came to stay.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In among this throng of folk who rushed into the town in 1858 there
+came&mdash;among those who came to stay&mdash;Rowland H. Macy. The partial success
+of his Haverhill store, to an extent overbalancing the initial failure
+in Boston, had brought him into the metropolis of America, the city of
+wider, if indeed not unlimited opportunity. In those days there were few
+large stores in New York; nothing to be in the least compared with its
+great department stores of today. One heard of its hotels, its churches,
+its theaters, its banks, but very little indeed of its mercantile
+establishments. They were, for the most part, very small and exceedingly
+individual. They were known as shops and well deserved that title. There
+were a few exceptions, of course: A. T. Stewart's&mdash;still on Broadway
+between Worth and Chambers Streets&mdash;Ridley's, Lord &amp; Taylor's and John
+Daniell's in Grand Street (this last at Broadway), McNamee &amp; Company's,
+Arnold, Constable &amp; Co., McCreery's, Hearn's, and one or two others,
+perhaps, of particular distinction.</p>
+
+<p>It is hardly possible that Macy, as he found his way into these larger
+establishments, believed that he might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> ever in his own enterprise match
+their elegance and distinction. It is difficult to believe that in those
+very earliest days he had the vision of a department store. At any rate
+the extremely modest establishment which he opened at 204 Sixth Avenue,
+between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets, in conjunction with his
+brother-in-law, Samuel S. Houghton, devoted itself at first, and for a
+long time afterward, exclusively to the sale of fancy goods. For
+specializing was the fashion of that day and generation; John Daniell
+sold nothing but ribbons and trimmings then; Aiken laces, and Stewart's
+chiefly dress-goods.</p>
+
+<p>Yet Macy had vision. The department store idea must slowly have forced
+itself into his mind. For, five years later, we find his small business,
+originally on Sixth Avenue, just a door or two below Fourteenth Street,
+expanding so rapidly that he was forced to secure more room for it. And
+this despite the fact that not only was he two long blocks distant from
+Broadway but the particular corner which he had chosen for his store was
+known locally as unlucky&mdash;two or three other stores had gone bankrupt on
+it. Macy had no intention of going bankrupt. He added to his original
+shop the store at 62 West Fourteenth Street, at right angles to and
+connecting in the rear with it, and in this he installed a department of
+hats and millinery. He was beginning to come and come quickly&mdash;this
+country merchant to whom at first New York refused to extend either
+recognition or credit.</p>
+
+<p>Now was the complete department store idea fairly launched, for the
+first time in the history of America,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> if not in the entire world. Yet,
+when one came to fair and final analysis, it represented nothing else
+than the country-store of the small town or cross-roads greatly expanded
+in volume. And so, after all, it is barely possible that the canny New
+Englander may have had the germ of his surpassing idea implanted in his
+mind, a full decade or more before he had the opportunity to make use of
+it. Incidentally, it may be set down here, that Mr. Macy in the rapidly
+recurring trips to Paris which he found necessary to make in the
+interest of his business developed a great admiration for the Bon March&eacute;
+of that city. He studied its methods carefully and adopted them whenever
+he found the opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>From hats to dress-goods&mdash;the addition of still another adjoining store
+was inevitable&mdash;came as a fairly natural sequence. And one finds the
+successful young merchant who had had the enterprise and the initiative
+to leave Broadway&mdash;supposedly the supreme shopping street of the New
+York of that day&mdash;laying in his stocks of alpaca, of black bombazine, of
+silks and muslins, sheetings and pillow-cases and all that with these
+go. The idea once born was adhered to. As it broadened it gained
+prosperity. And as a natural sequence there came gradually and with a
+further steady enlargement of the premises, jewelry, toilet-goods and
+the so-called Vienna goods. Toys were added in 1869, and gradually
+house-furnishing goods, confectionery, soda water, books and stationery,
+boys' clothing, ladies' underwear, crockery, glassware, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>silverware,
+boots and shoes, dress-goods, dressmaking, ready-to-wear clothing, and,
+in due time, a restaurant.</p>
+
+<p>For many years it was the only store in town to carry soaps and
+perfumes. This, of itself, brought to the store a clientele of its
+own&mdash;the most beautiful women of New York, among the most notable of
+them, Rose Eytinge, the actress, who was just then coming to the
+pinnacle of her fame.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Macy, accompanied by his wife and daughter&mdash;the latter of whom is
+still alive at an advanced age&mdash;took up his residence at first over the
+store and then, a little later, in a small house in West Twelfth Street,
+within easy walking distance of his place of business. From this he
+afterward moved to a larger residence in West Forty-ninth Street. He was
+a man of sturdy build, of more than medium height and thick-set,
+extremely affable in manner. He wore a heavy beard, and an old employee
+of the store was wont to liken his appearance to that of the poet,
+Longfellow. His tendency toward black cigars and to appearing in the
+store in his shirt-sleeves did not heighten the resemblance, however.</p>
+
+<p>He was a man of almost indomitable will. Such a quality was quite as
+necessary for success in those days as in these. The modern ideas of
+beneficence and generosity to the employee were little dreamed of then.
+The successful merchant, like the successful manufacturer or the
+successful banker, drove his men and drove them hard. Macy was no
+exception to this rule. If he had been, it is doubtful if he would have
+lasted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> long. For while '58 was a year of seeming prosperity in New York
+it also followed directly one of the notable panic-years in the
+financial history of the United States and was soon to be followed by
+four years of internecine struggle in the nation&mdash;in which its credit
+and financial resources were to be strained to the utmost.</p>
+
+<p>It is entirely possible that the record of the Macy store might not be
+set down as one of final and overwhelming success, if it had not been
+for the driving force of a woman, who was brought into the organization
+not long after the opening of the original store in lower Sixth Avenue.
+This woman, Margaret Getchell, was also born in Nantucket. She had been
+a school-teacher upon the island, until the loss of one of her eyes
+forced her to seek less confining work. She drifted to New York and,
+taking advantage of a girlhood acquaintance with Mr. Macy, asked him for
+employment in his store. He knew her and was glad to take her in. She,
+in turn, engaged rooms in a flat just over a picture-frame store, in
+Sixth Avenue, across from her employment, so that she might devote every
+possible moment of her time, day and night, to its success.</p>
+
+<p>So was born a real executive&mdash;and in a day when the possibilities of
+women ever becoming business executives were as remote seemingly as that
+they might ever fly. For decades after she had gone, she left the
+impress of her remarkable personality upon the store. An attractive
+figure she was: a small, slight woman, with masses of glorious hair and
+a pert upturn to her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> nose, while the loss of her eye was overcome, from
+the point of view of appearance at least, by the wearing of an
+artificial one, which she handled so cleverly that many folk knew her
+for a long time without realizing her misfortune.</p>
+
+<p>At every turn, Margaret Getchell was a clever woman. Once when Mr. Macy
+had imported a wonderful mechanical singing-bird&mdash;a thing quite as
+unusual in that early day as was the phonograph when it came upon the
+market&mdash;and its elaborate mechanism had slipped out of order, it was
+she, with the aid of a penknife, a screw-driver and a pair of pliers&mdash;I
+presume that she also used a hair-pin&mdash;who took it entirely apart and
+put it together again. And at another time she trained two cats to
+permit themselves to be arrayed in doll's clothing and to sleep for
+hours in twin-cribs, to the great amusement and delectation of the
+visitors to the store. Later she caused a photograph to be made of the
+exhibit, which was retailed in great quantities to the younger
+customers. Miss Getchell was nothing if not businesslike.</p>
+
+<p>It was her keen, commercial acumen that made her alert in the heart
+center of the early store&mdash;the cashier's office. She tolerated neither
+discrepancies nor irregularities there. There it was that the New
+England school-ma'm showed itself most keenly. Did a saleswoman
+overcharge a patron two dollars? And did the cashier accept and pass the
+check? Then the cashier must pay the two dollars out of her meagre
+pay-envelope on Saturday night. "Overs" were treated the same as
+"unders." It made no difference that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> store was already ahead two
+dollars on the transaction. Discipline was the thing. Discipline would
+keep that sort of offense from being repeated many times, and Macy's
+from ever being given the unsavory reputation of making a practice of
+overcharging.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't ever erase a figure or change it, no matter what seems to be the
+logical reason in your own mind," she kept telling her cashiers. "The
+very act implies dishonesty."</p>
+
+<p>So does the New England conscience ever lean backward.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is related of this same Margaret Getchell that when a little and
+comparatively friendless girl had been admitted to the cashier's cage&mdash;a
+decided innovation in those days&mdash;and had been found in an apparent
+peculation of three dollars and promptly discharged by Mr. Macy, Miss
+Getchell dropped everything else and went to work on behalf of the
+little cashier. Intuitively she felt that another of her sex in the cage
+had made the theft&mdash;a young woman who had come into the store from a
+prominent up-state family to learn merchandising. The up-state young
+woman was fond of dress. Her dress demands far exceeded her salary. Of
+that Miss Getchell was sure.</p>
+
+<p>Yet intuition is one thing and proof quite another. For a fortnight the
+store manager worked upon her surpassing problem. She induced Macy to
+suspend for a time his order of discharge and she kept putting the women
+cashiers in relays in the cage, to suit her own fancy and her own plans.
+The petty thefts continued. But not for long. The plans worked. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+altered checks were found to be all in the time of one of the
+cashiers&mdash;and that was not the one who had been discharged. Miss
+Getchell drove to the home of Miss Upper New York and there, in the
+presence of her family, got both confession and reparation.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="z036.jpg" id="z036.jpg"></a><img src="images/z036.jpg" width='700' height='463' alt="THE BEGINNINGS OF MACY'S" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">THE BEGINNINGS OF MACY'S</p>
+
+<p class="bold">The original small store in Sixth Avenue just south of 14th Street. Here
+the business starts in 1858</p>
+
+<p>She was forever seeking new lines of activities for the store&mdash;branching
+out here, branching out there, and turning most of these new ventures
+into lines of resounding profits. "If necessary, we shall handle
+everything except one," she is reputed to have said. And upon being
+asked what that one was, she replied brusquely, "Coffins." Once she
+embarked Macy upon the grocery business&mdash;whole decades before the
+establishment of the present huge grocery department&mdash;and while
+eventually the store was forced to drop for a time this line of
+merchandise, she succeeded in taking so much business from New York's
+then leading firm of grocers that they came to Macy, himself, and begged
+him to drop the competition.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In the retailing world of that day, tradition and habit still governed
+and with an iron hand. Stores opened early in the morning and kept open
+until late in the evening, and did this six days of the week. Their
+workers rose and left their homes&mdash;before dawn in many months of the
+year&mdash;and did not return to them until well after dark. Yet they did not
+complain, for that was the fashion of the times and was recognized as
+such. Wages were as low as the hours were long. But food-costs also were
+low, and rentals but a tiny fraction of their present figure. The
+apartment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> house had not yet come to New York. It was a development set
+for a full two decades later. The store-workers lived in
+boarding-houses, in small furnished rooms or with their families. The
+greater part of them resided within walking distance of their
+employment.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Macy had all of his fair share of traditional New England thrift.
+One of the favorite early anecdotes of "the old man," as his
+fellow-workers were prone to call him, and with no small show of
+affection, concerned his refusal to permit shades to be placed upon the
+gas-jets in the store, saying that he paid for the light and so wanted
+the full value for his money. He was skeptical, at the best, about
+innovations. Moreover, necessity compelled him to keep close watch upon
+the pennies. At one time he reduced the weekly wages of his cash-girls
+from two dollars to one-dollar-and-a-half, saying that the war was over
+and he could no longer afford to pay war wages. Yet when a courageous
+sales-clerk went to him and told him that she could not possibly live
+any longer upon her weekly wage of three dollars, he promptly raised it
+a dollar, without argument or hesitation. And the following week he
+automatically extended the same increase to every other clerk in the
+store.</p>
+
+<p>Labor conditions in that day were hard, indeed. The working hours, as I
+have already said, were long. In regular times the store hours were from
+eight to six, instead of from nine to five-thirty, as today. On busy
+days the clerks worked an extra hour, putting the stock in place, while
+in the fortnight which preceded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> Christmas the store was open
+evenings&mdash;supposedly until ten o'clock, as a matter of fact, often until
+long after ten, when the workers were well toward the point of
+exhaustion. Other conditions of their labor were slightly better. There
+were no seats in the aisles and conversation between the clerks was
+punishable by discharge. They might make their personal purchases only
+on Friday mornings, between eight and nine o'clock, and they received no
+discount whatsoever. In Mr. Macy's day the only discounts ever given
+were to the New York Juvenile Asylum in Thirteenth Street nearby, which
+was an institution peculiarly close to his heart.</p>
+
+<p>There were no lockers in the early days of the old store. In one of its
+upper floors several small rooms were set aside as a crude sort of
+cloak-room for the employees. A few nails around the walls sufficed for
+their outer wraps but there were never enough of these nails to go
+around. One of the clerks was chosen to come early and stay late in
+order to supervise these rooms. Inasmuch as there was neither glory nor
+remuneration in this task, it was not eagerly sought after.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, here was the enlightened day at hand when women would and
+did work in stores&mdash;not alone in great numbers but in a great majority
+and in many cases to the exclusion of men. It was one of the sweeping
+economic changes that the Civil War brought in its train. When the men
+must go to fight in the armies of the North, women must take their
+places&mdash;for only a little while it seemed up to that time. Yet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> so well
+did they do much of men's work, that their retention in many of their
+positions came as a very natural course. So while the decade that
+preceded the Civil War found few or no professions open to women&mdash;save
+those of teaching or of domestic employment&mdash;the one which followed it
+found them coming in increasing numbers, into a steadily increasing
+number and variety of endeavors.</p>
+
+<p>So it was then that the great war of the last century brought women
+behind the counters of the stores&mdash;Macy's was no exception to the
+invasion. They came to stay. And stay they have, to this very day, even
+though most of the New York stores still retain men to a considerable
+extent in some of their departments&mdash;notably those devoted to the sale
+of furniture, dress-goods and boots and shoes. For some varieties of
+stock the male clerk still is the most suitable and successful sort of
+salesman.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In his store in Haverhill, Mr. Macy had adopted as his trade-mark a
+rooster bearing the motto in his beak, "While I live, I'll crow." For
+his nascent enterprise in New York, however, he adopted a different and,
+to him at least, a far more significant device, which to this day
+remains the symbol of the great enterprise which still bears his name.</p>
+
+<p>It was a star, a star of red, if you will. And back of that simple
+symbol rests a story: It seems that in the days of his youth when he
+sailed the northern seas in a whaling ship he had gradually acquired
+such proficiency that he was made first mate and then master.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> It was in
+the earlier capacity, however, and upon an occasion when he was given a
+trick at the wheel that Macy found himself in a thick fog off a New
+England port&mdash;one version of the story says Boston, the other New
+Bedford. To catch the familiar lights of the harbor gateways was out of
+the question. The cloud banks lay low against the shore. Overhead there
+was a rift or two, and in one of them, well ahead of the vessel's prow,
+there gleamed a brilliant star.</p>
+
+<p>For the young skipper this was literally a star of hope. His quick wit
+made it a guiding star. By it he steered his course and so successfully
+into the safety of the harbor that the star became for him thereafter
+the symbol of success. With the strange insistency that was inherent in
+the man, he was wont to say that the failure of his Boston store was due
+to the fact that he had not there adopted the star as his trade-mark. He
+made no such mistake in his New York enterprise. The star became the
+forefront of his business. And to this day it is a prominent feature of
+the main fa&ccedil;ade of the great establishment which bears his name.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Macy never lost his boyhood affection for the sea&mdash;the one thing
+inborn of his ancestral blood. It is related of him that one morning on
+his way to the store he found a small silver anchor lying on the
+sidewalk, picked it up, placed it in his pocket and thereafter carried
+it until the day of his death, regarding it as a talisman of real value.
+There was one souvenir of his early connection of which he was greatly
+ashamed, however. As a boy he had permitted his shipmates to tattoo the
+backs of his hands. In later years he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>regretted this exceedingly, and
+developed a habit of talking to strangers with the palms of his hands
+held uppermost, so that they might not see the tattoo marks.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>From the very beginning Macy adopted certain fixed and definite policies
+for his business. These showed not alone the vision but the breadth and
+bigness of the man. For one of the most important of them he decided
+that in his business he would have cash transactions only. This applied
+both ways&mdash;to the purchase of his merchandise as well as to its retail
+sale. It is a bed-rock principle that has come down to today as a
+foundation of the business that he founded. It is perhaps the one rule
+of it, from which there is no deviation, at any time or under any
+circumstance. It is related that a full quarter of a century after Macy
+had first adopted this principle, one of the then partners of the
+concern was approached by a warm personal friend, a man of high
+financial standing, who said that he wished to make a rather elaborate
+purchase that morning, but not having either cash or a check handy,
+asked for an exception to the no-credit rule. The partner shook his
+head, smiled, rather sadly, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"No, Mr. Blank, I cannot do that, even for you. But I can tell you what
+I can, and shall do."</p>
+
+<p>And so saying he reached for his own check-book, wrote out a personal
+voucher for two hundred dollars, stepped over to the cashier's office,
+had it cashed and presented the money, in crisp green bills to his
+friend.</p>
+
+<p>"You can repay me, at your convenience," was all that he said.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p><p>Convinced that trust&mdash;as he insisted upon calling credit&mdash;was a
+millstone upon the neck of the merchant&mdash;let alone a struggling man of
+thirty-five who previously had known failure&mdash;Macy insisted upon
+matching his purchases for any ensuing week close to his sales for the
+preceding one. He did all his own buying at first; and for a number of
+years thereafter he employed no professional buyers whatsoever. In this
+way he kept his margin closely in hand and at all times well within the
+range of safety. There was little of the spirit of the gambler in him.
+It would not have sat well with his Yankee blood.</p>
+
+<p>A second principle of the store in those early days which has come
+easily and naturally down to these&mdash;when it is accepted retailing
+principle everywhere&mdash;was the marking of the selling price upon each and
+every article. It seems odd to think today that the installing of such a
+fair and commonsense principle should once have been regarded as a
+stroke of daring initiative in merchandising. Yet the fact remains that
+in the days when Macy's was young, in the average store one bargained
+and bargained constantly. There was no single price set upon any
+article. Even when one went into as fine and showy a store as New York
+might boast one bartered. <i>Caveat emptor</i>, "Let the buyer beware," was
+seemingly the dominating retail motto of those days.</p>
+
+<p>But not in Mr. Macy's. The selling price went on every article displayed
+in the store in those days and in such plain and readable figures that
+any fairly educated person might clearly understand. This principle
+alone<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> was one of the huge factors that went toward the early and
+immediate success of the enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>There was still another merchandising idea born of that great and
+fertile New England brain that needs to be set down at this time. For
+many years a notable feature of the advertising of the Macy store has
+been in the peculiar shading of its prices&mdash;at forty-nine cents or
+ninety-eight, or at $1.98 or $4.98 or $9.98 rather than in the even
+multiples of dollars. A good many worldly-wise folk have jumped to the
+quick conclusion that this was due to a desire on the part of the store
+to make the selling price of any given article seem a little less than
+it really was. As a matter of fact it was due to nothing of the sort.
+With all of his respect for the honesty of his sales-force, the Yankee
+mind of R. H. Macy took few chances&mdash;even in that regard. He felt that
+in almost every transaction the money handed over by the customer would
+be in even silver coin or bills. To give back the change from an
+odd-figured selling-price the salesman or the saleswoman would be
+compelled to do business with the cashier and so to make a full record
+of the transaction. With the commodities in even dollars and their
+larger fractions the temptation to pocket the entire amount might be
+present.</p>
+
+<p>It required a good deal of logic, or long-distance reasoning, to figure
+out such a possibility and an almost certain safeguard against it. But
+that was Macy. His was not the day of cash-registers or other checking
+devices. The salesman and the saleswoman in a store was still apt to
+find himself or herself an object of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> suspicion on the part of his or
+her employer. Business ethics were still in the making. A long road in
+them was still to be traversed.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Macy's brother-in-law, Mr. Houghton, did not long remain in
+partnership with him, but retired to Boston, where he became senior
+partner of the house of Houghton &amp; Dutton, which is still in existence.
+For a long number of years thereafter Macy conducted his business alone.
+Its steadily increasing growth, however, the multiplication of its
+responsibilities and problems, and his own oncoming years finally caused
+him to admit to partnership on the first day of January, 1877, two of
+his oldest and most valued employees, Abiel T. LaForge and Robert M.
+Valentine. It had long been rumored in the store that Miss Getchell's
+years of faithful service were finally to be rewarded by a real
+partnership in it. But even in 1876, woman's place in modern business
+had not been firmly enough established to permit so radical a step by a
+business house of as large ramifications and responsibilities as Macy's
+had come to be. Yet the point was quickly overcome&mdash;and in a most
+unexpected way. Early in 1876 Miss Getchell became Mr. LaForge's wife.
+And so, in a most active and interested way, she gained at the end a
+real financial interest in the profitable business, in the upbuilding of
+which she had been so large a factor.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. LaForge had been a major in the Northern Army during the Civil War;
+in fact it was there that he had contracted the tuberculosis which was
+to cause<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> his early demise. He had come into the store in the middle of
+the 'seventies as one of its first professional buyers&mdash;being a
+specialist in laces&mdash;and had developed real executive ability. He had
+great affection for things military. And when Mr. Macy told him of the
+uniformed attendants of his beloved Bon March&eacute;, LaForge promptly
+proceeded to place the entire salesforce of Macy's in uniform. Neat
+uniforms they were, too: of a bluish-grey cadet cloth, and with stiff
+upstanding collars of a much darker blue upon the points of which were
+interwoven the familiar device of the bright red star. The Macy uniforms
+did not long remain, however. New York is not Paris. And in that day,
+when uniforms in general were looked upon as something quite foreign to
+the idea of the republic, American labor was particularly averse to
+them.</p>
+
+<p>His important partnership step taken, Mr. Macy began to lay down his
+responsibilities. Despite his great fame and vigorous constitution his
+health had begun to fail under the multiplicity of duties. Again he
+turned toward the sea. He embarked upon a long voyage to Europe; in
+which he was to combine both business and pleasure. From that voyage he
+never returned. His health sank rapidly and he died in Paris, on the
+twenty-ninth day of March, 1877.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Two days later in New York, Mr. LaForge and Mr. Valentine formed a
+partnership, Mr. LaForge, although the younger of the two men, becoming
+the senior member of the firm. It was provided in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> co-partnership
+papers that the business should be continued under the name of R. H.
+Macy &amp; Co., until January 1, 1879; and thereafter under the new firm
+name of LaForge and Valentine. However, Mr. LaForge's death in 1878,
+followed a year later by that of his wife, prevented this scheme from
+being carried out. The question of changing the name of a
+well-established business&mdash;now come to be one of the great enterprises
+of the city of New York&mdash;was never again brought forward. The name of
+Macy had attained far too fine a trade value to be easily dropped, even
+if sentiment had not come into the reckoning. And sentiment still ruled
+the big retail house in lower Sixth Avenue, sentiment demanded that the
+name of one of New York's greatest merchant princes should be henceforth
+perpetuated in the business which he had so solidly founded. And so that
+name continues&mdash;in growing strength and prosperity.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>III. Fourteenth Street Days</span></h2>
+
+<p>By 1883 the Macy store had rounded out its first quarter century of
+existence. The big, comfortable, homely group of red brick buildings on
+Sixth Avenue from Thirteenth to Fourteenth Streets had come to be as
+much a real landmark of New York as the Grand Central Depot, Grace
+Church, Booth's Theater, the Metropolitan Opera House or the equally new
+Casino Theater in upper Broadway. Its founder had been dead for six
+years. But the business marched steadily on&mdash;growing steadily both in
+its scope and in its volume. It already was among the first, if not the
+very first in New York, in the variety and the magnitude of its
+operations. It employed more than fifteen hundred men and women, a great
+growth since 1870 when an early payroll of the store had shown but one
+hundred on its employment list.</p>
+
+<p>Other stores had followed closely upon the heels of Macy's. Stewart's
+had moved up Broadway from Chambers Street to its wonderful square iron
+emporium between Ninth and Tenth Streets, where, after the death of the
+man who had established it, it enjoyed varying success for a long time
+until its final resuscitation by that great Philadelphia merchant, John
+Wanamaker. Benjamin Altman had moved his store from its original
+location on Third Avenue to Sixth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> Avenue and Eighteenth Street, Koch
+was at Nineteenth Street, but Ehrich was still over on Eighth Avenue.
+None of these had been an important merchant in the beginning. But all
+of them, by 1883, were beginning to come into their own. The Sixth
+Avenue shopping district of the 'eighties and the 'nineties was being
+born. Mr. Macy's vision of more than twenty-five years years before was
+being abundantly justified. The new elevated railroad, which formed the
+backbone of Sixth Avenue and which had been completed about a decade
+before, all the way from South Ferry to One Hundred and Fifty-fifth
+Street, had proved a mighty factor in bringing shoppers into it. Mr.
+Macy in 1858 might not have foreseen the coming of this remarkable
+system of rapid transit&mdash;the first of its kind in any large city of the
+world. But he foresaw the coming of both Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth
+Street. There is no doubt of that. He had a habit of reiterating his
+prophecy to all with whom he came in contact.</p>
+
+<p>The prophecy came to pass. Union Square no longer was surrounded by fine
+residences. Trade had invaded it, successfully. Tiffany's, Brentano's,
+<i>The Century's</i> fine publishing house had come to replace the homes of
+the old time New Yorkers. So, too, had Fourteenth Street been
+transformed. Delmonico's was still at one of its Fifth Avenue corners
+and back of it stood, and still stands, the Van Buren residence, a sort
+of Last of the Mohicans in brick and stone and timber and plaster. All
+the rest was business; high-grade business, if you please, and Macy's
+stood in the very heart of it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p><p>We saw, in a preceding chapter, how just before the passing of Mr. Macy
+he had taken into partnership Mr. LaForge and Mr. Valentine. Mr.
+LaForge, as we have just seen, lived hardly a year after Mr. Macy's
+death in Paris, and Mr. Valentine died less than a twelvemonth later&mdash;on
+February 15, 1879. Yet the force and impress of both of these men
+remained with the organization for a long time after their going. Miss
+Prunty, one of the older members of it, still remembers as one of her
+earliest recollections, seeing Mr. LaForge taking groups of the
+cash-girls out to supper during the racking holiday season. The little
+girls were duly grateful. Theirs was a drab existence, at the best; long
+hours and wearying ones. A type that has quite passed out of
+existence&mdash;in these days of automatic carriers&mdash;that old-time cash girl
+in the big store, with her red-checked gingham frock and her hair in
+pig-tails, which had a fashion of sticking straight out from her small
+head. Lunch in a small tin pail and a vast ambition, which led many and
+many a one of them into positions of real trust and responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>The most of them continued in the business of merchandising. They rose
+rapidly to be saleswomen, buyers and department managers&mdash;not alone in
+Macy's; but in the other great stores of the city. A Macy training
+became recognized as a business schooling of the greatest value. While
+at least one of these Macy graduates&mdash;Carrie DeMar&mdash;came to be an
+actress of nation-wide reputation, a comedienne of real merit.</p>
+
+<p>There were times when the existence of these smart, pert little girls
+grew less drab. One of them told me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> not so long ago of the <i>entente
+cordiale</i> which she had upbuilded between Mr. S&mdash;&mdash; and herself; nearly
+fifty years ago.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. S&mdash;&mdash; was the only floorwalker that the store possessed in those
+days," said she. "Mr. Macy had been much impressed by his fine
+appearance and had created the post for him. On duty, he seemed a most
+solemn man. That was a part of his work. Behind it all he was most
+human, however; and sometimes on a hot day in midsummer he would begin
+to think of the cooling lager that flowed at The Grapevine, a few blocks
+down the avenue. That settled it. He would have to slip down there for
+five minutes. And slip down he did, while I stood guard at the
+Thirteenth Street door. I felt that Miss Getchell's far-seeing eye was
+forever upon us or that Mr. Macy might turn up quite unexpectedly.</p>
+
+<p>"In return for all this, Mr. S&mdash;&mdash; would occasionally stand guard while
+I would slip over to John Huyler's bakery at Eighth Avenue and
+Fourteenth Street&mdash;sometimes to get one of his wonderful pies, and other
+times to buy the lovely new candies upon which he was beginning to
+experiment. We were great pals&mdash;S&mdash;&mdash; and I."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Nowadays in the great department stores they order this entire business
+of collecting both cash and packages in a far better fashion. The
+merchant of today has a variety of wondrous mechanical contraptions&mdash;not
+only cash-carriers but cash-registers&mdash;which do the work they once did,
+much more rapidly and efficiently.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> Even in those long ago days of the
+'eighties the Macy store was beginning to install pneumatic tubes for
+carrying the money from the saleswomen at the counters to the high-set
+booths of the head cashiers, who seemingly had come to regard it as a
+mere commodity, to be regarded in as fully impersonal a fashion as boots
+or shoes or sugar or broom-sticks. Put that down as progress for the
+'eighties.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="z054.jpg" id="z054.jpg"></a><img src="images/z054.jpg" width='485' height='700' alt="THE FOURTEENTH STREET STORE OF OTHER DAYS" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">THE FOURTEENTH STREET STORE OF OTHER DAYS</p>
+
+<p class="bold">By the early 'seventies Macy's had absorbed the entire southeastern<br />
+corners of 14th Street and 6th Avenue, and had come to<br />be a fixture of New York</p>
+
+<p>The Macy store prided itself during that second generation, as now, upon
+its willingness to take up innovations, particularly when they showed
+themselves as possessing at least a degree of real worth. Mr. Macy, with
+his old fashioned prejudices against innovations of any sort, was gone.
+His successors took a radically different position in regard to them.
+Here was the electric-light&mdash;that brand-new thing which this young man
+Tom Edison over at Menlo Park was developing so rapidly. It was new. It
+had been well advertised; particularly well advertised for that day and
+generation. How it drew folk, to gaze admiringly upon its hissing
+brilliancy! Ergo! The Macy store must have an electric light. And so in
+the late autumn days of 1878 one of the very first arc lamps to be
+displayed in New York was hung outside the Fourteenth Street front of
+the store and attracted many crowds. It was hardly less than a
+sensation.</p>
+
+<p>In the following autumn arc lamps were placed throughout all the retail
+selling portions of the store. Of course, they were not very dependable.
+Most folk those days thought that they would never so become. The
+store's real reliance was upon its gas-lighting;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> nice, reliable old
+gas. You could depend upon it. The new system was still erratic. So
+figured the mind of the 'eighties.</p>
+
+<p>Soon after the first electric lamps, the store's first telephone was
+installed. It, too, was a great novelty, and the customers of the
+establishment developed a habit of calling up their friends, just so
+that they could say they had used it. Eventually the convenience of the
+device became so apparent that folk stood in queues awaiting their turn
+to use it, and the telephone company requested Macy's to take it out or
+at least to discontinue the practice of using it so freely.</p>
+
+<p>In that day there were no elevators nor for a considerable time
+thereafter. All the store's selling was at first, and for a long time
+thereafter, confined to its basement and to its main-floor. Gradually it
+began to encroach upon small portions of the second story. This afforded
+fairly generous selling space; for it must be remembered that the
+establishment not only filled the entire east side of Sixth Avenue from
+Thirteenth Street to Fourteenth Street but extended back upon each of
+them for more than one hundred and fifty feet. Moreover it was beginning
+slowly to acquire disconnected buildings in the surrounding territory;
+generally for the purpose of manufacturing certain lines of
+merchandise&mdash;a practice which it has almost entirely discontinued in
+these later years. Then it still made certain things that it wished
+fashioned along the lines which its clientele still demanded. And even
+some of the upper floors of the older buildings that formed the main
+store group were partly given over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> to the making of clothing; of
+underwear; and men's shirts and collars in particular.</p>
+
+<p>It was after 1882, according to the memory of Mr. James E. Murphy, a
+salesman in the black silk department, who came to the store in that
+memorable year, that the first elevator was installed in the store. Up
+to that time, as we have just seen, there had been no necessity
+whatsoever for such a machine. But the steadily growing business of the
+store&mdash;there really seemed to be no way of holding Macy's back&mdash;made it
+necessary to use upper floors of the original building for retailing and
+more and more to crowd the manufacturing and other departments into
+outside structures.</p>
+
+<p>So Macy's progressed. It kept its selling methods as well as its stock,
+not only abreast of the times, but a little ahead of them. Miss Fallon,
+who was in the shoe department of those days of the 'eighties, recalls
+that up to that time the shoes had been kept in large chiffoniers&mdash;the
+sizes "2&frac12;" to "3&frac12;" in one drawer, "4" to "5" in the next, and so
+on. This meant that if a clerk was looking for a certain specified
+width&mdash;say "D" or "Double A"&mdash;she must rummage through the entire drawer
+until she came to a pair which had the required size neatly marked upon
+its lining. The mating of the shoes was accomplished by boring small awl
+holes in their backs and tying them neatly together. There was no repair
+shop in the shoe department of that day&mdash;merely an aged shoemaker who
+lived in a basement across Thirteenth Street and to whom shoes for
+repair were despatched almost as rapidly as they came into the store.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span></p><p>These methods seem crude today. But, even in 1883, they were in full
+keeping with the times. Merchandising was still in its swaddling
+clothes; the real science of salesmanship, a thing unknown. Yet men were
+groping through; and some of these men were in Macy's. You might take as
+such a man C. B. Webster, who came to the forefront of the business,
+soon after the deaths of Macy, LaForge and Valentine at the end of its
+second decade. In fact, his actual admission to the partnership preceded
+Mr. Valentine's death by a few months. A while later he married Mr.
+Valentine's widow. And when the last of the old partners was gone his
+was the steering hand upon the brisk and busy ship.</p>
+
+<p>To help him in his work he brought to his right hand Jerome B. Wheeler,
+who was admitted as a full partner April 1, 1879, and who so continued
+until his complete retirement from business, December 31, 1887. Mr.
+Webster continued with the house for a considerably longer time,
+maintaining his active partnership until 1896 when he sold his interest
+in the business to his partners. He continued, however, to retain his
+private office in the Macy store, coming north with it from Fourteenth
+Street to Thirty-fourth in 1902, and, until his death four or five years
+ago, staying close beside the enterprise in which he had been so large a
+creative factor.</p>
+
+<p>Webster and Wheeler are, then, the names most prominently connected with
+the second era of the store's growth and activity. They were bound to
+the founder of the house by blood-ties and by marriage.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> Mr. Webster's
+father&mdash;Josiah Locke Webster, a merchant of Providence, R. I.&mdash;and Mr.
+Macy were first cousins, their mothers having been sisters. The elder
+Webster and Rowland H. Macy were, in fact, the warmest of friends and so
+the proffer by the original proprietor of the store of an opening to his
+friend's son, came almost as a matter of course. Its educational value
+alone was enormous. Young Webster accepted. He joined the organization
+in 1876 and a year later was made one of its buyers. His worth quickly
+began to assert itself. And within another twelvemonth he had abandoned
+all idea of returning to his father's store in Providence and entered
+upon a partnership in the Macy business.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the older employees of the store still remember him distinctly.
+He was a tall man, stately, conservative in speech and in manner&mdash;your
+typical successful man of business of that time and generation. Yet
+these very Macy people will tell you today that while his dignity awed,
+it did not repress. For with it went a kindliness of manner and of
+purpose. Nor was he&mdash;as some of them were then inclined to
+believe&mdash;devoid of any sense of humor. Mr. James Woods, who is assistant
+superintendent of delivery in the store today and who has been with it
+for forty-eight years, recalls many and many a battle royal with "C. B.
+W." as he still calls his old associate and chief, which they had
+together as they worked in the delivery rooms of the old Fourteenth
+Street store, hurling packages at one another and then following up with
+smart fisticuffs.</p>
+
+<p>"In those early days," adds George L. Hammond,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> who came to the store in
+1886 and who is now in its woolen dress-goods department, "I found Mr.
+Webster a most kindly man, even though taciturn. For instance, one day
+Mr. Isidor Straus came up to the counter with a man whom he had met upon
+the floor. They stood talking together. Mr. Straus told the other
+gentleman that he had recently met a Mr. Cebalos, known at that time as
+the Cuban Sugar King, and that Mr. Cebalos had spoken to him of having
+met such a fine gentleman, an American, in France; that this gentleman
+was evidently a man of education and large means and had said that he
+was in business in New York. Mr. Cebalos asked Mr. Straus if he had ever
+known his chance acquaintance in Paris&mdash;he was a Mr. Webster, Mr. C. B.
+Webster. To which Mr. Straus instantly replied: 'Of course I know him.
+He is the senior member of our firm.' Mr. Cebalos answered: 'What, the
+senior member of the firm of R. H. Macy &amp; Co.? Why, he never told me
+that!'"</p>
+
+<p>So much for old-fashioned modesty and conservatism.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The habit of reticence enclosed many of these older executives of
+Macy's. They were silent oft-times because they could not forget their
+vast responsibilities&mdash;even when they were away from the store. It is
+told of one of them that once in the middle of the performance in an
+uptown theater the thought flashed over him that he had neglected to
+close his safe&mdash;a duty which was never relegated to any subordinate. He
+arose at once from his seat and hurried down to the Store, brought the
+night watchman to the doors and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> strode quickly to the private office:
+only to find the stout doors of its great strong-box firmly fastened.
+The idea that he had neglected his duty was a nervous obsession. His was
+not the training nor the mentality that ever neglected duty.</p>
+
+<p>Upon another occasion another partner (Mr. Wheeler) worried himself
+almost into a nervous breakdown for fear that there would not be enough
+pennies for the cashier's cage during the forthcoming holiday season.
+Mr. Macy's odd-price plan was something of a drain upon the copper coin
+market of New York. And at this particular time, the local shortage
+being acute, Mr. Wheeler took a night train and hurried to Washington,
+to see the Secretary of the Treasury. Late the next evening he returned
+to New York and went to the house of Miss Abbie Golden, his head
+cashier, at midnight, just to tell her that he had succeeded in getting
+an order upon the director of the Philadelphia Mint for $10,000 in
+brand-new copper pennies. After which he went home, to a well-earned
+rest.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Although Mr. Wheeler's connection with the store was for a much shorter
+period, he left upon it, at the end of its second era, much of the
+impress of his own personality. Like both Webster and Valentine, he also
+was indirectly related to R. H. Macy, having married Mr. Macy's niece,
+Miss Valentine. In appearance and in manner he was the direct antithesis
+of his partner, Webster. In the language of today he was a "mixer."
+Affable, direct, approachable, men liked him and came<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> to him freely.
+The employees of the store poured their woes into his ears; and never in
+vain. He stood ready to help them, in every possible way. And they,
+knowing this, came frequently to him.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wheeler left the store and organization in 1887, selling his
+interest in the enterprise to Messrs. Isidor and Nathan Straus&mdash;of whom
+much more in a very few moments. He became tremendously interested in
+the development of Colorado and, upon going out there in 1888, built up
+a chain of stores, banks and mines. He still lives in the land of his
+adoption.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>One of Mr. Wheeler's keenest interests in the store was in its toy
+department. In this he followed closely Macy's own trend of thought and
+desire. For Macy's had already become, beyond a doubt, <i>the</i> toy-store
+of New York City. Starting eleven years after the foundation of the
+original store, this one department had so grown and expanded as
+annually to demand and receive the entire selling-space of the main
+floor. Each year, about the fifteenth of December, all other stocks
+would be cleared from shelves and counters, the willow-feathers, the
+fans and the fine laces would disappear from the little glass cases
+beside the main Fourteenth Street doors and in their places would come
+the toys&mdash;a goodly company in all, but strange&mdash;dolls, engines, blocks,
+mechanical devices, books.</p>
+
+<p>And then, to the doors of the great red-brick emporium in Sixth Avenue
+would come New York Jr. He and she came afoot and in carriages, upon
+horse-cars of the surface railways and upon the steam-cars of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> the
+elevated, and before they entered stood for a moment at the great glass
+windows that completely surrounded the place. For there was spread to
+view a pantomime of the most enchanting sort. No theater might equal the
+annual Christmas window display of Macy's. No theater might even dream
+of creating such a vast and overwhelming spectacle. The Hippodrome of
+today was still nearly thirty years into the future.</p>
+
+<p>The responsibilities of this vast undertaking alone were all but
+overwhelming. The twenty-fifth of December was barely passed, the store
+hardly cleaned of all the debris and confusion that it had brought,
+before plans for another Christmas were actively under way; Miss Bowyer,
+who specialized in the window display, taking Mr. Wheeler up to the
+wax-figure experts of Eden Muse&eacute; in Twenty-third Street to order the
+saints and sinners and famous folk generally who came to the window
+annually at the end of December. One of the present executives of Macy's
+can remember being privileged, as a small boy, to go behind the scenes
+of the window pantomime. There he saw it, not in its beauty of form and
+color and light, but as a bewildering perplexity of mechanisms&mdash;belts
+and pulleys and levers and cams&mdash;an enterprise of no little magnitude.</p>
+
+<p>While Miss Bowyer and her assistants were busy laying the first of the
+plans for another window display, Mr. Macy was off for Europe seeking a
+fresh supply of toys and novelties for New York Jr.'s own annual
+festival. Once in a while he touched a high<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> level of novelty, such as
+the securing of the mechanical bird&mdash;which a moment ago we saw Margaret
+Getchell taking all to pieces and then placing the pieces together
+again, with all the celerity and precision of a Yankee mechanic. The
+mechanical bird appealed particularly to Mr. Macy's friend, Mr. Phineas
+T. Barnum. Mr. Barnum came often to the store in Fourteenth Street to
+gaze upon it and to listen to it. Perhaps he regretted that he had let
+so valuable an advertising feature slip out of the hands of his museum.</p>
+
+<p>For Mr. Macy's chief reason in importing a toy so rare and so expensive
+as to bring it far beyond the hands of any ordinary child was to create
+sensation&mdash;and so to gain advertising thereby. The merchant from out of
+New England was nothing if not a born advertiser. While his competitors
+were quite content with small and stilted announcements in the public
+prints as to the extent and variety of their wares, Macy splurged. He
+took "big space"&mdash;big at least for that day and generation. And he did
+not hesitate to let printer's ink carry the fame of his emporium far and
+wide&mdash;a sound business principle which has prevailed in it from that day
+to this.</p>
+
+<p>But the toy season was never passed without its doubts and worries. An
+older employee of the store can still remember a most memorable year
+when it rained for a solid week after the toy season had opened and the
+bombazines and the muslins had been put away for the building-blocks and
+the hobby-horse. No one came to the store for seven long days. Mr. Macy
+was greatly distressed. He walked up one aisle and down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> another,
+stroking his long silky beard and saying that he was utterly ruined, and
+would have to close his store forthwith. But on the eighth day the sun
+came out, a season of fine crisp December weather arrived and the store
+was thronged with holiday shoppers. A fortnight's buying was
+accomplished in the passing of a single week and the situation
+completely saved.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>IV. The Coming of Isidor and Nathan Straus</span></h2>
+
+<p>During the era in which Webster and Wheeler controlled it, the Macy
+store may be fairly said to have been in a state of hiatus. The driving
+force of its founders&mdash;Rowland Macy, LaForge and his wife and
+Valentine&mdash;was somewhat spent. And nothing had come to replace it. The
+store went ahead, of course&mdash;Webster and Wheeler were both hard workers
+and well-schooled&mdash;but keen observers noticed that it traveled quite
+largely upon the impetus and momentum which it had derived from its
+founders. New minds and hands to direct, new arms to strike and to
+strike strongly were needed and greatly needed. These new minds and
+hands and arms it was about to receive. But before we come to their
+consideration we shall turn back the calendar&mdash;for nearly forty years.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It was in 1848 that the German Revolution drove out from the Fatherland
+and into other countries great numbers of men and women. The United
+States received its fair share of these; the most of them young men,
+impetuous, enterprising, idealistic. The late Carl Schurz was a fair
+representative of this type. About him were grouped in turn a small
+group of men, who might be regarded fairly as the most energetic and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+successful of the expatriates. In this group one of the most distinctive
+was one Lazarus Straus, who had been a sizable farmer in the Rhine
+Palatinate&mdash;at that time under the French flag&mdash;and who brought with him
+his three small sons, Isidor, Nathan and Oscar. In their veins was an
+admixture of French and German blood.</p>
+
+<p>In 1919 when Oscar S. Straus attended the Paris Peace Conference as the
+Chairman of the League to Enforce Peace, a dinner was given to him in
+Paris at which Leon Bourgeois, the former Premier of France and the
+present Chairman of the Council of the League of Nations, presided. In
+his address he referred to the fact that the father of the guest of
+honor, Oscar S. Straus, was born a French subject.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>To America, then, came Lazarus Straus and later his little family, as
+many and many an immigrant has come, before and since&mdash;seeking his
+fortune and asking no odds save a fair opportunity and a freedom from
+persecution. They landed in Philadelphia, where a little inquiry, among
+old friends who had come to the United States a few years before,
+developed the fact that the best business opportunities of the moment
+seemed to center in the South. Oglethorpe, Ga., was regarded by them as
+a particularly good town. With this fact established, Lazarus Straus
+started South and did not end his travels until he had reached Georgia,
+then popularly regarded as its "empire state." Through Georgia he found
+his way slowly, a small stock of goods with him and selling as he went
+in order to make his meagre living expenses, until he was come<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> to
+Talbot County, which proudly announced itself as "the empire county of
+the empire state."</p>
+
+<p>It was in court-week that Lazarus Straus first marched into Talboton,
+its shire-town, and took a good long look at his surroundings. At first
+glance he liked it. It was brisk and busy; if you have been in an
+old-fashioned county-seat in court-week you will quickly recall what a
+lot of enterprise and bustle that annual or semi-annual event arouses.
+But that was not all. Talboton did not have the slovenly look of so many
+of the small Southern towns of that period. It was trim and neat; its
+houses and lawns and flower-pots alike were well-kept. It must have
+brought back to the lonely heart of the man from the Palatinate the neat
+small towns of his Fatherland. Moreover it possessed an excellent school
+system.</p>
+
+<p>No longer would Lazarus Straus tramp across the land. He had accumulated
+enough to start his store on a moderate basis at least. For three or
+four days he skirmished about the town looking for a location, until he
+found a tailor who was willing to rent one-half of his store to him.
+Even upon a yearly basis the rental of his part of the shop would cost
+less than the annual license which the state of Georgia required
+itinerants to buy. The opportunity was opened. A resident of Talboton he
+became. There in its friendliness and culture he brought his family and
+set up his little home.</p>
+
+<p>The business prospered so rapidly that within a few weeks he was obliged
+to seek larger quarters. A whole store he found this time, so roomy that
+he needs must<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> go back again to Philadelphia to find sufficient stock to
+fill its shelves. His original stock he had purchased at Oglethorpe,
+which, although much larger than Talboton, had apparently not appealed
+to him the half as much.</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you going to buy your new stock at Oglethorpe?" his fellow
+merchants of the little county-seat asked him. He shook his head. And
+they shook theirs.</p>
+
+<p>"The merchants of Oglethorpe will not like it if you pass them by and go
+on to Philadelphia."</p>
+
+<p>But the founder of the house of Straus in America kept his own counsel
+and followed his own good judgment. He went to Philadelphia, found his
+friends again, who had known his family in the Rhine, either personally
+or by reputation, obtained their credit assistance and with it bought
+and carried south such wares as Talbot County had not before known, with
+the result that the business, now fairly launched, was carried to new
+reaches of success.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>If there had been no Civil War it is entirely probable that this record
+would never have been written&mdash;that there would be in 1922 no Macy store
+in New York to come into printed history. It was in fact that great
+conflict that brought disaster to so many hundreds and thousands of
+businesses&mdash;big and little&mdash;that ended the career of L. Straus of
+Talboton, Georgia, U. S. A. But not at first. At first, you will recall,
+the South marched quite gaily into the conflict. She was rich,
+prosperous, well-populated. Impending conflict looked like little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> else
+than a great adventure. Lazarus Straus' oldest son, Isidor, who had been
+destined for military training&mdash;having already been entered at the
+Southern Military College, at Collingsworth, to prepare for West
+Point&mdash;could not restrain himself as he helped organize a company of
+half-grown boys in the village, of which he was immediately elected
+first-lieutenant. This company asked the Governor of Georgia for arms,
+but was refused.</p>
+
+<p>"There are not enough guns for the men, let alone the boys," came the
+words from the ancient capitol at Macon.</p>
+
+<p>At that time Lazarus Straus' partner, the man who was his right hand and
+aid, did succeed in getting a gun and getting into the war. This made a
+natural opening for Isidor in the store, in which he progressed rapidly,
+for a full eighteen months. Then, the partner having been invalided home
+from the front, the boy was free to engage once again in the service of
+the newly created nation to which the family, as well as all their
+friends roundabout them, had already given their fealty. He went to
+enter himself in the Georgia Military Academy, at Marietta&mdash;a few miles
+north of the growing young railroad town of Atlanta.</p>
+
+<p>Then came one of those slight incidents, seemingly trifling at the
+moment of the occurrence but sometimes changing the entire trend of men
+and their affairs. A young man, already a student at the Academy,
+volunteered to introduce Isidor Straus to his future fellow students.
+When they were come to one of the dormitories and at the door of a
+living-room, the kindly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> young man swung the door open and bade Isidor
+enter. He entered, a pail of water, nicely balanced atop the door,
+tumbled and its contents were poured over the novitiate's head and
+shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>That single hazing trick disgusted Isidor Straus immeasurably. He was a
+serious-minded young man, who realized that Georgia at that moment was
+passing through a particularly serious crisis in her affairs. For such
+tomfoolery and at such a time he had no use whatsoever. It settled his
+mind. He did not enter the school, but returned to his hotel, and on the
+following day, going to a nearby mill, bought a stock of grain and began
+merchandising it, on his own behalf.</p>
+
+<p>This was not to last long, however. The struggling Confederacy needed
+his services and needed them badly. The fame of the Straus family&mdash;its
+great ingenuity and ability&mdash;had long since passed outside of the
+boundaries of Talbot County. Tongues wagged and said that Isidor had
+inherited all of his father's vision and acumen. That settled it. Lloyd
+G. Bowers, a prominent Georgian, was being designated to head a mission
+to Europe, to sell, if he could, both Confederate bonds and cotton
+acceptances. He chose for his secretary and assistant Isidor Straus. And
+early in 1863 the two men embarked upon a small ship, The May, in
+Charleston harbor, which, in the course of a single evening,
+successfully performed the difficult task of running the blockade that
+guarded that port. Two days later they were at Nassau in the Bahamas,
+from which the voyage to England was a secondary and fairly easy matter.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span></p><p>Despite the seeming hopelessness of his task&mdash;for already the tide had
+turned and was flowing against the Confederacy&mdash;Isidor Straus had a
+remarkable degree of success in England. In his later years he was fond
+of relating how, in 1890, while sojourning abroad, in turning over a
+telephone book in London he came to a name which brought back memories
+and, acting upon impulse, called that name to the telephone.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you tell me the price of Confederate bonds this morning?" he asked
+quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"Isidor Straus!" came the astonished reply. A few hours later a real
+reunion was in progress.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Long before Appomattox came the utter failure of the once brisk little
+store at Talboton. In fact, the family had left that small village&mdash;very
+nearly in Sherman's path&mdash;and had moved to Columbus. There it sat in
+debt and desperation, as the Confederacy sank to its inevitable death.
+The only ray of hope in its existence was the vague possibility of
+success in Isidor's trip to England. And when the son came back to New
+York, soon after Lee's surrender, Lazarus Straus went north to meet him.
+Isidor had prospered. Cotton acceptances were not the bonds of a defunct
+young nation. England needed cotton&mdash;the mills of Manchester had stood
+idle for weeks and months at a time. Isidor Straus knew when and how to
+sell his cotton-bills&mdash;he was, in every sense of the word, a born
+merchant. He sold shrewdly, lived frugally, and returned to the United
+States with $12,000 in gold upon his person!</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p><p>This was the nugget upon which a new family beginning was made. There
+was to be no more South for the family of Straus. Business opportunity
+down there was dead&mdash;for a quarter of a century at the very least. But
+business opportunity in New York had never seemed as great as in the
+flush days of success and prosperity which followed the ending of the
+war. Lazarus Straus had brought north in his carpet-bag more cotton
+acceptances. But he had not been as fortunate as his son in having the
+time and the place to sell them at best advantage. Cotton within a few
+months had fallen in the United States to but one-half of its price of
+the preceding autumn.</p>
+
+<p>It was fortunate, indeed, that Isidor Straus had his little bag of
+golden coin at that moment. It was that gold that enabled him to start
+with his father, under the name of L. Straus &amp; Son, a rather humble
+crockery business in a top-floor loft at 161 Chambers Street. The specie
+went toward the establishment of the new business. The debts of the old
+were already being paid. Lazarus Straus was, I believe, one of the few
+Southern merchants who paid their debts in the North in full, and
+thereby secured a great personal credit. This last came without great
+difficulty&mdash;in after years it was to be said that Isidor Straus could
+raise more money upon his word alone than any other man in New York. It
+was Mr. Bliss&mdash;of Bliss &amp; Co., long time wholesalers of the city and
+predecessors of the well-known Tofft, Weller &amp; Co.&mdash;who, upon being
+applied to by Isidor Straus for financial assistance, asked what he and
+his father proposed to do to regain their fortune.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span></p><p>"Start in the china business," was the simple reply.</p>
+
+<p>"You have your courage," was Mr. Bliss's reply, "your father at the age
+of fifty-seven&mdash;and yourself&mdash;to embark upon a brand new business, in
+which neither of you have had the slightest experience."</p>
+
+<p>But such was the old New Yorker's faith in these men that he sold them
+the huge bill of merchandise, some $45,000, under which they embarked
+their business, saying that they could pay him, one-third in cash, and
+that he could well afford to wait two or even three years for the
+balance.</p>
+
+<p>He did not have to wait that long. Again the business&mdash;in the hands of
+hard-working born merchandisers&mdash;prospered, from the very instant of its
+beginning. It opened for selling and made its first sale, June 1, 1866.
+And again within a few short weeks, L. Straus &amp; Son was demanding more
+room for expansion, and getting it&mdash;this time in the form of a ground
+floor and basement of that same building in Chambers Street. It was
+still both new and young, however. Its hired employees were but three: a
+packer, his helper and a selector, or stock-room man. Isidor Straus ran
+all the details of the store, opening it and closing it each day and
+acting as its book-keeper, until a year later when Nathan Straus came
+into the organization, becoming its first salesman. The business was
+getting ahead. Despite the difficulties and the humbleness of its start
+it had sold more than $60,000 worth of goods, in the first twelve months
+of its existence.</p>
+
+<p>"That they were hard months, I could not deny,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> said Isidor Straus of
+them in after years. "We had bought our house in West Forty-ninth
+Street, so that we might have our family life together, just as we had
+had in those pleasant Georgia days of before the war. More than once we
+contemplated selling the house so that we might put the proceeds in the
+business, but always at the last moment we were able to avoid that great
+catastrophe."</p>
+
+<p>And soon the necessity of ever selling the house was past. Prosperity
+multiplied. The firm went beyond selling the ordinary grades of
+crockery, which America had only known up to that time&mdash;serviceable
+stuff, but thick and clumsy and heavy&mdash;and began the importation upon a
+huge and increasing scale, of the more delicate and beautiful porcelains
+of Europe. It added manufacturing to its importations. It became an
+authority upon fine China. And Nathan Straus, its salesman, had to
+scurry to keep apace with its growth&mdash;already he was becoming known as a
+super-salesman. He extended his territory to the West and in 1869&mdash;the
+year of the completion of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific
+Railroads&mdash;was going to the West Coast in search for customers. Two
+years later&mdash;a few weeks after the great fire&mdash;he opened a
+selling-office for the firm in Chicago.</p>
+
+<p>"Yet I do not like this travel," he said a little later to his brother.
+"Not only is it very hard, physically, but I find that as soon as I get
+away from it the orders fall off. We have to work too hard for the
+volume of profit in hand."</p>
+
+<p>With this idea firmly in his mind he began a more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> intensive cultivation
+of the fields closer at hand. Some of the establishments of New York
+that later were to develop already were in their beginnings. There was
+that smart New Englander up at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue&mdash;that
+man Macy, whose store already was beginning to be the talk of the town.
+Nathan Straus thought that he would go up and see Rowland H. Macy. And
+one of the oldest employees of the store still recalls seeing him come
+into the place, for the first time in his life, on a Saint Patrick's
+Day&mdash;it probably was March 17, 1874&mdash;with a paper package under his arm
+which contained a couple of fine porcelain plates.</p>
+
+<p>Macy was a good prospect. For one thing, remember that he bought as well
+as sold for cash, and for cash alone. Credit played little or no part in
+his fortunes. New York had refused him credit when first he came to her
+and he had learned to do without it. Macy was not alone a good prospect
+from that point of view but he was, as we have already seen&mdash;a man
+constantly seeking novelty. Straus and his porcelain plates interested
+him immensely. And the upshot of that first call was the assignment of a
+space in the basement of the store, about twenty-five by one hundred
+feet in all, which L. Straus &amp; Sons rented and owned. That was not a
+common custom at that time, although a little later it became a very
+popular one, and, I think, prevails to a slight extent even in these
+days. The Straus experiment in the basement of the Macy store paved the
+way. It having succeeded remarkably well within a short time after its
+inception, other and similar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> departments were established elsewhere; at
+R. H. White's, in Boston, at John Wanamaker's, in Philadelphia, at
+Wechsler &amp; Abraham's, in Brooklyn, and in a Chicago store which long
+since passed from existence.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Here, after all, was perhaps the real incarnation of the
+department-store in America, as we know it today, and as it is
+distinguished from the dry-goods store of other days which, as natural
+auxiliaries and corollaries to its business, had long since added to the
+mere selling of dress-goods that of hosiery, boots and shoes,
+underclothing, ribbons, hats and other <i>finesse</i>, both of women's and of
+men's apparel. We have seen long since the versatile Miss Getchell
+adding groceries to Macy's departments&mdash;and then for a time withdrawing
+them&mdash;afterwards toys, which were never withdrawn. Even then the
+department-store idea was gradually being born; with the establishment
+of the Straus crockery store in the basement of the downtown Macy's it
+came into the fine flower of its youth.</p>
+
+<p>For fourteen years this arrangement prospered and progressed&mdash;grew
+greatly in public favor. The store, as we have seen, had passed out of
+the hands of its original proprietors. Death had claimed four of
+them&mdash;within a short period of barely thirty months. And a new
+generation had come in. But within a decade of the time that he had
+entered the organization, one of the partners of this second generation,
+Mr. Wheeler, was considering leaving it. Colorado had fascinated him. To
+Colorado he must go. To Colorado he did go. He sold his interest to his
+partner, Mr. Webster, who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> in turn sold it to Isidor and Nathan Straus.
+The crockery counter had absorbed the great store which it had entered
+so humbly but fourteen years before, as a mere tenant of one of its tiny
+corners.</p>
+
+<p>Now were there indeed real guiding hands upon the enterprise. Force and
+energy and ability had come to direct the fortunes of what was already
+probably the largest merchandising establishment within the entire land.
+A family which had not known failure, save as a spur to repeated
+efforts, had come into control. It had everything to gain by the venture
+and it did not propose to lose.</p>
+
+<p>The actual consolidation and transfer of interests took place on January
+1, 1888. Mr. Webster, as has already been recorded, retained his actual
+interest in the store until 1896, when he retired, disposing of it to
+his partners but maintaining an office in their building until his
+death, in 1916. He gave way deferentially, however, to the Straus energy
+and Straus experience. The effects of these were visible from the
+beginning.</p>
+
+<p>The personality of the Straus family had, of course, become well
+identified with the store long before the accomplishment of its
+reorganization. The crockery department had grown to one of its really
+huge features. In it Nathan Straus was perhaps more often seen than
+Isidor, who always was of a quieter and more retiring nature. Many of
+the employees remember how Nathan Straus came to the store on the
+morning of the first day of the blizzard of March, 1888. By some strange
+fatality that morning had been appointed weeks in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> advance as the
+store's annual Spring Millinery Opening&mdash;a vernal festival of more than
+passing interest to a considerable proportion of New York's population.
+The actual morning found the city far more interested in getting its
+milk and bread than its straw-hats for oncoming summer. A large number
+of the employees of the millinery department who had remained in the
+store late the preceding evening in order to complete the preparations
+of the great event were compelled to remain there the entire night,
+being both fed and housed by the firm. They were there when Nathan
+Straus arrived. Even the elevated railroad which he and many others had
+looked upon as a reliance after the complete and early collapse of the
+surface lines, had finally broken under the unparalleled fierceness of
+the storm. And Nathan Straus, after arriving on a train within a
+comparatively few blocks of the store, was long delayed there, between
+the stations, and finally came to the street on a ladder and made his
+way to the store through the very teeth of the gale.</p>
+
+<p>That was dramatic. It was not so dramatic when, time and time again,
+both he and his brother, Isidor, would insist upon bundling themselves
+in all sorts of disagreeable weather and going downtown or up, because
+an old employee of L. Straus &amp; Son was to be buried or a new one of the
+retail store was ill. The fidelity and the inherent affection of these
+men was marked more than once by those who work with and for them. And
+what it gave to the store in <i>esprit-de-corps</i>&mdash;in the thing which we
+have very recently come to know as morale&mdash;cannot easily be estimated.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p><p>In this, its fourth decade, many distinguished New Yorkers still came
+to the store. One remembers a President of the United States who came
+often and who brought his Secretary of the Treasury with him more than
+once. The President was Grover Cleveland and his Secretary of the
+Treasury was John G. Carlisle and they were both intimate friends of the
+brothers Straus. And there came often among customers and friends the
+late Russell Sage. Macy's sold an unlaundered shirt, linen bosom and
+cuffs with white cotton back and at a fixed price of sixty-eight cents,
+which seemed to have a vast appeal to Mr. Sage. Yet he never purchased
+many at a time&mdash;never more than two or three. He was a financier and did
+not believe in tying up unnecessary capital.</p>
+
+<p>To the store from time to time came Mrs. Paran Stevens. And one day
+while waiting for Mr. Hibbon of the housefurnishing department, she told
+Miss Julia Neville, one of the women on the floor there, that while upon
+an extended trip abroad she had written instructions to her agents in
+this country to sell certain of her personal belongings and that upon
+her return she was astounded to find that a glass toilet set, which she
+had purchased at Macy's for but ninety-nine cents and from which the
+price-mark had long since been removed had been sold by them at auction
+for one hundred dollars!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>V. The Store Treks Uptown</span></h2>
+
+<p>With the beginning of a new century New York was once again in turmoil.
+Always a restless city, the year 1900 found her suffering severe growing
+pains. Manhattan Island seemingly was not large enough for the city that
+demanded elbow room upon it. Moreover, a distinct factor in the growth
+of New York was not only planned but under construction. Its final
+completion&mdash;in 1904&mdash;was already being anticipated. I am referring to
+the subway. After a quarter of a century of talk and even one or two
+rather futile actual experiments, a real rapid-transit railroad up and
+down the backbone of Manhattan finally was under way. As originally
+planned it extended from the City Hall up Lafayette Street and Fourth
+Avenue to the Grand Central Station, at which point it turned an abrupt
+right angle and proceeded through Forty-second Street to Times Square,
+where it again turned abruptly&mdash;north this time&mdash;into Broadway, which it
+followed almost to the city line; first to the Harlem River at
+Kingsbridge and eventually to its present terminus at Van Cortlandt
+Park. A branch line, thrusting itself toward the east from Ninety-sixth
+Street, emerged upon an elevated structure which it followed to the
+Bronx Park and Zoological Gardens.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p><p>Before this original section of the subway was completed it already was
+in process of extension toward the south; from the City Hall to and
+under the South Ferry to Brooklyn which it reached in two successive
+leaps; the first to the Borough Hall (the old Brooklyn City Hall) and
+the second to the Atlantic Avenue station of the Long Island Railroad,
+which has remained its terminus until within the past twelvemonth. More
+recently the original subway system of Greater New York has been so
+changed and enlarged as to all but lose sight of the original plan.
+Instead of a single main-stem up the backbone of New York, there are now
+two parallel trunks&mdash;the one on the east side of the town and the other
+upon the west&mdash;and the now isolated link of the original main line in
+Forty-second Street has become a shuttle service from the Grand Central
+Station to Times Square and the crossbar of the letter "H" which forms
+the rough plan of the entire system. Still other underground railroads
+have come to supplement the vast task of this original system. It is
+more than a decade since the energy of William G. McAdoo completed the
+Hudson River Tubes, which an earlier generation had had the vision but
+not the ability to build, and brought their upper stem through and under
+Sixth Avenue and to a terminal at Herald Square; while even more
+recently the huge and far-reaching Brooklyn Rapid Transit system has
+appropriated Broadway, Manhattan, for a vastly elongated terminal; which
+takes the concrete form of a four-tracked underground railroad beneath
+that world-famed street all the way from the City Hall to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> Times Square
+and above that point through Seventh Avenue to Fifty-ninth Street and
+Central Park; and thence across the Queensborough Bridge.</p>
+
+<p>It was the original subway, however, that brought the great real-estate
+upheaval to New York. Many years before it was completed New York had
+been moving steadily uptown&mdash;shrewd observers used to say at the rate of
+ten of the short city blocks each ten years. But its progress had been
+slow and dignified&mdash;relatively at least. With the coming of the new
+subway, dignity in this movement was thrown to the four winds. A mad
+rush uptown. Wholesale firms abandoned the structures that had housed
+them for years in the business districts south of Fourteenth Street and
+began to look for newer and larger quarters north of that important
+cross-town thoroughfare. The retail world of New York was far slower to
+be influenced by the change. For one thing, its investment in permanent
+structures was relatively much higher than that of the wholesale. Folk
+who came from afar and who marveled at the elegance of Sixth Avenue as a
+shopping street, all the way from Thirteenth to Twenty-third, could
+hardly have conceived that within two decades it would become dusty,
+forlorn, practically deserted. No matter that the hotel life of New York
+had ascended well to the north of Twenty-third, that the theaters were
+beginning to gather even north of Thirty-fourth, that a few small,
+smart, exclusive shops were showing signs of joining the trek&mdash;there
+remained the realty investment in the department stores at Sixth Avenue.
+It seemed incredible that such a huge <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>investment should be thrown to
+the winds. Yet this was the very thing that actually was accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>Macy's stood to lose less in an economic sense from a move uptown than
+any of its competitors. True it was that the firm had builded for its
+own account in Fourteenth Street, just east of the original store, a
+very handsome, steel-constructed, stone-fronted building which it had
+thrown into the older building in order to relieve the pressure upon it.
+Across the way, on the north side of Fourteenth Street, it had put up at
+an even earlier date a substantial seven-story store for the use of its
+greatly expanded furniture department. The original store, however,
+stood upon leased land&mdash;the property of the Rhinelander Estate. One of
+the earliest of the stories about Mr. Macy concerns the coming of George
+Rogers, the agent of the estate and his warm personal friend as well,
+each Monday morning; not for his rent; but to cash a check for thirty
+dollars. It was not hard to guess at his compensation.</p>
+
+<p>The increase in land rentals in the neighborhood and the fact that the
+firm could hardly hope ever to acquire an actual title to the valuable
+site of its main store, coupled with the steadily increasing trek
+uptown, caused the Macy management to consider seriously whether it
+would join in the northward movement. It soon would have to do one thing
+or the other. The old store was growing very old and very overcrowded.
+Moreover, it was, at the best, a makeshift, a jumbling together of one
+separate store after another in order to accommodate a business which
+forever refused to stay put. Under such conditions a scientific or
+efficient<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> planning of the building had been quite out of the question.
+The real wonder was that the business had been conducted so well,
+against such a handicap.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="z088.jpg" id="z088.jpg"></a><img src="images/z088.jpg" width='700' height='433' alt="THE HERALD SQUARE OF ANTE-MACY DAYS" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">THE HERALD SQUARE OF ANTE-MACY DAYS</p>
+
+<p class="bold">In 1900, before the coming of the present store, Broadway at 34th Street<br />
+gave but faint promise of its present importance</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The move once considered was quickly determined upon. No other course
+seemingly would have been possible. To have erected a new store building
+upon a leasehold in a quarter of the town which presently might begin to
+slide backward&mdash;would have been a precarious experiment, to put it
+mildly. It must go uptown. The only question that really confronted the
+store was just where to go uptown. A site large enough for a huge
+department-store is not usually acquired overnight. Moreover, the
+necessity for secrecy in so important a step was obvious&mdash;the dangers of
+the mere suggestion of its becoming known were multifold.</p>
+
+<p>With these things clearly understood, the search for a new site was
+begun. Various ones were considered, but were finally rejected. For a
+time the firm considered buying the famous old Gilsey House and the
+property immediately adjoining it. Another site which appealed to it
+even more was the former site of the Broadway Tabernacle on the east
+side of Broadway, just north of Thirty-fourth Street&mdash;the site of the
+present Marbridge Building. The commanding prescience of this corner
+forced itself upon them. Sixth Avenue, an artery street north and south,
+threaded by electric surface-cars and the elevated railroad&mdash;the McAdoo
+Tubes had not then come into even a paper being&mdash;was crossed at acute
+angles by an even more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> important street&mdash;New York's incomparable
+Broadway&mdash;and at right angles by Thirty-fourth Street, which even then
+was giving promise of its coming importance. The original planners of
+the uptown city of New York made many serious mistakes in their
+far-seeing scheme. But they made no mistake when they took each half
+mile or so and made one of their cross streets into a thoroughfare as
+bold and as wide as one of their north and south avenues. Thirty-fourth
+was one of the streets picked out for such importance. And from the
+beginning it realized the judgment of its planners. The completion of
+the huge Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1897 (the earlier or Waldorf side in
+Thirty-third Street had been finished in 1893) had fixed the importance
+of the street. Thirteen years later the opening of the Pennsylvania
+Station was to confirm it&mdash;for all time.</p>
+
+<p>In 1900 the vast plan of the Pennsylvania Railroad for the invasion of
+Manhattan was as yet unknown. Even in the main offices of that railroad,
+in Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, it still was most inchoate and
+fragmentary. In the language of the moment, Macy's was "acting on its
+own." The store was using its own powers of foreseeing&mdash;and using them
+very well indeed.</p>
+
+<p>But the site on the east side of Herald Square was not to be. In free
+titles it was not nearly large enough. But the west side of the square!
+There was a possibility. If the new store could be builded there it not
+only could possess an actual Broadway frontage but it would be set so
+far back from the elevated railroad as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> not to be bothered by its noise
+or smoke, even in the slightest degree. As a matter of fact the last
+already was disappearing. The electric third-rail system was being
+installed everywhere upon the Manhattan system, and the pertinacious,
+puffy little locomotives, which so long had been a feature of New York
+town, were doomed to an early disappearance.</p>
+
+<p>The west side of Herald Square appealed to Macy's. Long and exacting
+searches into its land-titles were made. Some three hundred feet back of
+Broadway the magnificent new theater of Koster &amp; Bial's, extending all
+the way from Thirty-fourth Street to Thirty-fifth, backed up a tract
+which in the main was occupied by comparatively low buildings, the most
+of them brown-stone residences, which already were in the course of
+transformation into small business places. This tract seemingly was
+quite large enough for the new Macy's&mdash;with the possible exception,
+perhaps, of its engine-room and mechanical departments. The firm decided
+to take it, and with a policy of magnificent secrecy began negotiations
+for its lease. In order to accommodate the engine and machinery rooms it
+purchased a tract upon the north side of Thirty-fifth Street just back
+of the former Herald Square Theater. On this last land stood two of New
+York's most notorious resorts of twenty years ago&mdash;the Pekin and the
+Tivoli. The development of the Macy plan drove them out of the street
+and, for the time being at least, out of business.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The Macy plan did not go through to a final<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> culmination, however, quite
+as it had been laid out. So huge a scheme and one involving so many
+separate real-estate transactions is hard to keep a secret for any great
+length of time. Gradually the news of Macy's contemplated step became
+public property. It caused public astonishment and public acclaim. For,
+remember, if you will, that in 1900, none of the department stores had
+moved uptown north of Twenty-third Street. Bloomingdale's was at Third
+Avenue and Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth Streets, but it was a gradual
+upgrowth, from a modest beginning upon that original important corner.
+The last move had been in 1862, when A. T. Stewart had moved his store
+from Chambers Street north to Ninth. The cost of the lot and structure
+to Mr. Stewart was $2,750,000&mdash;a stupendous figure in that day.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The publicity surrounding the proposed move of Macy's found the Straus
+family still without one of the plots necessary to the complete
+acquisition of all the land in the block east of Koster &amp; Bial's. It was
+the small but important northwest corner of Broadway and Thirty-fourth
+Street&mdash;a mere thirty by fifty feet, a remnant of an ancient farm whose
+zig-zag boundaries antedated the coming of the city plan and showed a
+seeming fine contempt for it. This tiny parcel was the property of an
+old-time New Yorker, the Rev. Duane Pell. Dr. Pell was on an extended
+trip in Europe in 1901, when Macy's began the active acquisition of its
+new store-site. It was given to understand that his asking price for the
+small corner was $250,000; an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> astonishing figure for such a tiny bit of
+land, even today, but Dr. Pell felt that he held the key to the entire
+important Herald Square corner and that he was justified in asking any
+price for it that he saw fit to ask.</p>
+
+<p>While the plot was so small as to afford very little to it in the way of
+actual floor space the Macy management felt that it was so essential to
+the appearance of the store that it agreed to come to Dr. Pell's
+price&mdash;and so cabled him; in Spain. Word came back that he was about to
+embark for New York and that he would take up the entire matter
+immediately upon his arrival.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>A few years before the Macy organization planned to be the initial
+department-store to move uptown, Henry Siegel, a Chicago merchant, who
+had achieved a somewhat spectacular and ephemeral success in that city,
+decided upon the invasion of New York. He came to Manhattan and in Sixth
+Avenue, midway between Fourteenth and Twenty-third Streets, erected a
+store which for a time duplicated the success of its Chicago
+predecessor. The proposed move of the Macy store apparently filled him
+with consternation. With a good deal of prophetic vision he foresaw that
+other Sixth Avenue stores would go uptown in its wake. His own
+investment in that street was too great and too recent to be
+jeopardized.</p>
+
+<p>Siegel hit upon the idea of stepping into the old site and building at
+Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue as soon as the Macy organization
+should vacate. But to desire that valuable location and to secure it
+were two vastly different things. The Strauses were not asleep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> to the
+possibility of some one attempting such a move. It would not be the
+first time in merchandising history. They arranged carefully therefore
+that their old corner at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue should
+remain entirely empty for two years after they had moved out from it.
+The moral and educational effect of such a hiatus was not to be
+underestimated.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime the Chicago man was busy on his own behalf. Through his
+realty agents he had quickly discovered Dr. Duane Pell's ownership of
+the corner point of the new Macy plot. He also found that the dominie
+was already on his return to the United States. He entrusted to a
+faithful representative the task of meeting him at the steamer-pier. The
+agent was there, bright and early, to meet the boat, and within a
+half-hour of its docking Siegel had acquired the north-west corner of
+Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street.</p>
+
+<p>Now was the Chicagoan in a strategic position to do business with the
+Macy concern. At least so he felt. The concern felt differently. As far
+as it was concerned the corner point had sentimental value; nothing
+else. We already have seen how slight was its floor-space. Without
+hesitation it turned its back upon the tiny corner, and with the money
+that it had intended investing in it, purchased the leasehold of the
+huge theater of Koster &amp; Bial&mdash;about twenty thousand square feet of
+ground space&mdash;which enabled it to place its mechanical departments
+(engine-rooms and the like) in its main building, and so to leave the
+former Tivoli and Pekin sites for the moment unimproved. This done, it
+turned its attention to the gentleman from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> Chicago. It leased him the
+premises at Fourteenth Street at a much higher figure than it would have
+been glad to rent them to another concern, and under the provisions that
+they should not be occupied until at least two years after the removal
+of the parent concern from them and that the name "Macy" should never
+again appear on the buildings of that site.</p>
+
+<p>With the site difficulties cleared up, the actual construction problems
+of the enterprise were entered upon. Nineteen hundred and one was born
+before Macy's was enabled to begin the wholesale destruction of the many
+buildings upon its new site. The job of clearing the site and erecting
+the new building was entrusted to the George A. Fuller Company, which
+had just completed the sensational Flatiron Building at the apex of
+Fifth Avenue and Broadway at Twenty-third Street, and it was one of the
+first, if not the very first of the building contracts in New York where
+the estimates were based upon the cubic feet contents. DeLomas and
+Cordes, who had had a considerable success in the planning of one or two
+of the more recent department stores in the lower Sixth Avenue district,
+were chosen as the architects of the new building. Before they entered
+upon the actual drawing of the plans they made an extended study of such
+structures, both in the United States and abroad. The new building
+represented the last word in department store design and construction.
+Nine stories in height and with 1,012,500 square feet of floor-space, it
+was designed not only to handle great throngs of shoppers each day but
+the multifold working details of service to them, with the greatest
+expedition,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> and economy. To do this it was estimated that there would
+be required fourteen passenger elevators, ten freight elevators and
+seven sidewalk elevators of the most recent type. Four escalators were
+installed running from the main floor to the fifth. It is to be noted,
+too, that these escalators were the very first to be installed in which
+the step upon which the passenger rides is held continuously horizontal.
+In the older types the ascending floor is held at an awkward angle of
+ascension and foothold is maintained only by the attaching of steel
+cleats at right angles to it.</p>
+
+<p>Lighting, ventilation, plumbing, all these received in turn the most
+careful consideration and planning. For instance, it was determined
+quite early in the progress of the planning for the new Macy store that
+it should be ventilated entirely by great fans, which, sucking the air
+in ducts down from the roof, would heat it or cool it, as the
+necessities of the season might demand, before distributing it through
+another duct to the working floors of the building. In this way the
+close and stuffy atmosphere somewhat common to old-time department
+stores when filled with patrons was entirely obviated in this new one.</p>
+
+<p>When we come to the consideration of the everyday workings of the Macy
+store today we shall see how well these architects of twenty years ago
+planned its details. We shall not see, however, one of the most
+interesting of them. When it was originally builded, by far the greater
+part of its ninth floor was devoted to a huge exhibition hall. Within a
+short time this room was in a fair way to become as famous as the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>
+larger auditorium of Madison Square Garden. In it were held
+poultry-shows, flower shows, even one of the very first automobile
+shows. Within a few years after its opening, however, the business of
+the store had grown to such proportions that it was found necessary to
+give its great space to the more mundane business of direct selling.</p>
+
+<p>The problem of the corner tip there at Thirty-fourth and Broadway was
+quickly overcome. If the new owner of that point had counted upon the
+new store which completely encircled him turning tens of thousands of
+folk past it each day he was doomed to disappointment. For Macy's made
+its own corner by means of a broad arcade entirely within the cover of
+its own huge roof; an inside street, lined with show-windows upon either
+side and giving, in wet weather as well as fine, a dry and handsome
+passageway direct from Broadway into Thirty-fourth Street.</p>
+
+<p>The original suggestion for such an arcade came in an anonymous letter
+to the original architects of the building. Only within the past year or
+two has this passageway been abandoned. The demands of the business for
+more elbow-room are voracious and apparently unceasing. And the space
+that the arcade consumed became entirely too great to be used any longer
+for such a purpose.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In that summer of 1901, while the architects and contractors were busy
+at their plans and specifications, there was wholesale and systematic
+devastation upon such a scale as New York has rarely ever seen. Such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+pullings down and tearings away! The scene was not without its drama at
+any time. The writer well remembers strolling into the Koster &amp; Bial
+Music Hall on an evening during that season of destruction. There was no
+one to bar his passage into what, at the time of its opening, but eight
+short years before, had been New York's most elaborate playhouse. If his
+glance had not been turned downward there was nothing to indicate that
+the evening performance might not easily begin within the hour. Upwards
+the great auditorium of red and gold was immaculate. The proscenium, the
+tier upon tier of balcony and of gallery, the dozens of upholstered
+boxes, the exquisitely decorated ceiling had not been touched.</p>
+
+<p>But if the eye glanced downward&mdash;what a difference! The main floor and
+its row upon row of heavy plush chairs was entirely gone. In their place
+was a mucky black sea of mud; a knee-high morass, if you please, in
+which a dozen contractor's wagons, hauled and tugged unevenly by squads
+of lunging mules and horses in their traces, circled in and circled
+out&mdash;inbound empty and outbound laden deep with their muddy burden. On
+the stage, back of what had once been the footlights and in the same
+place where the darling Carmencita had once been wont to make her bow,
+stood a shirt-sleeved gang-boss. On either side of him,
+spotlights&mdash;things theatrical yanked from the memories of
+yesteryear&mdash;threw their radiance down into the auditorium and the motley
+audience it held.</p>
+
+<p>So went Koster &amp; Bial's, the pet plaything of joyous New York in its
+Golden Age. In a short time the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> scaffolding was to rise in that mighty
+amphitheater and the decorations to come tumbling down. Gang upon gang
+to the roof; more gangs still to the stout sidewalls, brick by brick;
+down they came until Koster &amp; Bial's was no more. Its site was marked by
+a huge and gaping hole in the subsoil of Manhattan.</p>
+
+<p>There were other phases of that tearing-down that were less dramatic and
+more comic. A restaurant-keeper who had a small eating place on the
+Broadway side of the site sought obdurately to hold out in his
+location&mdash;seeking an advantageous cash settlement from the store owners.
+His lease, perfectly good, still had from sixty to ninety days to run.
+He felt that the store could not wait that length of time upon
+him&mdash;that, in the language of the street, it would be forced to "come
+across." But it did not "come across." It was not built that way. It was
+built on either side of the restaurant. Its steel girders were far above
+its tiny walls and spanning one another across its ceiling before its
+disappointed proprietor moved out&mdash;at the end of his perfectly good
+lease&mdash;and without one cent of bonus money in his pocket; after which it
+was almost a matter of mere hours to tear the flimsy structure away and
+remove a small segment of earth that held it up to street level. A
+barber around the corner in Thirty-fourth street caught his cue from the
+restaurant. He, too, was going to stand pat. But he was not in the same
+strategic position as the <i>restaurateur</i>. He had no lease. He merely was
+going to stay and defy the wreckers. They would not dare to touch his
+neat, immaculate shop.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p><p>They did dare. On the very night that his lease expired something
+happened to the business enterprise of the razor-wielder. A cyclone must
+have struck it. At least that was the way it looked. The barber, coming
+down to business on the morrow, found his movables upon the sidewalk,
+neatly piled together and covered by tarpaulins against the weather. But
+the shop was gone. Where it had stood on the close of the preceding day
+was a deep hole in the ground; and three Italian workmen were whistling
+the Anvil Chorus.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>About the tenth of October, 1901, actual construction began on the new
+building. On the first day of November of the following year it was
+complete&mdash;or practically so. It was a record for building, even in New
+York, which is fairly used to records of that sort. A steel-framed
+nine-story building, approximately four hundred feet on Thirty-fourth
+and Thirty-fifth Streets, by one hundred and eighty feet on Broadway
+(widening to two hundred feet at the west end of the store), with
+1,012,500 square feet of floor-space, and 13,500,000 cubic feet in all,
+had been erected in a trifle over six months. In the meanwhile the
+wisdom of the Macy choice of location was already being made evident. A
+Washington concern&mdash;Saks and Company&mdash;was on its way toward Herald
+Square. It took the west side of Broadway for the block just south of
+Thirty-fourth Street, and by dint of great effort and because its
+building was considerably smaller in area, succeeded in getting into it
+ahead of Macy's.</p>
+
+<p>Herald Square! There was, and still is, a site well<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> worth rushing
+toward. We have seen already the strategic advantages of the new site,
+even as far back as 1902, long before the coming of the great
+Pennsylvania Station just back of it at Seventh Avenue. Ever since 1890,
+when the remarkable vision of the late James Gordon Bennett had seen the
+crossing of Broadway and Sixth Avenue as the finest possible location
+for his beloved <i>Herald</i> and had torn down the little old armory in the
+gorge between these two thoroughfares, Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth
+Streets, to build a Venetian palace for it there, the square had been a
+veritable hub for the vast activities of New York. Hotels, shops and
+theaters sprang up roundabout it. And the coming of what is one of the
+finest, if not the very largest, of the great railroad terminals of the
+land but multiplied its real importance.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The actual moving from the old store to the new was a herculean task.
+Yet it was accomplished within three days&mdash;which means that large
+enterprise was reduced through the perfection of system to a rather
+ordinary one. This could not have been if all its details and its
+possibilities had not been anticipated long in advance and planned
+against.</p>
+
+<p>The job was undertaken by the store itself; through its delivery
+department, in charge of Mr. James Price, with Mr. James Woods as his
+very active assistant. Both of these men are veteran employees of
+Macy's. The service record of the one of them reaches to forty-one years
+and the other to forty-eight. They knew full well the size of the
+moving-day task that confronted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> them. To pick up a huge New York
+department-store and carry it twenty uptown blocks&mdash;almost an even
+mile&mdash;was a deal of a contract. Yet neither of them flinched at it. But
+both put on their thinking-caps and evolved a definite plan for it&mdash;a
+plan which in all its details worked without a hitch.</p>
+
+<p>The old store closed its doors for the final time at six o'clock in the
+evening of Monday, November 3, 1902. The following day was Election Day.
+The movers voted early. They came to the Fourteenth Street store not
+long after daybreak and there began the great trek uptown&mdash;stock and
+fixtures. For three days they kept a steady procession; west through
+Fourteenth Street, then north through Seventh Avenue&mdash;to
+Thirty-fourth&mdash;from the old store to the new&mdash;and the empty wagons
+returning down through Sixth Avenue to Fourteenth Street once again. The
+entire route was carefully patrolled by special guards and policemen,
+and the entire task finally accomplished late on Thursday evening, the
+6th, at which Mr. Isidor Straus was called on the telephone and told
+quietly:</p>
+
+<p>"We shall be able to open tomorrow if you wish it."</p>
+
+<p>But the head of the house advised that the opening be set for Saturday,
+as had been advertised; it would give a final valuable day for setting
+things to rights, which meant that at eight o'clock on the morning of
+Saturday, November 8, the new store opened its doors to the public that
+was anxiously awaiting the much heralded event; with as much simplicity
+and seeming ease as if it had been situated at Thirty-fourth Street for
+the entire forty-four years of its life, instead of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> but a mere
+twenty-four hours. A great task had been accomplished, a long step
+forward safely taken&mdash;and Macy's was ready to enter upon a new decade of
+its existence.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In its wake there came uptown the other department-stores of New York;
+one by one until, with but three exceptions, every one of these
+establishments which had been situated south of Twenty-third Street and
+which are still in business today, had joined in the trek. Lord &amp;
+Taylor's left its comfortable home at Broadway and Twentieth Street, in
+which it had been housed for nearly half a century since coming north
+from its original location in Grand Street, and moved to Fifth Avenue
+and Thirty-ninth; its ancient neighbor in Broadway, Arnold Constable &amp;
+Company, stood again almost cheek by jowl in Fifth Avenue. McCreery's,
+first establishing an uptown branch in Thirty-fourth Street, eventually
+abandoned its older store in Twenty-third Street and consolidated its
+energies in the upper one. Mr. Altman moved his business to its new
+marble palace at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth, and Stern's went as far
+north as Forty-second. Lower Sixth Avenue began to look like a deserted
+village. Simpson-Crawford's, Greenhut's, Adam's, O'Neill's&mdash;one by one
+these closed their doors for the final time. Once, and that was but two
+decades ago, they had been household words among the women of New York.
+Now their buildings were emptied, stood empty and deserted for months
+and for years&mdash;in most cases until the coming of the Great War and our
+participation in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> it, when the Government was very glad to make use of
+their spacious floors for war manufacturing and for hospitalization. Of
+Macy's old-time competitors downtown who failed to join in the uptown
+movement, but three remained&mdash;Wanamaker's, Daniell's and Hearn's, who
+stood and still stand pat and prosperous in the locations which they
+have occupied for almost half a century.</p>
+
+<p>The rest are all gone. Twenty-third Street, which of a Saturday
+afternoon used to be filled from Fifth Avenue to Sixth with smart folk
+of every sort, is as dull as the deserted lower Sixth Avenue. Memories
+walk its spacious pavements. The Eden Muse&eacute;, that paradise for youth of
+an earlier generation, is vanished. So is the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which
+for forty years played so large a part in the political history of the
+town. That part of New York today is all but dead&mdash;inside of twenty
+years. Some day hence it may be reborn. Such things have come to pass in
+the big town ere now.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime the newest New York has come into its being. The
+construction of the two modern railroad terminals&mdash;the one in
+Thirty-third Street and the other in Forty-second&mdash;has created in the
+district that lies between them what today would seem to be the
+permanent retail shopping center of the city. The one station brings
+nearly 60,000 folk&mdash;transients and commuters&mdash;the other almost 100,000,
+into New York each business day. They anchor and anchor firmly, its new
+business heart. Its sidewalks are daily thronged. As was Twenty-third
+Street two decades ago, so has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> Thirty-fourth become today. Not only the
+railroad stations but four great subways running north and south, four
+elevated railways, too, a dozen surface-car lines, and innumerable taxis
+and private motor-cars pour their passengers into it. It is a
+thoroughfare of surpassing importance.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="z106.jpg" id="z106.jpg"></a><img src="images/z106.jpg" width='542' height='700' alt="THE MACY'S OF TODAY" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">THE MACY'S OF TODAY</p>
+
+<p class="bold">By 1903 the new Macy's in Herald Square was finished and the business<br />
+going forward in great strides</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Fifty years ago, as Rowland H. Macy walked home one evening with his
+daughter&mdash;as was his frequent wont&mdash;from the simple little old red-brick
+store in Fourteenth Street to their new house in Forty-ninth, he paused
+for a moment with her in front of the old Broadway Tabernacle.</p>
+
+<p>"I want you to notice this corner, very carefully, Florence," said he.
+"A half-century hence and the business of New York is to be centered
+between Thirty-fourth Street and Forty-second. Here is to be the future
+business heart of this wonderful city."</p>
+
+<p>It is upon the vision of men quite as much as upon their prudence that
+the success of their enterprises depends.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span><i>Today</i></span></h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>I. A Day in a Great Store</span></h2>
+
+<p>The subtle hour which in summer comes just before the break of day is
+the only hour in which New York ever sleeps; if indeed the modern Bagdad
+ever sleeps at all. There is an hour, however&mdash;from three of the morning
+until four&mdash;when the city is all but stilled; when its heart-beats are
+at the lowest ebb of the twenty-four. In that hour even Broadway is
+nearly deserted and Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street equally
+emptied. The swinging lights of a white-fronted lunch-room or two; the
+echoing racket of an extremely occasional surface-car or elevated train;
+the rush of a "night-hawk" taxi; the clatter of the milk-wagon; the
+measured walk of a policeman and the hurried one of some much belated
+suburbanite hurrying toward the great railroad station over in Seventh
+Avenue; these sounds, occasional and unrelated seemingly, are not New
+York; not at least the New York that you and I are accustomed to
+knowing. Yet, after all, they are New York; even, if you please, the New
+York of that throbbing heart, Herald Square.</p>
+
+<p>Soon after four in the morning the city begins to rise. New York's
+heart-beat is quickening, distinctly, even though ever and ever so
+slightly at the beginning. Yet the activity is distinguishable. The
+policemen and the cabbies in the square realize it, so do the waiter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
+and the cook in the <i>Firefly</i> lunch wagon which has stood in the busy
+Herald Square these thirty years or more now. The morning papers are
+out. The newspaper wagons, as well as those that bring milk and other
+comestibles, begin to multiply. The earliest workers in the heart of
+Manhattan now bestir themselves. By six there is real animation in the
+broad streets in and roundabout Macy's. By seven the traffic there
+begins to be a matter of reckoning. A traffic policeman makes his
+appearance. The current of vehicles and humans in those thoroughfares
+come under regulation. At eight, the city is in full sway.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>All this while Macy's has stood dark&mdash;save for the few yellow and red
+lights which police and fire protection demand. It fronts toward
+Broadway and the side streets alike are cold, impassive, unanimated.
+Inside the great dark building the watchmen are on ceaseless patrol.
+There are miles of corridors to be paced&mdash;the night walking of the Macy
+watchmen would reach from Dan to Beersheba or possibly from New York to
+Erie&mdash;millions of dollars worth of stock and fixtures to be guarded. A
+diamond ring would be missed; and so would a spool of thread. Nothing
+must be disturbed. And in order that the owners of the store may sleep
+in the sound assurance that nothing is being disturbed, the night patrol
+is made a matter of system and of record. Watchmen's clocks, here and
+there and everywhere, proclaim the regularity of the system. And an
+occasional surprise test now and then acclaims its thoroughness.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span></p><p>Hours before, the store was thoroughly cleaned; from cellar to roof.
+The last of yesterday's belated shoppers was hardly out of this
+market-place, before the men of the cleaning squads were in upon their
+heels. What a mess to be tidied up! Eight and one-half hours of hard
+endeavor can make daily a mighty dirty store and a huge housekeeping
+job. There is at the best a vast litter&mdash;and yet a litter that cannot be
+carelessly thrust away. In all that debris there may be some one tiny
+article of great value&mdash;a ring or a purse, dropped by some hasty or
+careless shopper or salesgirl. It all must be carefully gone through and
+in the morning sent to the Lost and Found Department where the chances
+are that it will not remain very long before having a claimant.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the ordinary routine of the cleaning squads. On rainy or snowy
+days its job is increased, measurably. It is astonishing the amount of
+filth the sidewalks of New York can give up on a wet day. Yet rain, or
+no rain, filth or no filth, the cleansing must be thorough. The store at
+eight o'clock of the next morning must be as clean as the proverbial
+pin. An earnest of which you can obtain for yourself any day by pressing
+your nose, among the first of the impatient early shoppers, against the
+panes of the public entrance doors. Through the night these toilers
+work; silently, unseen, save by others of their own kind. Far below
+them, in the cellars of the great structure at Thirty-fourth Street and
+Broadway, there are other squads who stand to unending tricks at the
+boilers, the engines, the dynamos and the other mechanical appliances of
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> organism. The fires may never die; the lights never go out&mdash;not
+even from one year's end to the other. And so that the very heart and
+blood and nerve-force of Macy's shall in truth be unending there are
+engines and boilers and dynamos in the mechanical plant under the
+Thirty-fourth Street sidewalks. As many as five hundred tons of coal can
+be housed in the bunkers hard at hand. The entire plant could easily
+light and supply the other necessary electric current for the needs of
+any brisk American town of five or six thousand people.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Eight o'clock, and the night superintendent of the store unlocks the
+first of its outer doors. But not to the public. Mr. Public's hours do
+not begin until a full sixty minutes later. First the store must be made
+ready for his coming. It is not enough that it shall be thoroughly
+cleaned in every fashion. The stock must be displayed anew; the long
+miles of dust coverings lifted off, folded and put away until the coming
+of another evening. Which means, of course, that the store folk must
+come well in advance of its patrons.</p>
+
+<p>In the half-hour which elapses between eight and eight-thirty, many of
+the minor executives&mdash;particularly those of the selling floors&mdash;make
+their appearance at the designated doors upon the side streets. In the
+parlance of the organization these are known as "specials" and are
+divided into several classes, denoting chiefly their connection with its
+selling or non-selling forces. They "sign in" their arrival upon a
+sheet. For while Macy's is known as the department-store without a
+time-clock, there is none which is more punctilious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> about keeping an
+exact record of the comings and goings of its workers, from the lowest
+to the highest. In the entire permanent organization of more than five
+thousand folk, there are not more than ten or a dozen who are exempted
+from this necessity. A man may draw a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year
+salary at Macy's and still be compelled to sign his time. It is part of
+the inherent democracy of the organization which holds as a high
+principle that what is fair for one man is fair for another. A better
+bed-rock principle can hardly be imagined.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Half after eight!</p>
+
+<p>A bell rings somewhere. The time-lists of the minor executives&mdash;perhaps
+it is better to remember them as the specials&mdash;are closed, and new ones
+substituted. These are duplicates of the earlier ones. When the section
+manager (a modern and much better name for the "floor-walker" of the
+earlier days) signs one of these, he does not merely put down an "X" as
+before eight-thirty, but specifically writes down his arriving time.</p>
+
+<p>But from eight-thirty to eight-forty-five is known to the rank and file
+of the organization as its hour for arrival. Three doors&mdash;one in
+Thirty-fourth Street (for the women, as well as for men executives) and
+two others, in Thirty-fifth Street (for the other men workers and the
+junior girls respectively) open on the precise moment of the half-hour.
+Even before they swing backward upon their hinges the earliest risers of
+the Macy family are beginning to group themselves in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> front of them.
+They go tramping up the broad stairs together; dropping into the slender
+receptacles the individual brass checks (of which much more a little
+later) at the first barrier-gateway; after which they go scurrying off
+to the locker-rooms, before descending or ascending to their various
+posts in the store.</p>
+
+<p>For fifteen minutes this rank and file&mdash;a miniature army it is&mdash;comes
+trooping in. There is no time to be lost; and yet no unseemly haste or
+confusion. And no noise. Noise, particularly surplus noise, is quite
+unnecessary in a machine which is functioning well.</p>
+
+<p>At eight-forty-five the barrier at the head of the main employees' stair
+at Thirty-fourth Street closes. And in order that there may not be even
+the slightest particle of unfairness&mdash;one gains an increasing admiration
+for the absolute impartiality of an organization such as this&mdash;the
+pressing of a button at that stairhead automatically orders closed the
+two auxiliary entrances in Thirty-fifth. And yet, in order perhaps that
+perfectly automatic and impartial systems may, after all, be tinged by a
+bit of human sympathy and understanding, eight-forty-five is forever
+translated at the employees' doors as eighty-forty-seven. And in cases
+of bad weather, hard rain or snow or extreme cold, eight-forty-seven
+becomes the stroke of nine by the clock&mdash;in very extreme cases even
+later, with a special allowance being made from time to time for the
+occasional breakdown of New York's rather temperamental transportation
+system.</p>
+
+<p>From eight-forty-five (eight-forty-seven) to nine o'clock, the
+late-comers&mdash;out of breath as a rule and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> extremely embarrassed into the
+bargain&mdash;are herded into a special group and given special "late"
+passes, without which they may not even enter the locker rooms, to say
+nothing of their posts in the store. Sometimes&mdash;when the tardiness
+percentages of the store have been running to unwonted heights&mdash;the
+group is admonished; always gently, always considerately. It is made to
+them a point of fairness, between the store and themselves. And almost
+invariably the admonition is received in the spirit in which it is
+given. In other days it was quite customary for the store manager or one
+of his several assistants to receive these late-comers personally and
+individually and talk to them, heart-to-heart. This method has now been
+entirely abolished. It led to controversy. It led to argument. And both
+of these led to ill-feeling. Macy's will not tolerate ill-feeling
+between its executives and its rank and file. Therefore, anything that
+might even tend to such an end was abolished&mdash;completely and
+permanently.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In due time, and when we are studying in greater detail the Macy family,
+we shall come again to the consideration of the methods of checking the
+force in in the morning and out again at night&mdash;as well as in and out at
+different intervals throughout the day. Consider now that it is still
+lacking a few brief minutes of nine o'clock on a workday morning. The
+sales force are through the lockers and getting to their day's work upon
+the floor. The non-selling forces as well&mdash;elevator-men, cashiers, all
+the rest of them, are at their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> posts. A doorman is told off to each of
+the public street entrances to the main floor. It is the regular post
+for each of these. He goes to it a minute or two before the coming of
+nine.</p>
+
+<p>After a brief period of busy activity the store aisles are for the
+moment practically deserted once again. There is a group of buyers
+"signing in"&mdash;once again the inevitable time-list&mdash;at the
+superintendent's office just beneath the main stair, where five or ten
+minutes ago the "big chief" of the whole main floor was giving his
+section managers their special instructions for the day. The rest of the
+aisles are all but empty. The clerks are behind the desks, the cashiers
+at their posts, the section managers at attention, the elevators banked
+and waiting at the ground floor&mdash; Then&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Nine o'clock!</p>
+
+<p>The echo of Madison Square Mary telling the hour comes rolling up
+Broadway. The street doors swing open; almost as if working upon a
+single mechanism. The first of the shoppers come tumbling in. The great
+main aisle of the store&mdash;one thinks of it almost as the Broadway of this
+city within a city&mdash;is populated once again. The chief stream of the
+store's patrons pours down through it. Other streams from the doors in
+the side streets join it; still others diverge down the side aisles, up
+the stair and escalators, into the elevators which presently go packing
+off, one by one, toward the mysterious and fascinating regions of the
+upper floors. In three or four brief minutes the picture that one has of
+that mighty first floor from the mezzanine balcony that runs roundabout
+it is of a great mass of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>hurrying, scurrying humanity; no longer any
+well-defined currents, but little eddies and pools of human beings
+constantly and forever changing.</p>
+
+<p>And this but hardly past nine o'clock in the morning. In another hour
+there will be still more folk within the great building. Most of them
+have come to shop, a few of them to take a tardy breakfast in the
+comfortable restaurant upon its eighth floor. One might not think that
+it would pay to open a restaurant for breakfast at as late an hour as
+nine in the morning, but such a one would not know his New York.
+Breakfast in our big town is rarely over until the setting of the sun.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>For an hour at the beginning of the day the Macy family may shop in its
+own interest. The saleswomen&mdash;the men as well&mdash;may obtain permits from
+their division managers which in turn entitle them to large and
+conspicuous shopping cards which serve two pretty definite purposes&mdash;the
+identification of the saleswoman as an actual and authorized shopper
+(she is not supposed to go nosing around other departments merely in her
+own interest or curiosity) and the obtaining for her of the discount to
+which she is entitled. Macy's is known pretty generally as a store of no
+special privileges or discounts. Teachers, clergymen, professional
+shoppers, dressmakers are recognized and welcomed in the big store, but
+only upon the same terms as every other sort of customer. But the rule
+bends, ever and ever so gently, for the man or woman who is employed
+within it. After all, he or she <i>is</i> a part of the family and so
+entitled to be recognized. This<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> recognition takes the form of a sizable
+reduction upon the wearing apparel necessary for his or her personal
+use. This difference goes upon the books of the store as a business
+expense.</p>
+
+<p>By ten the store has finished shopping in its own behalf. Its maximum
+force for the day is on the job and the wise shopper comes close to this
+hour. For by eleven the force is reduced. Luncheon is a very simple
+human necessity; but a necessity, nevertheless. And New York has never
+countenanced the Parisian habit of locking up practically all shops and
+stores and offices for an hour and a half or two hours in the middle of
+the day. But then New York has never taken its meal-times quite so
+seriously as Paris. Upon this one thing alone a considerable essay might
+be written.</p>
+
+<p>But New York must lunch, just as Paris or London or any other community
+must lunch. And so for three valuable hours out of the middle of the day
+the Macy force is reduced nearly one-third its size. Forty-five minutes
+is the ordinary allotment for lunch and the house prefers that its folk
+shall take this mid-day meal underneath its roof. Toward this end it has
+made, as we shall see, elaborate and expensive preparations in the form
+of elaborate lunch-rooms and the like. However, it recognizes that there
+are many workers who prefer to go out at the middle of the day. And
+proper arrangements are made for the accommodation of these folk.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>By two o'clock, however, practically the entire selling force at least
+is back again. The hardest portion of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> the day begins. For, no matter
+how hard the store may advertise, no matter how it may strive to educate
+its patrons in every other way to the use of its facilities in the less
+crowded and hence more comfortable morning hours, the hard and solemn
+fact remains that it suits the comfort and convenience of the average
+New York woman to shop in the afternoon. And shop in the afternoon she
+does. She comes into Macy's right after luncheon&mdash;although a single
+glance at the big and crowded restaurant would easily convince you that
+she often lunches as well as shops in the big red-brick institution of
+Herald Square&mdash;and then gets right down to the serious business of
+shopping.</p>
+
+<p>And at Macy's it <i>is</i> business; always business. The big store at
+Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, in recent years at least, has not
+gone in for shows&mdash;for organ and orchestral concerts or recitals or
+anything of that sort. It has considered that its best shows are always
+upon its counters. It has had no quarrel with the successful stores that
+have added entertainment features to the other routine of their
+operations. It merely has contended that its own method was completely
+satisfactory to itself. Which, after all, is a position of infinite
+strength.</p>
+
+<p>"Macy's attractions are its prices!" is an advertising slogan of the
+house so long sounded now that it has become almost a household phrase
+to its hundreds of thousands of regular patrons. It is a phrase up to
+which it has lived, steadily and consistently. And not only has it
+steadfastly refused to give shows of any sort&mdash;save, of course, those
+wonderful window<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> pageants of other years, which were horses of quite a
+different color indeed&mdash;but it has also refused up to the present time
+to install such non-merchandise enterprises as manicuring parlors,
+hair-dressing rooms, barber shops and the like. And this despite the
+fact that in selling such things as groceries and automobile
+sundries&mdash;to take two specific instances out of several&mdash;it has gone
+considerably beyond the merchandise scope of some of the very largest of
+its New York competitors.</p>
+
+<p>"Hundreds of thousands of regular patrons?" you interrupt and repeat. "A
+hundred thousand people is a whole lot. Until very recently, at least,
+the population of what would be considered a pretty good-sized American
+city."</p>
+
+<p>Not long ago, I asked how many people came into Macy's in the passing of
+an average business day. I was promptly told that several times the firm
+had endeavored to make an actual and systematic count of the folk who
+passed through each of its many entrances, but had never entirely
+succeeded. Once, of a busy October day, the count up to two o'clock in
+the afternoon had reached and passed the one hundred and twenty thousand
+mark. At that time each of the great escalators which ascend from the
+main floor was handling its maximum capacity of 7,400 persons an hour;
+each of the fourteen public elevators was carrying the full number of
+passengers permitted it by law and the store management; while a host of
+other folk were doing business upon the ground floor without ever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>
+ascending to the fascinating mysteries of the land of Up-Above.</p>
+
+<p>And that was October. If a man who had seen the throng of that pleasant
+autumn day and thought it well-nigh impossible only had returned to the
+big store on a December day&mdash;say the Saturday before Christmas last&mdash;he
+would have thought that three hundred thousand would have been far
+nearer the mark of the eight and one-half hours. Could more folk have
+been squeezed through those wide doors and into those broad aisles? It
+would have seemed not. Even with the aid of a whole corps of special
+policemen and traffic rules as scientific and as ingenious as those
+which regulate the vehicular traffic of nearby Fifth Avenue, it was a
+task of a good half-hour to get within the huge mart; another half-hour
+to get out again. Certain departments&mdash;notably toys&mdash;possessed
+navigation problems of their very own, and other departments, such as
+refrigerators and other household goods, were comparatively deserted.
+The Christmas trade is nothing if not oddly balanced.</p>
+
+<p>Through a store such as this one may wander, <i>ad libitum</i>, and find a
+new surprise at nearly every corner of it. Certainly upon each of its
+floors. Nor are these to be limited, in any way, to the floors to which
+the public is ordinarily admitted. Once I remember coming through the
+eighth floor and suddenly emerging upon a clean, crisply lighted little
+workshop. At a long bench underneath an atelier-like window three men,
+fairly well-advanced in years, were working. One was engraving upon
+silver&mdash;the other two upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> glass. The chief of the shop explained to me
+that in the beginning they were Germans but they had been in Macy's so
+many, many years that they were today to be classed as pretty thoroughly
+Americanized. One of them had sat at that bench&mdash;and the one down in
+Fourteenth Street that had preceded it before the northward trek to
+Thirty-fourth Street&mdash;for over thirty-two years. The three men were
+artisans&mdash;of the old school and of a sort that seemingly is not bred
+these days.</p>
+
+<p>"When they are gone I do not know where we shall go to replace them,"
+said the superintendent.</p>
+
+<p>"You will have to quit doing this sort of work?" I ventured.</p>
+
+<p>He answered quickly:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no," said he, "Macy's never quits. We shall have to find
+others&mdash;even if we train them ourselves. It is only the material for
+training that worries me. American young men of today are not overfond
+of painstaking work of this sort."</p>
+
+<p>I knew instantly what he meant. As a nation we are made up of "shortcut"
+experts. Perseverance, patience, a tedious attention to uninteresting
+detail, have seemingly but little appeal to the average young man who is
+looking forward to a real career for himself. To be an executive&mdash;no
+matter by what name or title&mdash;and in as short a time as is humanly
+possible is apparently the only object that he sees ahead of him. A
+laudable ambition to be sure. But one shudders at the mere thought of a
+land which should be composed entirely of executives and wishes that we
+might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> develop more definitely a class of artisan workers, such as came
+to us forty, thirty, even twenty-five years ago.</p>
+
+<p>The oldest of these men&mdash;the man with thirty Macy years to his
+credit&mdash;was chasing a hunting scene upon a great glass bowl as I bent
+over his desk. It was more than artisanship, that task; it was artistry.
+A real work of real art even though at the moment these elaborate
+cut-glass designs have lost a little in public favor. In their own time
+and order they will come back again, however. And the workmanship that
+made them possible will be restored to its own former high favor.</p>
+
+<p>But even today there are large demands in Macy's for precisely this sort
+of thing. And glass grinding and engraving&mdash;which runs all the way from
+the making of prescription lenses for spectacles or for milady's
+<i>lorgnons</i> up to the cutting of an entire dinner service of the most
+exquisitely patterned glass or repairs to the bowl or pitcher that
+Bridget or Selma has so carelessly broken&mdash;is the chief factor of a shop
+that handles, as other parts of its day's job, jewelry and watch
+repairs, electro-plating of gold, copper, silver, nickel, the printing
+or engraving or stamping of stationery of every sort, to say nothing of
+leather goods of every kind and description and a thousand lesser and
+highly individual jobs, such as the regilding of a mirror or the
+transformation of an ancient whale-oil lamp into a modern incandescent
+one. It is small wonder that as a minimum seventy-five men are
+constantly employed in this shop; more, as the exigencies of this season
+or of that may demand them.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p><p>Yet this is but one of Macy's shops under that giant roof of Herald
+Square. There are others in close proximity&mdash;like those for the making
+of mattresses and bedding of every sort and variety and the
+establishment which brings broken toys back into life again. To my own
+Peter Pannish soul this last forever has the greatest fascination. Once,
+long years ago, I went into a great store in a distant city and found up
+under its roof a man whose sole task from one year's end to the other
+was the making of repairs upon toy locomotives. How I envied that man
+his job! And how the other day I envied the job of the Macy man who was
+repainting dolls' houses, one fascinating suburban villa after another.
+The doctor in the far corner of the room, whose patients ran all the way
+from lovely dolls of the most delicate china and porcelain to Teddy
+Bears who apparently had been badly worsted in some terrific nursery
+struggle, was a man with a position in which he might have genuine
+pride; but for the painting and re-arranging of those small houses a
+man, with an imagination in his soul, might almost afford to pay for the
+privilege of doing the work!</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Five-thirty!</p>
+
+<p>Again the doormen to their posts, two or three minutes in advance of the
+exact hour set. The minute hand upon the face of the clock no sooner
+reaches the exact bottom of its course, before a bell rings within the
+store and the great doors shut&mdash;simultaneously, as in the morning they
+had opened. But not permanently, of course. Dozens, hundreds, perhaps a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>
+thousand or more shoppers still are left within the store. Each is to be
+accorded a full opportunity to finish his or her transactions. There is
+no hurry; no ostensible hurry, at any rate. It would not be
+good-breeding to hasten the customer upon his way. And a canon of good
+merchandising is good breeding.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually, however, the late-stayers eliminate themselves. The big doors
+open to let them out, but never again this day to let newcomers in. No
+rule of the house is observed more inexorably. And so gradually the
+store empties itself.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime certain departments have already ceased to function. The
+salesfolk are dismissed for the night and go scurrying off. A few bring
+out the dust-covers and these go out upon the stock. Counters are
+emptied. The stock, wherever possible, is put away, and when not put
+away is carefully covered. Nothing is left to chance nor to dust. System
+reigns. And the section manager, the last to leave his department for
+the night, makes sure that everything there is ship-shape against the
+coming of another day.</p>
+
+<p>Before he is gone&mdash;and he, in Macy's, is multiplied into ninety or a
+hundred human units&mdash;the cleaning squads are out upon the floor, rolling
+out their bin-like carts in orderly formation and proceeding upon the
+debris like a miniature army. Four, five, six hours of hard work await
+them. It will be midnight, perhaps later, before the store is absolutely
+clean again and settled down to the monotonous presence of the watchman,
+to await the arrival of another dawn.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p><p>In the meantime the Macy family is pouring forth into the side streets
+through the doorways through which they entered before nine of the
+morning. There is little restriction, no red-tape about their leaving.
+Their brass discs&mdash;each individual and bearing the employee's
+designating number&mdash;which they dropped in the morning have been returned
+to them in the course of the day for use again upon the morrow.</p>
+
+<p>The only formality about their leaving&mdash;if indeed it might be called a
+formality&mdash;is the quick-fire inspection made by two store detectives who
+stand either side of the descending file at the main employees' stair,
+to see if any packages which are being carried out are lacking the
+check-room stamp and vis&eacute;.</p>
+
+<p>These last are the store's protection against possible theft through its
+inner walls. The workers who bring packages in, either in the morning or
+at any later time in the progress of the day, are asked to take them to
+a well-equipped check and storage room close by the lockers, where they
+may regain them at night, stamped and vis&eacute;d, to go out into the open
+once again. Any purchases that they may make during the day follow a
+similar course. It is a definite and an orderly procedure. Any other
+would be indefinite and to an extent disorderly.</p>
+
+<p>This is the reason why an occasional package&mdash;lacking the official stamp
+and vis&eacute; of the check-room&mdash;is picked up by the keen-eyed detectives
+while its transporter is asked to tarry for a moment in an ante-room. In
+the course of an average evening there may be a half dozen of such
+outlaw packages detected. Their holders<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> are not thieves. There is not
+even the implication that they are thieves. They are simply trying to
+ignore a fair and open-minded rule which the store has made, not alone
+for its own protection but for the protection of every man and woman in
+its employ. Such is the explanation which the assistant store manager
+makes to them before he dismisses them, at just a few minutes before
+six.</p>
+
+<p>"We believe in explaining things," he will tell you afterwards. "For we
+believe that we gain the very best service from the Macy people by not
+asking them to work in the dark. If we make a rule and its rulings
+sometimes puzzle them&mdash;sometimes even seem a little arbitrary,
+perhaps&mdash;we tell them why we have had to make the rule and almost
+invariably find them satisfied and quite content."</p>
+
+<p>The packages, themselves, are detained overnight. The store reserves the
+right to make an inspection of them. Such inspection, even when it is
+made, rarely ever shows the package to be illicit. It merely is
+carelessness. And the thoughtless worker to whom it is returned in the
+morning is merely asked not to be careless again, but to make a full and
+co-operative use of the facilities which are provided for the comfort,
+and the protection, of him and his fellows; which generally is all that
+is necessary to be said.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>By six the store is practically emptied of its workers. After that hour
+any one leaving it must have a pass and be interviewed by the night
+superintendent at the single door left open for exit. Night work in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>
+Macy store is little and far between these days&mdash;save possibly in the
+Christmas season and even then it is held at a minimum; an astonishing
+minimum when one comes to compare it with the Christmas seasons of, say,
+a mere twenty years ago. The state law says that aside from that
+fortnight of holiday turmoil, the women workers of the store, who are
+considerably in the majority, shall not work more than fifty-four hours
+or oftener than one night a week and then not later than nine o'clock.
+In turn, the store, following the workings of the statute, designates
+Thursday as its late employment night. If, because of some emergency, it
+wishes to deviate from this, it must have a special permit.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, however, Macy's anticipates the law; goes far ahead
+of it. It finds its women workers not only willing to work the
+occasional Thursday night shifts, but, with the practical advantages of
+a full dinner furnished without cost and overpay to come into the
+reckoning, for the most part extremely anxious. And it reminds the
+solicitous legislators up at Albany that it was not a statute that
+abolished the pernicious habit of keeping the stores open for business
+evenings and late in the evening, but the progressive thought of the
+store managers of New York, themselves. These last have yielded little
+to the sentimentalists in real looking forward. Theirs have been the
+practical problems&mdash;not the least of these that of the education of a
+shopping public which seemingly had demanded that the big
+department-stores of New York should be kept open evenings&mdash;some
+evenings throughout the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> entire year&mdash;and all evenings in a certain
+small and terrible season; and without consideration of the task this
+custom imposed upon the patient folk who were serving them. Out of such
+lack of consideration, out of such selfishness, if you please, was a
+great practical and moral reform in merchandising evolved. Which was, in
+itself, no little triumph.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>II. Organization in a Modern Store</span></h2>
+
+<p>I like to think of modern business as a huge, great single machine; or
+better still, a group of little machines gathered together and
+functioning as one. It is a simile that I have used time and time again.
+To feel that some single achievement of industry&mdash;of manufacturing or of
+merchandising&mdash;is as well organized and as well balanced as the many
+mechanisms that are laboring in its behalf, seems to bring the most
+single complete picture of modern business of the sort that our press
+has ofttimes been pleased to term "big business".</p>
+
+<p>And sometimes I like to think of these "big businesses"&mdash;with their
+hundreds and thousands of human units&mdash;as armies. At no time is this
+last comparison more apt than when one comes to apply it to the modern
+department-store, as we today know it in America. For, even if you wish
+to grant an entire dissimilarity of purpose, one of these huge
+institutions has more than one point of similarity with an army. Not
+alone in numbers can this parallel be made, but quite as quickly in
+organization. While, to return to our first simile, it, too, is a big
+machine&mdash;humanized. Its parts are carefully co-ordinated so that the
+whole<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> will function with the least possible friction. Like an army it
+is officered with its generalissimo, its under generals, its colonels,
+its captains, its lieutenants, its sergeants and its corporals. The
+difference is only in nomenclature. The structure is quite the same.
+For, when you come to analyze, you will find the divisions of labor and
+of authority quite corresponding to similar divisions in the army.
+Officer, "non-com" and private&mdash;each contributes his more or less
+important part; each is a necessary factor in the success of the
+enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>Like an army, the department-store of modern America is designed to move
+constantly forward. The "big-chief" scans his balance sheets, the rise
+and fall of the curves of his outgo and income averages, the
+tremendously meaningful jagged red lines of his graphic charts, quite as
+carefully as the army general keeps track of the movement of his forces
+upon the maps which his topographists send him. He gathers his officers
+roundabout him and plans the strategy of business with the same shrewd
+foresight that must be observed by the successful military leader. He
+must be a promoter of morale throughout his forces, even down to the
+newest and the lowest-paid clerk. There must be constant liaison between
+the general and the private in the ranks.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In considerable detail this parallel can be carried out. Soon, however,
+it must come to an end. That is, it ends in so far as Macy's is
+concerned. For the army at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street is neither
+an army<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> of offense nor of defense. Its sole position always is upon the
+front line of service.</p>
+
+<p>At the head of the organization there are the three brother partners who
+inherited their original interest in the great business from their
+father, the late Isidor Straus, who, with their mother, lost his life in
+the supreme catastrophe of the sinking of the <i>Titanic</i>. In 1914 they
+acquired Nathan Straus' interest by purchase. These men, Jesse Isidor,
+the president, Percy S., the vice-president, and Herbert N., the
+secretary and treasurer, are its triple head and front. While each has
+trained himself to be a merchandise specialist of the highest order,
+there is none that knows the details of Macy's better than his
+brothers&mdash;they share equally in the supreme authority that directs the
+business. Directly responsible to them, in turn, is its general manager,
+its merchandise council and its advertising and financial departments.</p>
+
+<p>As I write these paragraphs, the great chart of the Macy organization
+lies upon my desk. It is a vast and fascinating thing. With the lines
+extending upon it here and there and everywhere from the box which holds
+the triple-head, branching and rebranching here and there and again, it
+looks not unlike a giant map; a chart, if you prefer to have it so. And
+so it is, a chart upon which the steersmen of so vast and so responsible
+an enterprise safely pick their course upon a seemingly unending
+journey.</p>
+
+<p>"Government by draughting-board," sniffed an old-time business man to me
+once, when I was trying to explain to him in some detail how a great
+steel <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>manufacturing plant of the Middle West attempted to accomplish
+its huge job, economically and efficiently, by the use of graphic
+charts. And he added: "I'd like to see <i>myself</i> held down by blue-print
+authority."</p>
+
+<p>To which, after all this while, I should like to reply:</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to see a concern, as big and as successful as Macy's,
+operated without a careful charting of its always difficult path."</p>
+
+<p>Yet, as a matter of hard fact, Macy's, any more than any other big and
+well-planned business organism of today, never binds itself to go
+blindly and unthinkingly upon the lines of the charts&mdash;and nowhere else.
+The real trick of executive direction seems to be to know when to follow
+these lines and when more or less to completely disregard them.
+Rule-of-thumb can never again overcome the rules of averages, of
+percentages or of economic laws. But the rule of wit and of human
+understanding can ofttimes be used to temper this first group and
+sometimes with astonishingly successful results.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>A glance or two at this imposing organization chart lying before me
+begins to show the many, many ramifications of the huge Macy business
+tree. It shows, for instance, how, under the direction of the
+merchandise council, are four large branches of store activity more or
+less inter-related: the handling of Macy's own merchandise (meaning
+particularly that which is either made in the store's own factories or
+at least made under its direct supervision); the work of the large force
+of buyers; the comparison department<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> (an important phase of the
+business to which we shall come in our own good time); and the foreign
+offices.</p>
+
+<p>In the financial department, the controller is the quite logical chief.
+His general duties are fairly obvious. To help him in them, he has,
+under his direction, the chief cashier, the salary office, the auditing
+department, the depositors' account department&mdash;this last a most
+distinctive Macy feature&mdash;and a statistical department.</p>
+
+<p>Obvious, too, is the greater part of the work of the publicity
+department. It includes in addition to the advertising manager&mdash;always
+an important factor in the modern department-store and particularly so
+in the case of Macy's&mdash;a display manager. It is the job of the first of
+these men to tell the public of the merchandise being offered for sale
+at the sign of the red star; the job of his compeer to see that it is
+properly displayed to them.</p>
+
+<p>And, finally, there is the general manager&mdash;last but not least.
+Connected by an exceedingly direct and much-traveled line with the
+general offices upon the seventh floor of the store are Mr. W. J. Wells,
+the store's general manager, and his advisory council. For the G. M.,
+big as he is always, has need of much advice. Upon his broad and
+efficient shoulders are placed such a tremendous array of
+responsibilities that one cannot but marvel at the sheer efficiency of
+the man&mdash;to say nothing of his reserves of physical and mental
+strength&mdash;who can hold down such a job. Yet, at Macy's, the man himself
+disclaims any superhuman powers.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span></p><p>"I am merely the automatic governor to this big machine," he will tell
+you, in his own simple, direct way. "In fact, if the machine always
+functioned one hundred per cent. efficient, there really would be no
+need either of me or of my job. It is because no machine that is built
+of human cogs and cams and levers and pulleys may ever work at one
+hundred per cent. efficiency that I, or some other man, must sit in this
+office. It is our job to meet the unusual and the unforeseen. We take up
+slack here and loosen there."</p>
+
+<p>The translation of this is unmistakable. If the three men upon the high
+seventh floor of the institution are its steersmen, this man, who has
+his office at the rear of its broad mezzanine balcony, is at least its
+chief engineer. And to assist him he has five assistant
+engineers&mdash;assistant general managers, in reality. The habit of simile
+leads one into odd designations of title. Each of these five assistant
+general managers&mdash;we shall stand by the nomenclature of the store&mdash;in
+turn has a large number of departments reporting to him. While in
+addition to them and ranking as virtual assistant managers are the
+superintendent of the detective bureau and that of the building, itself.</p>
+
+<p>The general manager, himself, is charged with the general duty of
+engaging, training and educating employees. He regulates salaries. He
+controls the transfer and discharge of employees. He is charged with the
+enforcement of all rules and regulations. He is the final authority to
+decide whether or not merchandise is returnable, for refund, exchange or
+credit. He also is the authority who adjusts all claims or
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>controversies with customers. And he is the one to whom employees may
+appeal if they feel they are being treated unfairly by their superiors.
+A man-sized job truly! And because no one man, short of a superhuman at
+any rate, could ever perform all of its various and perplexing
+functions, Mr. Wells has his five assistants. In the event of his
+absence as well as that of any one of them the man below rises
+temporarily into his immediate superior's job.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="z140.jpg" id="z140.jpg"></a><img src="images/z140.jpg" width='500' height='700' alt="WHERE MILADY OF MANHATTAN SHOPS" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">WHERE MILADY OF MANHATTAN SHOPS</p>
+
+<p class="bold">The vast ground floor of Macy's is, in itself, a mark of much interest<br />and variety</p>
+
+<p>It is the major task of the first of these assistants to direct the work
+of the floor superintendents&mdash;eight of these&mdash;and through them that of
+the section managers and the actual sales forces; nearly two thousand
+people all told. In other words, his job is the selling. To this great
+force and to the countless problems that must arise in its day-by-day
+direction there is added the oversight of the personal shoppers'
+service. Which means in turn the furnishing of guides throughout the
+departments to shoppers who ask for them; finding translators for folk
+to whom the intricacies of our tongue are unsolved mysteries and, in
+certain specific and necessary cases, the sending of merchandise with a
+member of the sales force into the homes of Macy's patrons.</p>
+
+<p>The second and the third assistant managers are the heads of non-selling
+organizations within the store, the fourth and the fifth handle the
+training and the educational departments, respectively. The second
+assistant has, as his especial responsibility, the merchandise checkers,
+the collectors, the stock clerks, the cashiers and the interior mail and
+messenger service. The other non-selling assistant general manager
+supervises<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> the receiving department, the department of money orders and
+adjustments, the supply department, the delivery, the receiving, the
+time office, the manufacturing, and sundry other smaller specialties of
+the store; small, however, only in a comparative sense. Taken by
+themselves they quickly would be seen to be sizable indeed.</p>
+
+<p>The tasks of most of these departments are fairly obvious from their
+names. Some of the others we shall see in a bit of detail as we go
+further into the store and its workings. In other chapters we shall
+describe what the great delivery department is supposed to accomplish,
+and actually does accomplish, the scope and plan and reach of the
+departments of training and of employment, and some others, too. It
+takes no great strain upon the imagination to conceive of the importance
+of the detective bureau's work, nor that of the superintendent of
+buildings.</p>
+
+<p>So much, then, for a preliminary bird's-eye view of a mammoth machine,
+not a machine for turning out shoes or typewriters or paper, but for
+buying and selling all these things and many, many more. And as you read
+in the earlier part of this book, the huge mechanism did not spring into
+its being in a year, or in a decade, or even in a generation. It
+represents slow, hard, steady growth; and slow, hard, steady growth it
+is still having.</p>
+
+<p>There are now one hundred and eighteen departments in Macy's and yet,
+out of many thousands of separate and distinct items, there are some
+things that the store does not sell. Some of these commodities are
+handled by other great department-stores. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> while Macy's may and does
+follow a charted path, it is its own chart and its own path. It never
+follows blindly the pathways of others. So, for instance, it does not
+sell pianos. In this particular case, at least, the reason is not hard
+to discover. Remember, all the while, that Macy's sells for cash and for
+cash alone&mdash;always and forever; and then consider that in ninety-nine
+cases out of a hundred, pianos are sold upon the installment plan. The
+installment plan is entirely outside of the Macy scheme of salesmanship.
+It may or may not be a good plan. But to adopt it Macy's would either
+have to change its selling policy or else dispose of so few pianos that
+it would not be profitable to maintain a department for them. This is
+the alpha and the omega of the piano, as far as Macy's is concerned. It
+has no intention either of changing its deep-rooted and well-founded
+selling policy, nor, on the other hand, of establishing a little-used
+and possibly unprofitable department. Upon this decision it stands quite
+content.</p>
+
+<p>Yet assuredly Macy's is organized to sell nearly all of the necessities
+of life&mdash;and an unusually large number of the luxuries in addition. From
+hosiery to ice cream, from women's suits to artists' materials, from
+eye-glasses to sausages, and from petticoats to ukeleles, the list of
+the store's wares is almost without limit. Other furniture is not hedged
+about by the same merchandising traditions and restrictions as are
+pianos; there are in the upper floor of this great market-place pieces
+of household furnishings whose prices run well into the hundreds and
+even thousands of dollars, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> say nothing of rare Oriental rugs, fine
+paintings and other works of art.</p>
+
+<p>These one hundred and eighteen departments have been arranged after long
+study and experience and well thought out plans. In fact, so many
+conflicting and intricate features have entered into their planning that
+it is hardly possible within the space of these pages to give more than
+the broad general policy of the department organizations of the store.
+Yet it is another of these fairly obvious principles that upon its main
+floor&mdash;where its space, square foot by square foot, is by far at its
+highest value, and where there is a maximum of accessibility&mdash;should be
+displayed the items that sell the most quickly and the most readily.
+This follows the very reasonable theory that goods for which there is
+the most popular demand should at all times be the most accessible.
+Varying slightly in specific cases and conditions, as one ascends into
+the five upper selling floors of the store, the merchandise falls more
+and more into classifications that call for care and deliberation in the
+purchasing. Thus, upon the main floor, one will find such articles as
+umbrellas, books, candy, notions, and the like&mdash;to make but a few
+instances out of many&mdash;while upon the second, there will be yardage
+goods, linens, shoes and so forth.</p>
+
+<p>Parenthetically, it may be set down that in older days, yardage
+goods&mdash;meaning cloths and weaves of almost every sort&mdash;never used to be
+found above the ground floor of any department-store. Retail
+merchandising tradition in New York suffered a body blow some years ago
+when Macy's sent them upstairs. Even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> the men who worked in the
+department protested against the change. A sizable proportion of their
+income was and is in their commissions upon their total volume of sales.
+They could not see the sales upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>"For two cents I'd resign," said one of the veterans, just as the change
+was announced.</p>
+
+<p>No one offered him the two cents, however, and he remained. And the
+following year saw the department reach a new high level for total sales
+in its yard goods.</p>
+
+<p>One large reason for this in Macy's is the unusual accessibility of the
+upper floors from the street level. It required little or no effort for
+the customer to get to the second floor, or, for that matter, to the
+sixth. The store's unusual and fairly marvelous system of escalators,
+well-placed, smooth running, always available, and to be safely used by
+even a rheumatic or a cripple, bring these self-same upper floors at all
+times within easy reach of the street, and without the use of the firm's
+generous plant of elevators. With the exception of the abnormal stress
+and strain of the holiday season, the vertical system of Macy's
+transportation is never very seriously taxed.</p>
+
+<p>To those upper floors, also, go the folk whose purchases necessitate the
+fitting of something or other to the human frame. As we have just seen,
+shoes are upon the second floor. On the third is the women's wearing
+apparel, with special dressing-room facilities for trying on and
+fitting. Similar conveniences are to be found in the men's clothing
+department upon the fifth floor.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span></p><p>Rugs, upholstery and art objects generally require more time for
+selection than do shoes and socks, more room for display as well. They
+go, then, quite naturally to the broad spaces of the fourth floor. The
+same qualities, only somewhat emphasized, apply to furniture, which is
+shown and sold upon the sixth. That the restaurant is relegated to the
+eighth floor is due in large part to the necessity for having cooking
+odors where they can be carried away without reaching other parts of the
+store; as well as to considerations in regard to the economy of floor
+space for an enterprise that is active during only a part of the day.</p>
+
+<p>Minor changes in the arrangement of all these departments are constantly
+and forever under way. A great market-place like Macy's never stays
+entirely put. Special considerations, special problems, unforeseen
+merchandising plans may at any moment make it not only advisable but
+necessary to change the location or the relative space of any or all the
+departments. At Christmas-time the unusual pressure upon some of them,
+accompanied by a slacking in others&mdash;unfortunately (or fortunately?)
+shoppers cannot be everywhere and at the same moment&mdash;means many
+temporary changes&mdash;so one department must give some of its space for a
+time to its neighbor&mdash;a debt possibly to be repaid at some other season
+of the year, when thoughts are not on toys, or candies or jewelry, but
+upon such serious things as carpets or refrigerators.</p>
+
+<p>An interesting sidelight upon the intensive study that Macy's gives the
+psychology of its interior arrangements is furnished in the fact that,
+on the theory that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> the less deadly of the species has an inherent
+aversion to department-stores, men's furnishing goods in these emporiums
+should generally be displayed upon the main floor, and just as close to
+a street entrance as is possible. Macy's has been no exception to this
+rule. A man, even when he is in a mood for spending, wants it over with
+as soon as possible. He is impatient of the slightest delay. On the
+other hand, his wife or daughter will make of shopping a kind of ritual.
+And, perhaps, because of that, she is often the more intelligent and
+discriminating buyer.</p>
+
+<p>Today, however, space on the main floor of the larger stores in New York
+is proving so valuable for goods that appeal to women shoppers, that
+some of them are trying to find a new method of appealing to the
+man-in-a-hurry. And so there has come to be a distinct trend toward
+putting men's goods upon a high upper floor, but with special express
+elevator service, so that their purchasers can get in and out with a
+minimum use of their valuable time.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>That part of the organization of Macy's which always has, always has
+had, and always will have the chief visual appeal to the public, is the
+staff of sales people with whom it comes in constant contact. Again and
+again, as we come to consider the minute workings of this great machine
+of modern business, we shall find its human factor looming larger before
+our very noses. We can not dodge it. We have no desire to dodge it. In
+fact, we find it at all times the most fascinating feature of our study.
+It is no part of this narrative to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> decide which part of the whole corps
+of workers in the store is the most important to it&mdash;it would be similar
+and quite as easy to try to give an opinion as to the relative
+importance of the mainspring and the balance-wheel of a watch&mdash;but it is
+enough to say here, as we shall say again and again, that the girl
+behind the counter&mdash;to say nothing of the man&mdash;is an absolutely
+indispensable feature. By her it rises; by her it might easily come
+tumbling down.</p>
+
+<p>Let me illustrate by the testimony of a young woman who recently was a
+girl behind the counter at Macy's:</p>
+
+<p>"It surely is true," she says, "that we salespeople can do a great deal
+to increase the business and the number of customers. Some of these last
+are, of course, nearly hopeless&mdash;they would try the patience of Job,
+himself&mdash;and then again there are the others who are most appreciative
+of your services. It was interesting to me, when first I went behind the
+counter, to see how many of my customers would say 'thank you.' I found
+that nearly all of them will, if only you make a real effort to please
+them. And the majority of the Macy salesforce does try to help a
+customer in any way that she needs help. One day I observed this
+incident, which is almost typical: A customer approached our counter and
+put her bag down upon it. A saleswoman went to her at once, saying:</p>
+
+<p>"'May I help you, madam?'</p>
+
+<p>"The customer shook her head, a negative; she was merely trying to
+adjust her veil, she explained. But our saleswoman was resourceful in
+her tact.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well, maybe, I can assist you with that,' she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> insisted, and
+straightway proceeded to do so. That was her notion of the service of
+our store."</p>
+
+<p>It is incidents just like this&mdash;seemingly small when you take them apart
+and place them out by themselves&mdash;but in the aggregate very real and
+very important, that make for a store its lifelong customers. Let the
+young woman continue. Like a good many other young women in the store
+she is a college graduate and also possessed of a power for shrewd
+observation.</p>
+
+<p>" ... One woman bought some gloves from me and while she waited for her
+change showed me her shopping-list. It was miles long, seemingly, and
+appeared to include everything from a safety-pin to a toy submarine. As
+she conned it, she said that she had shopped in Macy's for years, and
+nowhere else. In fact, I remember that she said that she would be
+completely lost in any other store.... Others came back, bringing a
+single glove that they had purchased a year or more before and wanting
+another pair just like them, they had been so satisfactory....</p>
+
+<p>"Not all of them are quite so cheery, however. Occasionally some
+unreasonable and irate customer would appear, storming at having to wait
+a few precious moments for her change, or at not being able to find the
+same glove that her friend purchased the week before&mdash;the chances being
+quite good that her friend might have bought the glove in another store.
+These are the times that test the wit and diplomacy and resource of the
+girl behind the counter.</p>
+
+<p>"A day behind a counter is filled to the brim with experiences&mdash;you have
+your finger on the pulse of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> part of the life of New York&mdash;you are a
+part of a huge and important organization, and you come into contact
+with the world in general. Even customers coming to our glove counter
+furnished us with interesting moments. One in particular came to me to
+get some of our children's woolen gloves. He was a robust old man&mdash;about
+fifty-five, I'd have said&mdash;but he told me he was sixty-nine. He said he
+had just bought the same gloves elsewhere for over twice as much. (I
+said I didn't doubt that in the least.) And then he went on to say his
+wife and daughters shopped in stores where the name meant a great deal,
+but that he always came to Macy's because he came for the merchandise he
+got. He ended by saying he was a happy man, with three romping
+grandchildren, that he daily handled over two thousand men, but couldn't
+handle one woman. I should like to see him try to run Macy's and have to
+handle some six thousand men and women."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The personnel of each of the selling floors of the store is under the
+direction of an organization captain, whose precise title is floor
+superintendent. He has an understudy&mdash;or, as he is known in the parlance
+of the place, a relief&mdash;so that the floor is never, even for a minute,
+without an executive head.</p>
+
+<p>This floor superintendent is a man of considerable discretionary powers.
+He must be. These powers are being constantly brought into play as he is
+called upon to decide the merits of this or that customer's claim. He is
+a man of tact and judgment, both of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> which qualities are kept in
+constant operation. Upon his floor he is the direct representative of
+the management and so looks out for its interests. From his desk upon
+the floor headquarters he directs and supervises, yet he constantly
+circulates throughout his various departments and sees to it himself
+that the matters for which he is responsible are thoroughly carried out.
+The orderliness of the floor is his special concern, and when, from time
+to time, it becomes necessary to shift salesclerks from one department
+to another&mdash;as in the case of the numberless special sales requiring
+extra help&mdash;it is he who engineers the details of the transfer.</p>
+
+<p>Acting as lieutenants to the floor superintendents are the section
+managers, who, as we have already seen, were in the store of yesterday
+known as "floorwalkers." But in the Macy's of today something
+considerably different is meant from the superannuated and somewhat
+pompous gentleman who used to condescend, when we asked for the location
+of silverware, to wave us away with a cryptic
+"second-aisle-to-the-right-rear-of-the-store." It now means a live,
+up-to-date, agreeable gentleman, with a man's-size job to fill.</p>
+
+<p>Not only must he ascertain the customers' needs and direct all of them,
+plainly and courteously, but he has direct supervision over all of the
+employees within his section. He is held responsible for their
+deportment and it is his duty to observe, as far as possible, their
+mental, moral and physical condition. He must be able to detect errors
+in the methods used by his salesclerks, and in order that he may be in a
+position to teach them correct methods, he must, himself, be master of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>
+the store system. Parts of this constantly are being changed, so that in
+addition to all of these other qualities, the successful section manager
+must possess an alert mind. The importance of his work may be visualized
+to some slight extent at least by the manual which is prepared for his
+guidance. This is a loose-leaf book of some fifty closely printed pages;
+the number varying according to the changes in the store system which
+are made from time to time. Just to give you a slight idea of what this
+captain of a merchandising army has upon his mind, consider that under
+the division entitled "Section Managers' Daily Duties" there are
+forty-six different items, and under "Miscellaneous Duties" thirteen.
+Moreover, he must have at his instant command all the technical
+procedure regarding transactions and forms, refunds, complaints,
+transfers, employees' shopping, the Internal Revenue Law, accidents, and
+then some more. I submit this as a job requiring all that a man has of
+fortitude and delicacy!</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Salesmanship is the thing that really made R. H. Macy &amp; Company and it
+therefore is patent that they should consider the actual sellers of
+their goods as the very backbone of their organization. In another place
+it is related how, in the department of training, employees are taught
+to sell, and in another something of the working out of the psychology
+of the customer and the salesclerk. Education counts. It helps to make
+the salesclerk a vital factor of the store organization.</p>
+
+<p>Macy policy sees to it that the clerk is, in so far as it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> is possible,
+kept interested in his or her work. There are, as we have already begun
+to understand, as few rules governing their conduct, dress and liberties
+as are consistent with the smooth, economical operation of the business.
+On the other hand, there is all possible encouragement for them to
+become familiar and even expert with the things that they sell. In many
+of the departments special booklets have been prepared as aids in
+selling the particular line of merchandise carried. That for the
+stationery department, for instance, covers: Paper, with its history
+from the earliest times, its manufacture, sizes and characteristics;
+engraving, with a full description of the processes connected therewith;
+fountain-pens and their manufacture; desk accessories, commercial
+stationery and the like. Ambition to excel in salesmanship is further
+stimulated by taking clerks through factories where their lines are
+made, and by exhibiting motion pictures of the manufacturing of these
+goods.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, is the store's most direct contact with its patrons. There
+are others, however, to be classed as at least fairly direct. Take that
+big and comfortable restaurant up on the eighth floor. It is one of the
+real landmark's among eating-places of New York, a world city of good
+eating.</p>
+
+<p>Its own magnitude may easily be guessed from the fact that in a single
+business day it feeds more people than almost if not any other in the
+town. Translated into cold figures this means that there is an average
+of twenty-five hundred lunches bought by customers each day that the
+store is open; with a maximum on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> extremely busy days reaching as high
+as five thousand. Figures are impressive. Yet these do not include
+either afternoon teas or late breakfasts for both of which there is a
+considerable clientele.</p>
+
+<p>To serve these hungry folk who come to Macy's there are two hundred
+waitresses, buss-boys and other employees upon the floor, besides fifty
+in the general kitchen, twenty in the bakery and eight in the ice cream
+factory. And if you still try to doubt that this restaurant is not of
+itself a real business and one to be reckoned with, consider that in the
+course of an average year its patrons consume&mdash;among other things&mdash;two
+thousand barrels of flour, fifty-two tons of sugar, seven hundred and
+fifty thousand eggs, ninety-three thousand six hundred pounds of butter,
+two thousand bags of potatoes, and nearly half a million quarts of ice
+cream. This latter item, however, covers the ice cream used at the soda
+fountain and in the employees' and men's club restaurants.</p>
+
+<p>The employees' lunchroom&mdash;conducted on the cafeteria plan&mdash;serves four
+thousand men and women each working day. It provides tasty and wholesome
+food at a cost that makes it entirely possible to eat to repletion for
+twenty cents or less. Soups, for instance, are three cents a portion,
+and meat dishes six, while other items, such as sandwiches, vegetables,
+desserts and the like are correspondingly low.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is this luncheon the sole restaurant resource of the employees
+within this institution. In the men's club nearly a thousand more of the
+Macy family eat their midday meal each day; and eat very well indeed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+Here the meal is served at a flat rate: at the uniform and moderate cost
+of thirty cents.</p>
+
+<p>Under the same general management direction (the third assistant general
+manager) as the restaurant is the store's supply department&mdash;not
+different very much from the supply department of a big railroad or
+manufacturing unit&mdash;which supplies everything for its consumption, from
+coal to string; the manufacturing departments in which are produced
+glass, mattresses, printing, engraving, custom-made shirts, millinery,
+picture frames and paper novelties; the candy factory over near Tenth
+Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street, which completely fills a big modern
+six-story building; the telephone service; and the so-called public
+service department.</p>
+
+<p>These last facilities command our attention for a passing moment. The
+telephone is, of course, the nerve-system of the Macy organization;
+nothing else. Its chief ganglion is a far-reaching switchboard on which
+little lights twinkle on and off and at which at a single relay sit nine
+competent operators in addition to a corps of inspectors and
+supervisors. The big board, from which run fifty-nine trunk-wires to the
+neighboring Fitzroy exchange, is none too large. Year in and year out it
+handles an average of nine thousand calls a day. And in the Christmas
+season this number easily is doubled and trebled.</p>
+
+<p>The public service department means exactly what it is called. It is at
+the service of the public. In concrete form it is a free information
+bureau, where theater seats and railroad and Pullman tickets may be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+purchased at face value&mdash;and not one cent beyond, not even the usual
+moderate fifty-cent advance of the hotel agencies&mdash;where astute and
+marvelously informed young men and women, with a miniature library of
+reference books at their immediate command, stand ready and willing to
+answer all the reasonable questions that may be thrust at them. To it is
+added a postal office, a telegraph office and public telephones for both
+local and long distance service.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The third assistant general manager of the store also has within his
+bailiwick the important department of mail orders and adjustments.
+Although in the technical sense of the word Macy's today has no mail
+order department&mdash;having been forced to abandon its once promising
+beginning along this line because of a sheer lack of room in which to
+handle it&mdash;the store each year actually receives thousands of orders for
+its goods by mail, from folk who, for one reason or another, find it
+inconvenient to visit it. These are received and systematically handled
+in this very department. Under its adjustment division comes the
+extremely interesting bureau of investigation, which concerns itself
+with all complaints, and the correspondence bureau, which handles more
+than ninety-five per cent. of the mail of the house.</p>
+
+<p>It requires no particular keenness of imagination to see that, even with
+complaints reduced to a minimum and letter-writing and handling to a
+fine science, there is an infinite amount of detail in these two
+departments alone&mdash;detail that reaches into every part of the store<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> and
+that necessitates a clever combination of system and diplomacy.</p>
+
+<p>The exposition of the workings of the Macy organization is yet to lead
+us into other chapters in which various separate subjects of interest
+will be treated at greater length than here; but now is the time and
+place to focus our attention upon one of the small, but extremely
+important, departments that works unseen&mdash;but not unfelt&mdash;behind the
+scenes. It is known as the comparison department and the work that it
+does is of vast importance in the operation of the store. Its functions
+are unending&mdash;and continuous. Macy's policy of underselling its
+competitors is an unhalting one.</p>
+
+<p>I have before me a Macy advertisement from a New York newspaper of
+recent date. In a conspicuous place in it there is a card which says:
+"For sixty-two years we have sold dependable merchandise at lowest in
+the city prices. We are doing so now and shall continue to do so." This
+was published at a time when the recent reaction from the extremely high
+prices of the war period already had begun to set in; and yet this was
+the big store's sole acknowledgment of the deflation sentiment&mdash;to say
+nothing of hysteria&mdash;which was sweeping the town. Its competitors had
+been offering their wares at reductions of from twenty to fifty per
+cent. from their topmost prices, but, serene and secure in the knowledge
+that its policy in selling had been consistently adhered to, Macy's only
+reiterated that its prices would continue to be the lowest in the
+city&mdash;quality for quality.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span></p><p>To hold fast to this policy, through thick and thin, has not always
+been easy. Macy's has fought some royal battles in its behalf&mdash;yet not
+so much because it was a policy as because with the big store in Herald
+Square it has become a principle of the most fundamental sort.</p>
+
+<p>More than twenty years ago the principle became extremely difficult to
+maintain, because of the growing tendency of the proprietors of
+articles, so patented or copyrighted as to make their imitation
+practically impossible, to attempt to fix their final retail sales
+price. It no longer became the mere question of whether Macy's or any
+other store would have the right to undersell its competitors; it became
+the fundamental question of whether the great centuries-old open market
+of the world could continue to remain an open market, in the interest of
+the consumer; and not a closed market, in the interest of the producer.
+To maintain the first of these positions, in behalf of its patrons,
+Macy's entered upon and won, almost single-handed, one of the notable
+legal battles in the history of this country.</p>
+
+<p>As far back as 1901&mdash;if you are a stickler for exact dates&mdash;this whole
+question of price maintenance became an acute issue with Macy's. It came
+to pass that when the prominent publishers of America formed an
+association, one prime purpose of which was to fix the prices at which
+their books would sell at retail, the store quickly saw that if this
+trust agreement was permitted to stand unchallenged, its cardinal
+principle of underselling its competitors, would have to be sacrificed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>
+Macy's did not propose to make such a sacrifice&mdash;to permit its customers
+to be sacrificed&mdash;without a protest. And such a protest it prepared to
+make.</p>
+
+<p>Isidor Straus, then the head of the business, sat in the office of his
+friend and counsel, Edmond E. Wise, in a downtown office. Mr. Wise put
+the thing frankly and without equivocation before his client. He said
+that it would be a hard legal fight, no doubt of that, but that a great
+principle was at stake; the keen mind of the lawyer was convinced of the
+economic fallacy of the position of the publishers' association.</p>
+
+<p>Quietly Mr. Straus told his attorney to go ahead. He said that he would
+fight the fight, to the last ditch. No expense was to be spared. The
+case would be carried, if necessary, in every instance to the highest
+court of appeal.</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly, Mr. Wise prepared a suit against the American Publishers'
+Association which holds the record for appeal in the history of
+jurisprudence in this country. Three times it went up to the Court of
+Appeals of the State of New York; finally, after nine years of legal
+battle, it was carried to the United States Supreme Court, which, after
+due deliberation, decided every point in favor of R. H. Macy &amp; Company.</p>
+
+<p>That was in December, 1913. Early in the following May the firm had the
+satisfaction of having the publishers hand over a check on the Park
+National Bank for $140,000. This sum represented a settlement for the
+difficulties that Macy's had had to undergo for more than a dozen years
+past in getting stock for its book department. Ofttimes it was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+necessary to follow devious paths indeed to gain this end&mdash;and still
+hold fast to the fundamental underselling policy of the store. Sometimes
+the store had to go so far as to send to other retail stores to buy a
+certain volume, at the full retail price, and then resell it to its
+patrons, at its customary ten per cent. off the price of the store at
+which it had just purchased it. So much if you please for the expense of
+standing by a principle!</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>A short time after this signal victory of Macy's, certain large
+manufacturers of patented articles, who for a time had sustained in the
+lower courts their claim to a fixed retail price standard, sought
+definitely to control Macy retail prices upon their products. Macy's,
+however, defied them, and the Victor Talking Machine Company, one of the
+leading adherents of price maintenance, brought an action in the United
+States courts to compel Macy's adherence to the rules for resale at a
+certain price. Again there was a royal battle and again Macy's triumphed
+signally, for on final appeal, the United States Supreme Court again
+decided in favor of the store in Herald Square, on every one of its
+contentions. Macy's then retaliated and brought suit against the Victor
+Company, under the Sherman Law. In a bitterly contested action, which
+culminated in one of the longest trials before a jury on
+record&mdash;consuming more than ten weeks&mdash;Macy's recovered a judgment of
+$150,000, and a counsel fee of $35,000; after which no paths apparently
+were left open to the manufacturers who sought to maintain the retail
+prices<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> that suited them best. Court decisions seemingly blocked all
+possible pathways.</p>
+
+<p>One path did remain, however&mdash;legislation. Effort was made to pass a
+measure down at Washington to permit and sustain retail price
+maintenance, which in reality meant the emasculation of the Supreme
+Court's decisions. When that measure came to a hearing before the
+Interstate Commerce Committee of the House one of the Macy partners,
+accompanied by Mr. Wise, the store's counsel, and Mr. E. A. Filene, the
+well-known Boston merchant, came before it in opposition. Up almost to
+that hour, Macy's had gone it alone. Now the attention of the country
+was focussed upon its fight and the National Retail Dry Goods
+Association came in with both its sympathy and its active
+co-operation&mdash;hence the appearance of Mr. Filene, who made a most
+excellent argument in support of the Macy contention.</p>
+
+<p>It was shown definitely to the members of this House committee that
+many, if not all, branded and patented articles took a retail profit of
+from fifty to seventy-five per cent. The member of the Macy firm took a
+watch nationally advertised at $2.50 and duplicated it with a watch
+which his store sold at sixty-five cents, going so far as to take the
+two watches apart so as to show conclusively that the one was quite as
+good as the other. Certain other commodities went under similarly
+critical analyses. When the hearing was completed, the committee laughed
+the bill out of court. Since then the question of price maintenance by
+the original producer has been permitted to drop. Macy's had won its
+hard-fought fight; won it cleanly and honestly. By <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>performance it had
+made good its statements that it proposed wherever it was humanly
+possible to undersell its competitors. That was no idle phrase.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It is indeed one thing to make a statement&mdash;whether in print or by word
+of mouth&mdash;and another and ofttimes a far more difficult thing to make
+good that statement by performance. No one knows this better than
+Macy's. Having set down such a definite and distinct statement it must
+be prepared to make good. It must be so covered and protected at every
+possible point that if challenged it can give a good account of itself.
+In fact, challenges come in every day&mdash;they have been coming in every
+day for a good many years now&mdash;and the house continues to make good its
+statement willingly&mdash;even joyfully. Here it is, then, that the
+comparison department functions; here it is that the original
+fundamental policy of Rowland H. Macy&mdash;to buy and sell only for
+cash&mdash;strictly adhered to during the sixty-four years' life of the
+business&mdash;makes it possible for the house to make good.</p>
+
+<p>How, then, is it done?</p>
+
+<p>The answer is easy.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose, if you will, that Smith, Brown &amp; Jones are having a special
+sale of Mother Hubbard wrappers. There are advertised as their regular
+$4.97 stock, marked down (at a heartbreaking sacrifice) to $3.79.
+Manifestly, it is up to R. H. Macy &amp; Company to sell the same quality of
+Mother Hubbard for less than $3.79, if they are to live up to their
+oft-stated policy. It is quite as patent that Macy's must know just
+what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> kind of wrappers Smith, Brown &amp; Jones are selling, if it is to
+compete on an exact basis. Nothing simpler. One of the Macy staff of
+shoppers is hurried forthwith to the scene of the bargain and,
+purchasing one of the garments, brings it back post-haste to the Macy
+comparison department. Furthermore, it is in this department by ten
+o'clock of the morning of the sale. It is then matched as closely as
+possible with a Mother Hubbard from the Macy stock, and the two garments
+compared, point by point. If, after careful examination, it is found
+that Macy's is charging more, or even the same price, for equal quality,
+then its prices are immediately marked down to a figure at least six per
+cent. lower than that advertised by the other store. And this, mind you,
+is not an exceptional performance but a daily procedure in the carrying
+out of which an exceptionally alert woman manager and twenty expert
+shoppers are constantly kept busy.</p>
+
+<p>If you make inquiry regarding the ins and outs of this remarkable policy
+you will find that it is far broader than you may have imagined. Here,
+again, is proof of the pudding. It is a typical letter, received from a
+customer and copied verbatim, with only the name left out:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p class="right">November 12, 1920.</p>
+
+<p>R. H. Macy &amp; Co.,<br /><span class="s3">&nbsp;</span>New York City.</p>
+
+<p>Dear Sirs:</p>
+
+<p>I purchased a banjo clock at $13.89 from you on Tuesday. Yesterday
+I saw the same clock, with same works, etc., identical in every
+way, at &mdash;&mdash;'s, for $11.25. Now, inasmuch as you claim that you
+sell goods at the very lowest figure, I think that is too much
+difference in price to overlook. I trust that I shall<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> receive your
+check for the difference in the amount, otherwise please call for
+the clock at once. I purchased clock in the basement.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Yours very truly,<span class="s3">&nbsp;</span>
+<br />&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>This letter was received by the store and acknowledged that very day. It
+then was turned over to the comparison department, from which a shopper
+was despatched to the store at which the customer claimed to have seen
+the clock for less money. The shopper reported that the claim was
+correct, and a check was immediately forwarded to the customer for the
+difference between the price which she paid for the clock and six per
+cent. less than the other store's price for it. Nor did the matter end
+there. All this kind of clocks in the basement were at once repriced to
+conform to the adjustment made with the customer.</p>
+
+<p>There are, too, the occasional tests made by customers who, while they
+are not dissatisfied, cannot believe that the low-price policy can be
+consistently carried out. As an example, this half-jocular letter:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p class="right">November 15, 1920.</p>
+
+<p>R. H. Macy &amp; Company,<br />
+<span class="s3">&nbsp;</span>Broadway &amp; 34th Street,<br />
+<span class="s3">&nbsp;</span><span class="s3">&nbsp;</span>New York.</p>
+
+<p>Gentlemen:</p>
+
+<p>Lest you regard this as a complaint from an ordinary .22 calibre
+chronic kicker let me say in the first place that I merely want to
+see to what extent you will make good on your brazen claim to sell
+goods at a lower price than other stores. Now then:</p>
+
+<p>On November 10th, I purchased a toy "cash register" bank in your
+toy department for $1.98. (I want the kid to learn frugality better
+than I did.) On November 14th my wife saw the same toy at Hahne's
+in Newark, N. J., for exactly the same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> price. So far, so good. It
+was worth it. But, Mr. Macy, you said your prices were <i>less</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, I have an account at Hahne's. By the time I would have
+needed to pay for that bank there would have been enough in it to
+settle the bill.</p>
+
+<p>Here is your chance, but I'm from Missouri.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Yours,<span class="s3">&nbsp;</span><span class="s3">&nbsp;</span>
+<br />&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The answer to this complaint was prompt and to the point. It reads:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p class="center">R. H. MACY &amp; CO.<br />
+<span class="smcap">Herald Square, New York</span></p>
+
+<p class="right">December 4, 1920.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;<br />
+<span class="s3">&nbsp;</span>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;<br />
+<span class="s3">&nbsp;</span><span class="s3">&nbsp;</span>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Dear Sir:</p>
+
+<p>We acknowledge your letter of November 24th, with regard to a
+toy-bank, which you purchased from us for $1.98. We have
+investigated your complaint and find, as you state, Hahne &amp; Co. in
+Newark are selling this article at the same price at which you
+purchased it from us. Our price on these banks is now $1.89, in
+keeping with our claim that we sell dependable merchandise for
+"lowest-in-the-city" prices.</p>
+
+<p>We appreciate your courtesy in calling this matter to our attention
+and also for the opportunity to demonstrate the upholding of our
+policy. A refund of nine cents in stamps is enclosed.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Yours very truly,<span class="s3">&nbsp;</span><span class="s3">&nbsp;</span><br />
+(Signed) <span class="smcap">R. H. Macy &amp; Co.</span><br />
+<br />&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; Mgr.<span class="s3">&nbsp;</span><br />
+Bureau of Mail Order and Adjustment.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Of course this complaint was trivial, the sum involved small, and Macy's
+must quickly have realized that the man who wrote the letter was not
+particularly serious. Yet that made no difference. The matter was
+adjusted; even though the process of adjustment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> involved a shopper's
+trip to Newark and considerable clerical work&mdash;in all several times the
+cost of the tiny bank. Yet the matter <i>was</i> adjusted and all the
+toy-banks of that kind were at once reduced in price, to say nothing of
+a satisfied patron made for the store.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>There is another sort of complaint that, at times, keeps the comparison
+department pretty busy. Women frequently will stop at a counter in the
+store, examine an article and then exclaim:</p>
+
+<p>"Hm-m&mdash;$6.74 for that! Why, I saw the same thing today at Jinx, Bobb &amp;
+Company's for $5.90."</p>
+
+<p>A mere passing comment which, in the old days of merchandising, might
+easily have been ignored. In Macy's it is not ignored. The clerk who
+hears this remark makes a note of it and sends through to the comparison
+department what is technically known as a customer's complaint.
+Immediate investigation is made, the prices checked up, and, if the
+casual shopper is right, Macy's prices are at once readjusted to the six
+per cent. below the competitor's charges. It has been found, however,
+that nearly ninety per cent. of this sort of complaints are incorrect.
+Two articles, in separate stores, may look so nearly alike that a casual
+inspection will not reveal any difference, and, therefore, competing
+goods must often be subjected to expert examination and even to
+analysis. A magnifying glass is used to count the threads in a fabric;
+woolens are boiled in chemical solutions to determine whether there is
+any adulteration; and cotton goods, such as sheets and pillow cases, are
+weighed, washed and weighed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> again to ascertain to what extent they are
+loaded. For Macy's is just to itself, as well as to the public.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>As has been indicated already, there are some things that the store as a
+matter of policy does not sell&mdash;pianos, chief of all. But that does not
+mean that there is, in the minds of its managers, the slightest excuse
+for its shelves not holding the things that it ought to sell. A large
+difference, this, and one which is constantly being checked by members
+of the shopping staff of the comparison department&mdash;going through its
+floors and inquiring in the various departments for goods for which
+there is little ordinary demand, and so a considerable likelihood of
+their not being found in stock. If an article requested is not found in
+stock, the shopper immediately buys something else&mdash;so as to get the
+number of the salesclerk. Then a report is made to the department buyer
+in order that he may see whether or not the clerk has followed up the
+inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>Incidentally, the shopper's report upon this entire transaction takes
+into account all the details regarding the manner in which the sales are
+handled and even notes the speed with which the parcel is wrapped and
+the change returned. It is not a spying system, but part of the store's
+honest effort to keep its efficiency at the highest notch. Naturally the
+shoppers of its comparison department are not known as such to its
+salesforce&mdash;for this reason the personnel of the corps must be under
+constant change&mdash;and it is equally evident that their anonymity is
+carefully preserved in their dealings with other stores. They are all
+well-bred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> young women, ranging in type from the flapper to the matron,
+and each is so carefully trained to act her part that it is quite
+impossible to distinguish them from the store's bona fide shoppers.</p>
+
+<p>Another of their duties is to report upon the speed of Macy deliveries.
+Once a month, at a certain prearranged time of day, a similar purchase
+is made at each of the largest stores in the city, including Macy's.
+These are all ordered sent to the same address and a record is made of
+the length of time it takes each to arrive. In the report that is
+finally made of the test details are included showing the manner in
+which all the packages are wrapped in order that Macy service may at all
+times be held up at least to the standard of its competitors.</p>
+
+<p>In the highly scientific machine of modern business, the test is as
+valuable as in other machines. I have stood in a great sugar refinery
+and watched the workmen from time to time draw off tiny phials of the
+sweetish fluid in order that they might show under laboratory
+examination that the machine was functioning at its highest point. And
+so are the tiny phials of Macy service drawn from the machine. If they
+show that, even in the slightest degree, the great machine of retail
+merchandising is functioning below its highest efficiency, it becomes
+the immediate business of the management to correct the loss.</p>
+
+<p>"I tell my people not to come to me with reports that everything is
+going well," says its general manager, "I only want to know when things
+begin to slip. Then it is my job to set them straight once again."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span></p><p>One thing more, before we are quite done with this sketch of the
+organization of a great merchandising institution. It is, in this case,
+a most important thing:</p>
+
+<p>With the credit system in force in nearly, if not quite, every other
+large store in the New York metropolitan district, Macy's for years has
+had to encounter a considerable sentiment against its policy of doing a
+cash business only. For there always has been a desirable class of trade
+represented by customers who, for one reason or another, find it most
+inconvenient to pay their bills monthly&mdash;people whose means and credit
+are unimpeachable. At one time it looked as if R. H. Macy &amp; Company
+would either have to forego their custom or else make exceptions to
+their long established rule. The former they could do; the latter they
+would not. But&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Out of this very need for furnishing customers with the convenience of
+some sort of a charge account grew a great Macy specialty&mdash;the
+depositors' account department which, while making no concessions to the
+store's rock-ribbed principle of selling for cash, solved a very great
+problem in its touch with its public. It turned the costly credit
+privilege into an asset both for the customer and for the store. The
+very thought was revolutionary! What, ask a customer to pay in advance;
+to have money on deposit with R. H. Macy &amp; Company, private bankers, to
+pay for normal purchases for a whole thirty days to come! It couldn't be
+done. New York would never, never stand for it. Every one outside of the
+store was sure that it never could be done. And a good many inside, as
+well. Yet the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> thing deemed impossible has come to pass. The idea was
+sound. The plan today is successful, even beyond the dreams of its
+promoters. With fifteen thousand depositors, its total deposits&mdash;money
+placed into the store to be drawn against solely for merchandise
+purchases&mdash;have reached as high as $2,750,000 at a single time.</p>
+
+<p>Interest at four per cent. annually is paid upon these deposits, so that
+the customer's money does not lie idle in the Macy till. Moreover, the
+money may be withdrawn at any time, and without previous notice being
+given. Further than this, it has been a custom&mdash;not, however, to be
+considered invariable&mdash;to pay a bonus of two per cent. on net sales
+charged to the depositors' account department throughout the year.
+Compare the thrill of receiving a bonus check from your
+department-store, instead of a bill for dead horses!</p>
+
+<p>It has been estimated that in some of New York's most representative and
+most elegant department-stores something like eighty-five per cent. of
+all retail transactions are upon the credit accounts. Assuming even that
+all of these accounts are promptly collectible&mdash;or collectible at
+all&mdash;the expense of the machinery of their collection becomes no small
+item in store management cost. This item Macy's saves&mdash;entirely and
+completely. And so, to no small extent, the store justifies itself in
+that other rigid rule&mdash;the pricing of its merchandise at a uniform
+rating of six per cent. less than that of its competitors. Upon this
+thought, alone, a whole book might be written.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>III. Buying to Sell</span></h2>
+
+<p>Up the broad valley of the Euphrates a caravan comes toiling upon its
+way. It is fearfully hot; frightfully dusty. For it has come to
+mid-September; the rains are long weeks gone; and with the crops
+harvested, even the sails of the great mills that pump the irrigation
+canals full are stilled. The time of great heat and of little work. But
+still the caravan&mdash;the long, attenuated file of horses and camels must
+press on.</p>
+
+<p>Ahead is Bagdad, that self-same ancient Bagdad which three thousand
+years ago was the commercial capital of the world. Through the heat
+waves and the blinding dust, the trained eyes of the Moslem can see the
+sun touching the gilded minarets and towers of her great mosques. Bagdad
+ahead. And at Bagdad the market-places which have stood unchanged for
+tens of centuries. Save that in recent years there have come to them
+these Americans&mdash;these shrewd agents of a little known folk, these
+rug-buyers of a far-away land of which they spin such fascinating tales.
+Tales far too fascinating ever to be believable. Yet Allah keeps his own
+accounting.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In the foyer of a lovely new home in newest New York a Persian rug is
+being spread for the first time.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> Its owner dilates with pride upon his
+purchase; shows those roundabout him the symbolism of its rarely
+delicate design; even to the tiny fault purposely woven into the
+creation by its maker to show in his humble fashion that only Allah may
+be faultless.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>A great French city; this Lyons, by the bank of the lovely Rhone. For
+two centuries or even more its tireless looms have spun the rarest silk
+fabrics of the world. Nearby there is a little French village. Were I to
+put its name upon these pages, it would mean nothing to you. Yet out
+from it there comes a lace, so rare, so delicate, that one well may
+marvel at the human patience and the human ingenuity that conceived it.
+The silk comes to America, straight to the chief city of the Americas;
+so do the laces; and so in a short time will come once again the
+wondrous cotton weaves of Lille and of Cambrai&mdash;and will come as a
+tragic reminder of the five fearful years that were.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In the hot depths of a South African mine, negroes, stripped to their
+very waists, are toiling to bring forth the rarest precious stones that
+the world has ever known. In the fearfully cold blasts of the far North,
+facing monotonous glaring miles of lonely ice and snow, trappers are
+after the seal and the mink. Why? In order that milady, of New York, may
+sweep into her red-lined box at the Opera, a queen in dress, as well as
+in looks and in poise.</p>
+
+<p>From the mine and from the ice-floes to her neck and back a mighty
+process has been undergone. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> great multiplex machine of
+merchandising has accomplished the process. A thousand other ones as
+well. Herald Square sits not alone between the East River and the North,
+between the Battery and the Harlem, between five populous boroughs of
+the great New York, not alone between the four million other folk who
+dwell within fifty miles of her ancient City Hall, but between the shoe
+factories of Lynn, the cotton mills of Lowell and of the Carolinas, the
+woolen factories of the Scots and the nearer ones of Lawrence, the paper
+mills of the Berkshires, the porcelain kilns of Pennsylvania, between a
+thousand other manufacturing industries, both very great and very small,
+as well. Into Herald Square&mdash;into the red-brick edifice upon the
+westerly side of Herald Square and reaching all the way on Broadway from
+Thirty-fourth to Thirty-fifth Streets&mdash;all of these pour a goodly
+portion of their products. In turn, these are poured by the big
+red-brick store into the pockets and the homes of its tens of thousands
+of patrons.</p>
+
+<p>A mighty business this; and, as we shall presently see, a business made
+up of many little businesses. Merchandising, financing, transportation;
+each has played its own great part in the bringing of that silk sock
+upon your foot or the felt that you wear upon your head. Each has
+co-operated; each has correlated its effort. There are few accidents in
+modern business. Rule-o'-thumb has stepped out of its back-door. In its
+place have come cool calculation, steady planning, scientific
+investigation. If modern merchandising has tricks, these are they. And
+they are the tricks that win.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p><p>In our last chapter we pictured R. H. Macy &amp; Company as a machine of
+salesmanship. Now I should like to change the film upon the screen. I
+should like to show you Macy's as a machine of buying. Obviously one
+cannot sell, without first buying. Buying must at all times precede
+selling, while to meet competition and still sell goods at a profit, the
+keenest sort of shrewd merchandising must be used in purchasing. Your
+buyer must be no less a salesman than he who stands behind the retail
+counters and, what is more to the point, he must constantly keep his
+finger upon the pulse of the market. Which means, in turn, that he must
+not for a day or an hour lose his touch with manufacturing and financial
+conditions&mdash;to say nothing of the changeable public taste.</p>
+
+<p>For the one hundred and eighteen different departments of the Macy's of
+today there are now sixty-nine buyers; the majority of them women. This
+last is not surprising when one comes to consider that by far the larger
+percentage of the department-store's customers are of the gentler sex.
+Women know how to buy for women&mdash;or should know. How foolish indeed
+would be the merchant prince of the New York of this day who would not
+instantly say "yes" to the assertion that feminine taste in buying is
+the one thing with which his store absolutely could not dispense. So the
+woman buyer in our city stores is so much an accepted fact as to call
+today for little special comment, save possibly to add that in no store
+outside of Macy's has she come more completely into her own. The buyer's
+job covets her. And she covets the buyer's job. Well she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> may. For it is
+a job well worth coveting&mdash;in independence, in opportunity and in
+salary.</p>
+
+<p>In almost every case a buyer comes to the job from retail
+experience&mdash;although occasionally a knowledge of wholesale selling
+develops the required skill. In nine cases out of ten, however, he or
+she rises to the important little office on the seventh floor from the
+salesforce upon the retail floors beneath. From salesclerk he&mdash;or as we
+have just learned, usually she&mdash;is promoted to "head of stock," which is
+the title of the head clerk in a department having three or four or more
+clerks. This promotion comes from a superior knowledge of the stock, yet
+not from that alone: the clerk must have executive ability. An agreeable
+temperament is also a necessary ingredient to the potion of promotion.</p>
+
+<p>To the position of assistant buyer is the next and logical promotion for
+the ambitious and successful "head of stock." After this should come the
+step to the big job&mdash;which steadily grows bigger&mdash;of buyer, or as the
+Macy store prefers to call it, department manager.</p>
+
+<p>Department managers do no actual selling. They now have graduated from
+that. Yet none the less are they salesmen&mdash;in more than a little truth,
+super-salesmen. For not only must they know what to buy&mdash;and how to buy
+it at the most favorable price&mdash;but they are equally responsible for
+knowing what to do with their purchases, once made. They are the
+merchants of the departments; accountable for the saleability of their
+stock. It is very much their concern whether<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> those departments show a
+profit or a loss. Little stores within a big store. A big store made up
+of more than a hundred little stores.</p>
+
+<p>As we have seen, it is not an uncommon custom for some department-stores
+to rent out or even to sell the privilege of many, if not all of its
+little stores. Macy's&mdash;in recent years at least&mdash;has not followed this
+policy. It has found that its own best organization comes from keeping
+the department as a unit; a pretty distinct and important unit, right up
+close to the very top of the business, where its three partners are
+specialists in merchandising; and passing proud of that.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The foundation of all successful buying is built of the bricks of sales
+knowledge laid in the mortar of good judgment. It is squared up by a
+sixth sense that has no name&mdash;yet a qualification which, by its presence
+or its absence, makes or unmakes a buyer's value. In its various
+branches, however, this unnamed sense is required, to a varying degree,
+perhaps, least of all in the purchasing of staple goods.</p>
+
+<p>For the sake of a more convenient understanding, let us begin by
+classifying the various needs of the insatiable Macy's into three major
+divisions: We shall put down staples, as the first of these; luxuries,
+as the second; and novelties, as the third. Under staples we shall
+include notions, cotton goods (such as sheets, pillow-cases and muslins)
+and, in general, the absolute necessities of life, including wearing
+apparel of the commoner varieties, household articles and the like.
+These are in constant purchase almost every day of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> year. Take, for
+instance, that heterogeneous collection of articles, grouped under the
+generic and whimsical head of notions. There is thread of all kinds,
+there are hooks-and-eyes, snap-fasteners, hair-nets, darners,
+button-hooks, tape-measures and what all not more&mdash;far be it from me
+even to attempt to mention the more than four thousand separate items
+that must be constantly carried in the notion departments.</p>
+
+<p>For all of these there is a huge daily demand, while a month's supply of
+any of them is all that can, as a rule, be conveniently handled in the
+store. It must be patent that, as there is never an equal demand for
+these small but essential articles, the buyers must be placing constant
+orders for them. So it is with everything else that people must
+have&mdash;irrespective of tastes, wealth or the season of the year&mdash;and the
+number of the list is legion.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, the buyer of staples does not depend so much upon the sixth
+sense as upon common sense. He must have plenty for the latter, however,
+and it is sure to be kept working on a fairly even basis throughout the
+entire year.</p>
+
+<p>In the category of the luxuries are included such articles as jewelry,
+musical instruments, Oriental rugs, paintings, fine bric-a-brac and the
+like. Clearly the buyer in this branch must possess real taste and
+discrimination in addition to commercial ability, in order to be able to
+purvey these properly to the public. He handles goods which have to be
+bought by people who have already purchased the necessities of life&mdash;the
+buying of luxuries involves the spending of the public's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> surplus and so
+this division of the work is at all times attended with great or less
+hazard.</p>
+
+<p>But the real hazards, the real necessity for that sixth sense, which I
+just mentioned, the hardest and most nerve-racking buyer's job, comes in
+the purchase of those goods grouped under the common title of novelties.
+As one of the members of the Macy's merchandise council once observed,
+the departments devoted to staples sell what the people want, while
+those devoted to novelties make the people want what they have to sell.
+And this last is quite true of the luxuries, as well.</p>
+
+<p>Here, incidentally, is a very curious fact about merchandise: A staple
+is not a constant thing. In one department it is what everybody wants
+and in another it becomes a novelty. For instance, a cotton pillow-case
+selling for, let us say, a dollar, is a staple; while another
+pillow-case, of linen this time, embroidered with an old English
+initial, hand hemstitched and edged with lace&mdash;we hesitate to guess at
+its cost&mdash;is a decided novelty, in the understanding of the store, at
+any rate. It also may be classed as a luxury.</p>
+
+<p>Styles, fads, exclusive designs and seasons determine the work of the
+buyer of novelties. The job is one that requires quick decisions. The
+staple buyer can "play safe," but the buyer of novelties who pursued the
+policy soon would find himself in the rear of the procession. Nor can he
+afford to make mistakes, for they may be costly indeed to the house that
+he represents. There is, in consequence, a greater demand on his nerve,
+his ingenuity and his imagination than you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> find in other classes of
+buyers. He must circulate where there are people&mdash;at the theaters,
+country clubs, restaurants, churches, in Fifth Avenue&mdash;and he must keep
+his ear to the ground and both eyes wide open. Consequently, when it is
+reported in the Sunday paper that the women of Paris have taken up the
+fad of wearing jeweled nose-rings, he must see that New York's women of
+fashion may have the same opportunity of expressing their individuality,
+by visiting Macy's jewelry department.</p>
+
+<p>This, of course, is rank exaggeration, but it indicates what the novelty
+buyer aims at. And surprisingly often he hits the mark.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In such a huge establishment it is but natural that the reception hall
+outside the buying offices should be crowded most of the time. Mahomet
+oftimes goes to the mountain&mdash;or sends a representative to it to buy
+some of its goods&mdash;yet more often the mountain comes to Mahomet. And so,
+I am told, for five days a week&mdash;Saturdays being generally recognized as
+a closed day for buying&mdash;an average of from four hundred to six hundred
+and fifty salesmen a day visit the buying headquarters on the seventh
+floor of the store. Taking into consideration the fact that the goods
+purchased are paid for in cash within ten days of their delivery, these
+headquarters are most popular with the emissaries of manufacturers and
+wholesale houses. Added to this is the uniform policy of courtesy to
+salesmen, which has been stated by the company in its precise fashion:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span></p><p>"We have held, as far as within our power, the precept of which our
+late head, Isidor Straus, was a living personification&mdash;that business
+may be conducted between merchants who are gentlemen, in a manner
+profitable to both."</p>
+
+<p>It is one thing to write a thing of this sort. It is another to live
+strictly up to it, day in and day out. But that Macy's does live up to
+this high-set principle of its behind-the-scenes conduct is evidenced by
+the unsought testimony of a manufacturer who sought for the first time
+to do business with it.</p>
+
+<p>This man had made one of the mistakes into which all manufacturers are
+apt to fall, sooner or later. He had overproduced. And while,
+heretofore, his product had been chiefly, if not solely, sold in
+high-priced novelty shops he now needed an establishment of great
+turnover to help him out in his dilemma. Macy's came at once into his
+mind. The old house is indeed advertised by its loving friends. He went
+to it at once; by means of the special elevator, found his way, along
+with several hundred other salesmen, to the sample and buying rooms upon
+the seventh floor.</p>
+
+<p>A young woman at the door received his card and, without delay, told him
+that he could see the buyer of the department which would naturally
+handle his product, upon the morrow; at any time before eleven, but
+under no circumstances later than noon. Better still, she would make a
+definite appointment for him for the next morning. Mr. Manufacturer
+chose this last course. And at the very moment of the appointed time was
+ushered into the buyer's little individual<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> room. Contact was
+established quickly. The buyer already knew of Mr. Manufacturer's line,
+regretted that they had not done business together a long time before.
+He inspected the proffered samples, quickly and with a shrewd and
+practiced eye; finally called into the little room two members of the
+salesforce from the department down upon the ground floor. They agreed
+with him as to the salability of the product. He turned toward the
+manufacturer.</p>
+
+<p>"Please bring your stock to No. &mdash; Madison Avenue next Tuesday
+afternoon, at half-past two."</p>
+
+<p>Why Madison Avenue? The manufacturer was perplexed as he descended to
+the street once again. The curiosity was relieved on Tuesday, however,
+when he and his abundant goods were ushered into a big and sunlit room.</p>
+
+<p>"We shall not be subject to any interruption here," said Macy's buyer.</p>
+
+<p>And so they were not. For two hours the buyer and two of his assistants
+went carefully over the stock, then withdrew for a short conference
+amongst themselves. When they returned they handed Mr. Manufacturer a
+card. It read after this fashion:</p>
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/cash.jpg" width='250' height='100' alt="CASH The entire lot $" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span></p><p>"The figure on that card, with the word 'cash' heavily underscored was
+just one hundred dollars in excess of my minimum," said the manufacturer
+afterwards, in discussing the incident. "I paused a moment and then
+said: 'Gentlemen, I mean to accept your offer. You have figured well, as
+your offer is just sufficient to buy the goods. R. H. Macy &amp; Company
+have secured this merchandise of unusual quality and I congratulate
+you.'"</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>At the beginning of this chapter we mentioned another form of the
+store's buying&mdash;where Mahomet goes to the mountain. This, being
+translated into plain English, means that Macy's must and does maintain
+elaborate permanent office organizations in Paris, in London, in Belfast
+and in Berlin. These in turn are but centers for other shopping
+work&mdash;shopping that may lead, as we have already seen, as far as the
+distant Bagdad.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, from his office in the Cit&eacute; Paradis in Paris, the head of
+the French-buying organization of the store controls the purchase of all
+goods for it, not only in France, but in Belgium and Switzerland as
+well. He virtually combs these busy and ingenious manufacturing nations
+for their latest specialties; from France, <i>les derniers cris</i> in
+fashionable gowns, millinery, perfumes and novelties of every
+description; from Belgium, fine laces and gloves; and from Switzerland,
+watches. These items, however, are merely typical; there are hundreds of
+others.</p>
+
+<p>A young American woman, of remarkable taste and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> gifted with a genuine
+genius for buying, is upon the Paris staff and is engaged practically
+the entire year round in visiting exhibitions of every sort and variety,
+in hunting the retail shops, great and small, of the French capital and
+at all times acting upon her own initiative as a free-lance buyer. A job
+surely to be coveted by any ambitious young woman who feels that she
+understands and can translate the constantly changing tastes of her
+countrywomen into the merchandise needs of a store whose chief task is
+always to serve them.</p>
+
+<p>For reasons that are not necessary to be set down here, the Berlin
+office of Macy's has been in <i>statu quo</i> for some years past, although
+it is just now reopening. The London branch is steadily on the search
+for the clothing, haberdashery and leather specialties which are the
+pride of the British workman, while from right across the Irish sea, at
+13 Donegal Square, North, Belfast, come the fine Irish linens that so
+long have been a distinguished merchandise feature of the store's stock.</p>
+
+<p>So it is, then, that forever and a day, Macy's is engaged in bringing
+the cream of European merchandise to New York&mdash;goods of nearly every
+kind that can either be made better abroad or cannot be duplicated at
+all in this country. Importing is indeed a large branch upon the Macy
+tree.</p>
+
+<p>And in this branch romance oftimes dwelleth. The picture of the caravan
+toiling up the banks of the Euphrates is no idle dream at all. Upon the
+world maps of the merchandise executives of Macy's it is an outpost of
+trading as unsentimental as Lawrence, Massachusetts, or Norristown,
+Pennsylvania. Yet the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> buyer who goes to the old Bagdad from the new has
+a real task set for him. Obviously he must not only have a knowledge of
+his market and a keen sense of values, but he must also be a resourceful
+traveler; a merchant who can adapt himself to the ways of the people
+with whom he trades. His judgment, discretion and integrity must be
+above reproach, for often he is far away and out of touch with
+headquarters for long months at a time.</p>
+
+<p>Take such a buying trip as the Oriental rug-buyer of Macy's recently
+made into the Orient and back again. It lasted eight months. In that
+time he traveled more than thirty thousand miles&mdash;by steamship,
+motor-car, railroad, horseback and on foot. The rug region of Persia is
+a long way, indeed, from Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street and to reach
+it he went to London and Paris, then to Venice, where he took a steamer
+for Bombay, upon the west coast of India. Thence he proceeded by another
+steamer up the Persian Gulf to the city of Basra, which is at the
+confluence of those two ancient rivers, the Tigris and the
+Euphrates&mdash;between which the earliest Biblical history is supposed to
+have been made. Basra today is one of the world's great rug-shipping
+centers.</p>
+
+<p>Then he went to Bagdad itself&mdash;the fabled city of Haroun-el-Raschid and
+the Arabian Nights&mdash;from whence he started into the very heart of
+Persia. He was not content, however, to remain idly there and let the
+rugs be brought to him. He went much further. Through Kermanshah, the
+city whose name is given to the rugs which come from Kerman, seven
+hundred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> miles to the southeast, to Hamadan, one of the main
+marketing-centers of the rug-producing country&mdash;that, briefly, was the
+beginning of his itinerary. He went carefully through Persia, picking up
+rugs here and there, having them baled and sent to Bagdad by mules or
+camels and shipped thence to New York; and he established warehouses to
+which rug-dealers brought their wares. The light of the Red Star shone
+in the East.</p>
+
+<p>Roads in Persia leave much indeed to be desired, and as the chief means
+of travel, aside from beasts of burden, is by Ford cars, a buyer who
+covers much of its territory has a rather unenviable job. Gasoline in
+those parts costs four dollars a gallon, while if you hire a jitney you
+pay for it at the rate of a dollar a mile.</p>
+
+<p>On his return trip to New York this buyer went back once again to India
+and north as far as the border of Afghanistan to investigate the
+condition of the rug market in that region. At ancient Siringar, in the
+Vale of Cashmere, he bought marvelous felt rugs made in the mysterious
+land of Thibet. And yet all the way throughout this long journey he was
+buying goods for only one department of the great store that he
+represented.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It used to be impressive to me when the hardware dealer of the small
+town in which I was reared would boast of the number of items that he
+held upon the shelves of his own center of merchandising. There were
+more than two thousand of them! He told me that with such an evident
+pride, as a Chicago man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> speaks of the population of his town, or one
+from Los Angeles, of his climate. And yet such a stock as that wonderful
+one that was told to my youthful imagination, is more than duplicated in
+Macy's&mdash;and is but one of one hundred and seventeen others. And the
+responsibility of buying these millions of articles is scarcely less
+great than that of selling them.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>IV. Displaying and Selling the Goods</span></h2>
+
+<p>With Macy's goods once purchased, the next problem becomes that of their
+transport to the store in Herald Square. Obviously their reception must
+rank second only to their purchase. And when this is accomplished, as we
+have just seen, in every corner of a far-flung world&mdash;Pennsylvania and
+Massachusetts and Thibet and Korea and South Africa, to say nothing of a
+thousand other places&mdash;their orderly receiving becomes, of itself, a
+mechanism of considerable size. Almost equally obvious it is, too, that
+the store, no matter how carefully and fore-visionedly and
+scientifically its buyers may plan, cannot always dispose of its
+merchandise at precisely the same rate at which it comes underneath its
+roof. It cannot afford to gain a reputation for not carrying in stock
+the items either that it advertises for sale or that it has educated its
+patrons to expect upon its counters. Which means that alongside of and
+intertwined with the orderly business of merchandise reception there
+must be warehousing&mdash;reservoir facilities, if you please.</p>
+
+<p>In concrete form, these last of Macy's are not merely rooms upon the
+extreme upper floors on the main store in Herald Square&mdash;a space which
+in recent years, however, has shrunk to proportionately small
+dimensions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> because of the vast growth of the business and the
+increasing demands of the selling departments upon the building&mdash;but
+four structures entirely outside of the parent plant: the Tivoli
+Building on the north side of Thirty-fifth Street, just west of Broadway
+(which, as we saw in the historical section of this book was originally
+the notorious music hall of the same name until Macy's purchased it for
+its merchandising plans), the Hussey Building, in the same street, but
+just west of the store, a third also in Thirty-fifth, but close to
+Seventh Avenue and a fourth in Twenty-eighth Street between Seventh and
+Eighth Avenues. So can a great store spread itself, even in its actual
+physical structure, far beyond the bounds that even the most imaginative
+of its customers might ordinarily call to mind.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It is in the rear of the selfsame red-brick building at the westerly
+edge of Herald Square&mdash;that same main structure that we have already
+begun to study in many of its fascinating details&mdash;that we find the core
+of the receiving department of the Macy store. It is a hollow core. A
+tunnel-like roadway, two hundred feet in length bores its way through
+the building, from Thirty-fifth Street to Thirty-fourth. Through this
+cavernous place, lighted at all hours by numerous electric arcs, there
+passes, the entire working-day, a seemingly endless procession of
+motor-trucks, wagons and other carriers. They enter at the north end and
+before they emerge at the south they have discharged their cargoes. A
+corps of men is kept constantly busy,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> checking off the merchandise as
+it is unloaded. Husky porters, with hand trucks, seize cases, barrels
+and miscellaneous packages of every sort and, presto! they are whirled
+into huge freight elevators which presently depart for upper and unknown
+floors. There are three of these, in practically continuous operation.
+In addition to them packages brought by hand&mdash;generally from local
+wholesalers and in response to emergency orders&mdash;are carried up into the
+offices of the receiving department upon an endless carrier.</p>
+
+<p>It is a source of wonder to the observer to see the way in which these
+men of Macy's work. The poise. The confidence. The system. It is
+terrifying even to think of the mess that would be the result of a day,
+or even an hour, of inexperience or carelessness. In fact, it would
+hardly take ten minutes so to jam that long receiving platform that
+straightening it out again would be a matter of days. But upon it every
+man knows just what to do; and every man does it, and does it fast. And
+system wins once again. It generally does win.</p>
+
+<p>For these incoming goods receipts are made out in triplicate&mdash;one for
+the controller, one as a record for the receiving office and the third
+for the delivery agent; the second of these acts as a sort of herald of
+the actual arrival of the merchandise so that within sixty seconds or
+thereabouts of the actual appearance of the goods under the house's main
+roof the man who is responsible for them may be advised.</p>
+
+<p>Every article purchased anywhere by R. H. Macy &amp; Company, either for
+their own use or for resale, is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> received through this department,
+although there are a few other points than the tunnel-like interior
+street from Thirty-fourth Street to Thirty-fifth where they are
+received. The four warehouses that we have just seen have their
+individual receiving facilities: the coal that goes to heat and light
+and drive the big main building is poured through chutes under the
+Thirty-fourth Street pavement, while direct to the company's stables and
+garages go the fodder for its vehicles&mdash;hay for the horses of flesh and
+blood, and gasoline and oil for those of steel and iron; all the other
+miniature mountains of their incidental materials into the bargain. But
+even these are checked in at the main receiving department; and
+triplicate receipts issued upon their arrival.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>So, then, come in these goods&mdash;by hand, express, by parcel post and
+freight. The most of them have had their transport charges prepaid; a
+certain small proportion of them comes marked "collect." An especial
+provision must be made for the cash payment of these charges. The big
+machine of modern industry must indeed have many odd cams and levers
+adjusted to it. It must be designed not alone for the usual, but for the
+unusual, and in a multitude of ways.</p>
+
+<p>These, then, are the reception chutes of the Macy machine; the porters,
+who even while hastening their trucks toward the elevators are making a
+cursory examination of the arrival condition of the merchandise, are in
+themselves small automatic arms of inspection. For while some of these
+packages have come from nearby<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>&mdash;perhaps not half a block
+distant&mdash;others will have come from halfway around the wide world. And
+the possibility of damage to the contents of the carrier is lurking
+always in the short-distance package, quite as much as in its brother,
+that has attained the distinction of being a globe-trotter. The crates
+from the Middle West, those stout and honest looking Yankee boxes from
+New England, this group of barrels from the heart of new
+Czecho-Slovakia, and that of zinc-lined cases from France&mdash;the
+<i>Lorraine</i> has touched at her North River pier but two or three days
+since&mdash;those great bales and bundles from the Orient, with the seemingly
+meaningless (and extremely meaningful) symbols splashed upon their rough
+sides, all look sturdy enough, as if they had survived well the
+vicissitudes of modern travel. Yet one can never tell.</p>
+
+<p>Which means that the personnel of the order checking department up on
+the seventh floor must not only carefully verify the shipment as to
+quality and to price but as to the condition in which it actually is
+received. The hurried cursory examination of the platform porters
+becomes an unhurried and painstaking investigation in this last
+instance. The cases are not necessarily opened within the seventh floor
+headquarters of the order checking department. As in the case of the
+actual physical receipt, the unpacking is carried forward at the point
+of greatest convenience to the merchandise department to be served. But
+the results and records are kept at the one central headquarters.</p>
+
+<p>And the skilled and expert merchandise checkers from the selfsame
+headquarters are the men and women<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> who oversee the
+unpacking&mdash;invariably. They pass the responsibility of their stamp and
+signature upon their receipts before the merchandise is turned over to
+the department manager, who himself, or through his responsibility,
+purchased it. Nothing is left to guesswork, or to chance.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Now we see the full responsibility settled once again upon the broad
+shoulders&mdash;let us hope indeed that they are broad&mdash;of the buyer. With a
+full knowledge of the price that he paid for them, of market conditions,
+and of the prices of Macy's competitors he determines the prices at
+which his merchandise is to be sold. Clerks, known as markers, quickly
+attach these prices by small tags to the goods themselves.</p>
+
+<p>From the marking-rooms, where everything to be sold within this
+market-place is plainly and unequivocally priced, the merchandise goes
+without further delay either direct to the counters of the selling
+floors, or into the "reserves"&mdash;the warehouses that extend all the way
+from Twenty-eighth Street to north of Thirty-fifth, and from Broadway to
+Eighth Avenue. The stage is set. The show is ready. The performance may
+now begin.</p>
+
+<p>A trip through the hinterland of the Macy store is like a visit behind
+the scenes of a modern theater. You see there just the way in which the
+drama of selling actually is staged, from the settings to the
+properties. You rub shoulders with the actors and actresses, just off
+stage; with the electrician, the stage-manager, the carpenter and the
+stage-hands. And always your ear<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> is waiting to hear outside the
+orchestra and the applause of the audience.</p>
+
+<p>Into that ear there comes the almost rhythmic thud of automatic
+machines; a sort of continuous drone. You turn quickly and find beside
+you a row of ticket-printers, the little electric presses in which are
+made the price-tags that you find pinned or pasted or tied on every
+piece of Macy merchandise you buy. Miles of thin cardboard are fed into
+one side of these machines and come out the other; in proper-sized
+units, with the selling price of the article to be tagged plainly
+printed on them. Where the article is subject to Federal tax, this is
+also included as a separate item and the total given. One of these
+machines combines the operation of printing the price and attaching the
+ticket to the garment. It is detail&mdash;necessary detail, detail upon a
+vast scale.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, is the receiving department of this great single retailing
+machine of modern business. It keeps over three hundred human units
+constantly upon the move&mdash;and, mind you, all that these people are doing
+is merely making the merchandise ready to sell. The next step is the
+final one before actual sale; the display of proffered goods&mdash;upon the
+counters and within the plate-glass windows along the street frontages.</p>
+
+<p>This, in the modern department-store, is considered a feature of the
+utmost importance, and nowhere more so than at Macy's. Sixty-four years
+of salesmanship experience, in the course of which it has been the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>originator of many daring and successful display experiments, has shown
+the house their full value.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, even in Macy's, there are certain reservations to the strong house
+policy of attractive display. Certain fundamentals are stressed. The
+invitation to buy is forever put in the goods themselves rather than in
+the background against which they are shown. It requires no especial
+astuteness to see from this fact alone an enormous expense is saved; the
+benefit of which, according to the now well understood Macy plan, is
+passed on to buyer. Other stores spend many thousands of dollars in
+building and decorating special rooms and sections for merchandising
+which are far out of the ordinary. To give an air of extreme
+exclusiveness, <i>chic</i>, Parisian atmosphere&mdash;call it what you
+may&mdash;elaborate partitions are put up and expensive decorators given
+carte-blanche. The result is beautiful, almost invariably. Shopping in
+such surroundings becomes a peculiar delight&mdash;particularly to the woman
+patron. But milady pays. In the expressive, if not elegant, old phrase
+she "pays through the nose."</p>
+
+<p>That some New York shoppers may like to pay this way is not for a moment
+to be doubted, but that the majority do, Macy's stoutly refuses to
+believe. While the house has not hesitated to install certain very
+lovely "special" rooms&mdash;<i>vide</i> the <i>salon</i> for the display of its
+imported frocks&mdash;the main thought in the construction of its present
+home in Herald Square was to build a retail market-place which would
+afford honest, efficient, comfortable marketing at the lowest possible
+prices. This meant that it would be inadvisable, to say<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> the least, to
+give the store the atmosphere of either a palace or a <i>boudoir</i>. This is
+a policy that has continued until this day.</p>
+
+<p>None the less, Macy goods are displayed with the taste that makes them
+most desirable to the customer; psychological forethought, in a word.
+Novelties, of course, take precedence over staples&mdash;the articles that
+make the customer stop and investigate. Except under unusual conditions,
+the demand for staples does not have to be stimulated, and ordinarily no
+especial attempt is made to give them more than ordinary display. One
+underlying factor in the successful display of goods is to preserve
+harmonious color relations between them and, so far as possible, this
+harmony pervades the entire floor. The buying public would not tolerate
+a store where they heard profanity among the employees; and at Macy's
+they do not have to endure colors that swear at one another.</p>
+
+<p>Held in high esteem by the public as well as by the store itself are the
+display windows which line the entire ground-floor frontage of the
+building on Broadway and on Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth Streets. Here
+merchandise is arranged by master window dressers under the general
+direction of the advertising department, for if the front windows of a
+house such as this are not advertising, what, then, is? Especially when
+the art of window dressing has come in recent years to be a finely
+developed art of its own. For many years before it left Fourteenth
+Street Macy's had a fame not merely nation-wide but fairly world-wide
+for its window displays&mdash;we already have referred to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>wondrous
+Christmas pageants that it formerly held as a part of them. In this it
+was again a pioneer, blazing a new commercial path for its competitors
+to follow.</p>
+
+<p>Because window display is recognized as advertising, the ceaseless work
+of the master window dressers upon the outer rim of the Macy store comes
+under the direct supervision of the advertising department which in turn
+reports direct to no less an authority than the triple partnership
+itself. Publicity is the great right-arm of the super-store of the
+America of today. Publicity not in one channel, but in a thousand.
+Macy's not only helps to dominate the advertising pages of the
+newspapers of New York and a good many miles round about it, its red
+star not only gleams in Herald Square, but in these very recent days
+upon the high-set electric hoardings of Times Square that blaze forth
+far into the night; it finds its way into the public thought here and
+there and everywhere. And yet, with due appreciation of every other
+medium of publicity, the street window of the store still remains one of
+the most important phases of its appeal to possible patrons.</p>
+
+<p>Its displays are scheduled long in advance; are devised as carefully as
+the decoration of a home might be, or, better still, as Urban or Pogany
+would plan the stage-settings of a scene in the Metropolitan or at any
+one of the various "Follies" that one finds just north of the Opera
+House. A large staff of men is kept constantly at work dressing the
+windows, and this staff includes the carpenters, paper-hangers, painters
+and electricians who are needed to help prepare the special exhibits.
+Under the floor of the window next the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>principal entrance on
+Thirty-fourth Street there is a tank, which is used when a pool of water
+is required to carry out some scenic effect. It is capable of floating a
+canoe to suggest the joys of camping and the need of going to Macy's for
+one's vacation requisites&mdash;as well as for use in other capacities. Known
+in the store as the "parlor window" it has been made to represent pretty
+nearly everything from milady's bedroom to a glorified carpenter shop.</p>
+
+<p>Window displays are regarded by Macy's as an important auxiliary to
+newspaper announcements. Very recently, during the few weeks before
+Christmas, a sale of overcoats was advertised. All the windows were then
+dressed with Christmas merchandise, but from one of them this was all
+removed and the sale overcoats substituted. For one day only. For upon
+the very next one the Christmas window was returned to its holly and
+mistletoe flavor.</p>
+
+<p>Here is a pretty direct indication of the store's attitude towards its
+immensely valuable windows&mdash;if you do not consider them valuable inquire
+the price of the advertising signs in the Herald Square neighborhood. I
+asked its advertising manager if, in his opinion, the window space would
+not bring better returns if it were devoted to direct selling, instead
+of mere indirect selling through display. I had in the back of my mind
+some of the great Paris emporiums who think so little of window- and so
+much of selling-space that on bright warm days they spread some of their
+notions and novelty-counters right out upon the broad sidewalks of the
+Boulevards.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p><p>"No," said he, "decidedly no. To be able to show one's goods to the
+multitudes that pass these windows nearly every hour of the day is an
+asset that cannot be overestimated."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>This is neither the time nor the place to go into the ethics or the fine
+principles of the most recently developed of American
+professions&mdash;advertising; the salesmanship of goods and of ideas not so
+much by the merchandise itself as by the representation of it. Neither
+is it the place to review the vast position that the modern department
+store has taken in the development of modern advertising of every sort:
+Newspapers, magazines, bill-boards, electric signs, other forms of
+display as well. There are folk who say that if it were not for the
+department-store advertising we should not have had the fully developed
+metropolitan newspaper of today; while, on the other hand, some of the
+larger merchants are not reluctant in saying that our modern
+metropolitan newspapers are the chief causes that have made the
+department-store as we know it in New York and other large cities of the
+United States possible. Be these things as they may, the fact does
+remain, however, solid and indisputable, that the co-operation between
+these two groups of interests has been more than profitable to their
+patrons, to say nothing of themselves. And not the least of the
+contributing causes to such profits is the fundamental honesty of the
+advertisements.</p>
+
+<p>Not so very many years ago the measure of integrity in advertising was,
+to speak charitably, a variable one.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> When they talked about them in
+print merchants were very likely to become overenthusiastic about their
+goods. Modesty was flung to the four winds. Printers' ink seemed to be
+taken as an automatic absolution for exaggeration&mdash;and oftimes absolute
+mis-statement&mdash;and, strangely enough, the public appeared to fall in
+with the idea. More often than not the merchant "got away with it"&mdash;or,
+if not, made good with bad grace, in which case the customer was
+satisfied. He had to be.</p>
+
+<p>But not so with Macy's. Early in its history an advertising policy was
+formulated that has endured to the present and will continue to endure.
+It is the house's stoutly expressed belief that there is no possible
+excuse whatsoever for misrepresentation and, following this out, it is
+its invariable rule to stand back of its advertising, to the last ditch.
+To this end it has inculcated such a spirit of conservatism into its
+advertising department that the superlative is eliminated and forbidden
+in describing Macy goods. "We may think that these articles are the
+best, or the most beautiful, or the greatest bargain, but we can't
+absolutely be sure of it." That is its attitude. The only possible
+criticism is the same that one applies to the man who stands so straight
+that he leans backward.</p>
+
+<p>Is the system flawless? Of course not&mdash;no system is. Not many weeks ago
+an incident occurred that shows how Macy's may slip up&mdash;and then make
+good; it put out a small newspaper advertisement featuring coats for
+small boys at $8.74. These were advertised as "wool chinchilla" and so
+potent was the appeal of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> the notice that by ten o'clock the entire
+stock of nine hundred coats was gone. Then one of the store executives
+discovered that the coats were not <i>all wool</i> and things began to hum.</p>
+
+<p>"Never said that they were all wool," the responsible sub-executive
+cornered. "People ought to know that they can't buy an all-wool coat for
+that money."</p>
+
+<p>That made no difference with the big boss. Patiently and firmly he
+explained that in a Macy advertisement "wool" means "all-wool" except
+where it is clearly specified that it contains cotton. Another
+advertisement was inserted in the newspapers the following day. It
+explained and apologized for the mis-statement and said, "We would deem
+it a favor if our customers would bring in these coats and accept a
+return of their money." Out of the nine hundred coats sold one was
+brought back for credit, while another was brought in by a customer who
+wanted to keep the coat but thought that she might get a rebate. She
+didn't. Macy's may lean over backward but it doesn't drag on the
+ground&mdash;an instance of which is contained in the following:</p>
+
+<p>Christmas candy for Sunday Schools was advertised in a number of New
+York newspapers at the very low price of $7.44 for one hundred pounds.
+In one newspaper three pieces of type fell out of the form with the
+result that the advertisement went to press quoting a hundred-weight of
+candy at forty-four cents! It was patent that it was a typographical
+error, for the decimal point, as well as the dollar mark and the figure
+7 was gone and there was a blank space where the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> types were missing.
+Three would-be customers tried, however, to hold the store accountable
+for the very obvious error. And Macy's balked!</p>
+
+<p>The lowest-in-the-city-prices policy keeps the advertising department on
+its toes continually. Other stores' prices must be anticipated wherever
+it is humanly possible, which means constant revisions of the copy.
+Occasionally a price duel develops that becomes spectacular in the
+extreme. In a recent memorable one "hard water soap" figured as the
+<i>casus belli</i>. Macy patrons know their right now to expect lowest
+prices, so when another store began to cut Macy's advertised prices on
+this commodity, Macy's had to return in suite. Whereupon the other store
+cut under Macy's again; and Macy's in turn went its competitor one
+better. It then became a merry game of parry and thrust until, one fine
+day, Macy's was selling twelve dozen cakes of hard water soap for the
+inconsiderable sum of one copper cent. One came near godliness for a
+small amount that day. The public profited hugely, but Macy's lived up
+to its policy.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>As a rule advertisements originate with the department managers. Keeping
+in mind that they are the buyers, the merchants responsible for the
+moving of their stock, it can be seen that they know best the goods that
+ought to be featured. The value of the space used is charged against
+their departments, so that their requisitions are governed accordingly.
+The advertising manager is a large factor, however, in the allotment of
+space&mdash;not only the clearing-house, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> practically the court of last
+resort&mdash;concerning the rival claims by the department manager for space
+upon a given day. After all, there is a limit to the size of a newspaper
+page.</p>
+
+<p>When a certain line of goods is about to be advertised, the comparison
+department is notified and the articles are "shopped." That is, one or
+more of the expert shopping staff is given the task of ascertaining what
+other stores are charging for the same things so that it may be made
+sure that the Macy price will be lower. The information then is passed
+on to the copy writing staff and samples of the goods are studied for
+selling points. While the description is being written, one of the art
+staff makes a drawing, either in the nature of a design or illustration,
+and when these are completed the advertisement is set in type. This,
+bear in mind, is only for one item. Macy advertisements, more often than
+not, cover an entire newspaper page and are made up of many separate
+items, each of which goes through practically the same process of
+creation. Their final collection and arrangement on the page are made by
+an advertising expert of skill and taste and from this fact, combined
+with the distinctive type faces that are commonly used, one might be
+reasonably sure of identifying a Macy advertisement even if the store
+name were to be entirely omitted.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to window display, newspaper and magazine announcements, it
+is the concern of the advertising department to provide the store with
+its sign cards and special-price tickets. These are all a part of the
+big problem of letting the public know about Macy goods.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> Yet above and
+beyond all of these things, the store's supreme advertisement, if you
+please, is the establishment itself, the service that it strives so
+sincerely to give. To use the current phrase of expert publicity men,
+the store, its salespeople and its prices must <i>sell</i> Macy's to the
+outside world. Outside advertising is but supplementary to this; but a
+single horse in a team of four.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>With this fact firmly fixed in your mind, consider next the unbending
+problem of making the salesforce into a genuine salesforce; one that
+constantly and continually backs up the force of the printed
+advertisement by the skill of its real salesmanship. When we come in
+another chapter to consider the Macy family as a whole we shall see in
+some detail its remarkable educational and training opportunities. These
+have been brought to bear directly upon the creation, not only of
+thoroughness and accuracy on the part of the clerk, but for courtesy and
+persuasiveness and enthusiasm as well&mdash;the things that make the
+structure of morale; that quality that we first began to know and to
+understand as such in the days of the Great War.</p>
+
+<p>"If you are playing a game, such as tennis, or bridge, or baseball or
+what-not," said one of the department managers to his sales staff but a
+few mornings ago, "you are out to beat your best friend; if you can, do
+it fairly and squarely, otherwise never. The enjoyment you derive from a
+game depends on the spirit with which you play it. When you begin to
+regard business in a similar light, playing it as a game in a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>sportsmanlike manner, then you will begin to get fun out of it&mdash;you
+will begin to make progress."</p>
+
+<p>After the preliminary training which every salesclerk receives, he or
+she is assigned to a department. Thenceforward a good deal depends on
+personal initiative; for in dealing with customers no small part of the
+store's reputation for efficiency and courtesy depends upon the
+individual clerk. A salesperson may become not only a distinct asset to
+the house, but may develop a personal clientele through especially
+intelligent and courteous attention to the customers' wishes. And this,
+owing to the system of allowing a bonus on sales above a certain fixed
+quota, and a commission on sales up to that quota, may make it
+financially very much worth while to him or her.</p>
+
+<p>Salesmanship in a store as large as Macy's must of necessity include the
+knowledge of considerable detail in the making out of sales slips,
+procedure with regard to C. O. D. deliveries, depositors' accounts,
+exchanges and the like. This knowledge is a fundamental part of each
+salesperson's equipment. His or her efficiency must come, however, from
+a far wider development of the possibilities of the salesmanship, from
+the "playing of the game," as the department manager put it but a moment
+ago&mdash;the understanding use of courtesy, merchandise knowledge,
+helpfulness. Such efficiency pays. The Macy folk who come to use it
+regularly soon find themselves advancing to responsible and highly-paid
+positions.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting to follow the career of a sales slip<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> from the time it
+is made out&mdash;when the sale is made&mdash;until the time that it ceases to
+function. Here is one of the most important items in the mechanism of a
+large retail store. It is an essential unit of a carefully developed
+system to keep track of sales, from the minute that they are made until
+they are finally delivered and audited.</p>
+
+<p>The sales slip&mdash;the Macy clerk has three different ones of them in
+all&mdash;is made in three distinct parts&mdash;original, duplicate and
+triplicate. Each of these is divided into several parts; each of which
+in turn is destined for separate hands. The packer of the merchandise
+gets one part, which eventually goes to the customer, a second to the
+cashier, the third the clerk retains. Eventually these last two come
+together once again in the auditing department and are checked, the one
+against the other; after which one goes into the archives of the bureau
+of investigation, in case that there is any further question about the
+details of the transaction. This one example of the infinite detail in
+the conduct of a great store is a slight indication of the
+responsibility upon the shoulders of not only its managers but the rank
+and file of its salesforce as well. A single error in the making out of
+a sales slip may easily result in expensive and harassing complications
+all the way along the line.</p>
+
+<p>A system of transfer books enables the store's customer to make
+purchases in its various departments with the least possible waiting.
+The goods and prices are entered in a small book which is given the
+customer at the time of the first purchase of the day. While<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> the
+customer is making his or her other purchases they are being sent to the
+wrapping room where they are held in a growing group until the customer
+presents the book to the cashier at the transfer desk on the main floor,
+pays the total and, a few minutes later, receives a neat package in
+which all of the items are wrapped together; or else it is sent to any
+designated address.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Enough, for the moment, of detail. Some of it is necessary to a proper
+understanding of the workings of this great machine of modern business,
+but too much of it may easily bore you. Instead, quickly turn your
+attention to a Macy feature dear to the heart of the average
+shopper&mdash;male or deadlier. Here is the familiar, the time-honored
+"special sale." In holding these Macy does not lay claim to originality,
+except perhaps in the amount of merchandising involved and the
+spectacularly low prices. Sales are in a large measure opportunities for
+the store as well as for the customer. It takes a goodly amount of
+merchandise from a manufacturer who for some reason offers a large
+concession in price and passes on its advantage to its customers. This
+is not generosity. It is good business. It is sound business. It is
+progressive business.</p>
+
+<p>Take a sale of laundry soap that went on within the great store about a
+year ago. The soap was made in this country and contracted for by the
+city of Paris, upon a dollar basis. Exchange slumped, and with francs
+worth only a fraction of their former value, Paris couldn't afford to
+take it. Macy's offer for it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> was accepted and so marked was the
+reduction at which it was offered to the public that inside of two weeks
+the big store had sold twenty-two carloads of it. Figuring from the fact
+that a carload comprised six hundred cases, the turnover amounted to
+6,862 cases; or, counting a hundred bars to a case, 686,200 pieces of
+soap!</p>
+
+<p>The most successful sale of winter underwear that Macy's ever held took
+place during a very warm week in July, a twelvemonth before the laundry
+soap episode. A large manufacturer wanted to unload his stock and Macy's
+bought it for cash. Add to these facts the consideration that the goods
+were away out of season and you can readily see how it was possible to
+buy the goods at a very low price. Relying upon the public's ability to
+judge values, in and out of season, the store launched the sale&mdash;and
+launched it successfully. It was like a scene out of <i>Alice in
+Wonderland</i> to see the crowds of men and women with perspiration rolling
+down their foreheads buying woolen "undies" against the needs of winter.
+Americans do like to be forehanded.</p>
+
+<p>Macy's ability to buy and sell huge quantities of merchandise is
+demonstrated through these sales. Very recently over seven thousand of a
+particular leather traveling bag were sold in less than four weeks, at
+an aggregate price of nearly $75,000. In one day seven hundred vacuum
+cleaners were sold for $29.75 each. This list might be continued
+indefinitely; for not only has Macy's proved that it pays to advertise
+but that it pays to follow the Macy advertisements.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p><p>Down in the basement of this great mart of Herald Square there is a
+corner not often shown to the outer world, from which there constantly
+emerge noises which blend and combine to give the effect of a staccato
+rumble. Thud, thud, t-h-u-u-d, thud, thudity, thud, thud. Then a sound
+of air, as in a Gargantuan sigh. Thudity, thud, and so on, <i>ad
+infinitum</i>. These sounds seemingly are quite unending. If your curiosity
+draws you toward the door from which these sounds emerge and you finally
+are permitted to open it and go within, you will find a company of young
+women sitting along both sides of three sets of moving belts, quickly
+picking brass cylinders from the belts as they pass them. Except for the
+fact that there is another tube room on the fourth floor (for the upper
+floor selling departments) this basement place might truly be called the
+heart of the store, for it is these brass cylinders that contain the
+life-blood of the business, the cash which the customers pay for their
+purchases. Call the tube room the pulse of the store and the analogy is
+better&mdash;certainly their throbbing is a close index of its condition.</p>
+
+<p>Alert cashiers pick up the carriers from the upper belt as they pass,
+deftly make the required change, and drop them to the lower belt, on
+which they are conveyed to other young women who despatch them to the
+departments whence they came. This continues for approximately eight
+hours each working day. The cash carriers do considerable traveling in
+the course of a year. One of them might easily go from the new Bagdad to
+the old. Yes, it might. If you still scoff<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> let us look at the system
+together and do a little figuring upon our own account.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the store there are two hundred and fifty cash stations&mdash;the
+outer terminals of the line at one of whose common hearts we now stand.
+Each of these stations is connected with one or the other of the common
+hearts by two separate lines of tubing, one for sending and the other
+for receiving the carriers. There is a total of 125,000 feet of this
+tubing, or nearly twenty-four miles. Five thousand cash carriers are in
+use and the average number of round-trips made per day by all of them is
+150,000. Each round-trip averages two hundred and fifty feet. The
+average distance traveled each day by this host of travelers then comes
+to the astonishing total of 37,500,000 feet&mdash;7,155 miles. Now to your
+atlases and find how far the new Bagdad is from the old. And if that
+distance does not give you pause, consider that the peak-load of the
+system was carried on a day when its mileage ran to 12,120&mdash;an
+equivalent of one-half the distance around the world&mdash;in a little over
+eight hours.</p>
+
+<p>Truly it would seem that money goes far at Macy's.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>V. Distributing the Goods</span></h2>
+
+<p>When milady of Manhattan finishes her purchases in Macy's, snaps her
+purse together once again and goes out of the store, the transaction is
+ended, at least as far as she herself is concerned. But not so for
+Macy's. Particularly not so when she has given orders that the goods be
+"sent," either to her own home or to the home of some friend. In such
+cases the largest part of the store's responsibility still is ahead of
+it. It must see to it that the package&mdash;or packages&mdash;shall be carried to
+the proper destination, quickly, promptly, correctly. Which means that
+the great business machine of Herald Square has another great function
+to perform.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>There is, in the sub-basement of the Herald Square store, where the
+greatest portion of its own great transportation system is situated, an
+ancient two-wheeled cart, somewhat faded and battered, yet still a red
+delivery wagon and showing clearly the name of the house it served, R.
+H. Macy &amp; Company. It is a treasured relic of other days, which now and
+then again, at great intervals, is shown to the populace in the
+all-too-rare parades of the huge wagon equipment of the store today.</p>
+
+<p>The gentleman who gives the lecture which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>accompanies any public
+showing of this ancient equipage is Mr. James Woods, who, as we have
+already seen, has been with the store for nearly half a century and who
+has risen in its service to the important post of assistant
+superintendent of the delivery department. Mr. Woods regards the cart
+with tender affection, since it was he who once was the human horse who
+strode between its shafts. That was back in 1873, long years before the
+store had moved north from the once tree-shaded Fourteenth Street. Mr.
+Macy, himself, was still very much in charge of the enterprise and was
+passing proud of his delivery "fleet"&mdash;consisting of three horse-drawn
+wagons, and young Jimmie Woods with the cart. A good many prosperous New
+Yorkers then had their residences within a dozen blocks or less of the
+old store, and young Jimmie's legs&mdash;and the cart&mdash;could and did serve
+them, easily and expeditiously.</p>
+
+<p>That was almost the beginning of the Macy delivery department. In fact
+it had been but five years before that Mr. Macy had acquired the first
+horse-drawn rig for this purpose. From that beginning the growth was
+steady although slow. Ten years after Mr. Woods first came to it&mdash;in
+1883&mdash;there were but fifteen wagons. In 1902, when the great trek was
+made north to Herald Square, there were a hundred. Today there are more
+than two hundred and fifty, of which by far the larger number are motor
+driven. These last range all the way from the big five-ton motor trucks
+which, as we shall presently see, are used primarily for carrying
+merchandise between the store and its outlying<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> distributing stations,
+down to the small one-ton truck, which is used at its greatest advantage
+in city street distribution. And an astonishing number of horse-drawn
+vehicles remain. That is, astonishing to the uninitiated layman, who
+perhaps has been led to believe that the motor truck in this, its heyday
+of perfection, could hardly be surpassed for any form of carrying. As a
+matter of fact, however, the department-stores as well as the express
+companies, skilled in the multiple distribution of small packages, have,
+after a careful and intensive study of the motor trucks&mdash;which has
+resulted in their ordering many, many hundreds of them for certain of
+their necessities&mdash;discovered that for certain forms of delivery the
+horse and wagon still remains unsurpassed. The time that a delivery
+wagon remains standing becomes an economic factor in its use. If it
+moved all the time it undoubtedly would be as cheap and certainly more
+efficient to use a small automobile truck. But when there are fairly
+lengthy stops and close together, where perhaps the vehicle is idle for
+four minutes for every one that it is actually in operation, the factor
+of having an expensive machine idle as against an inexpensive one comes
+into play.</p>
+
+<p>Business organizations reckon these things not alone from sentiment, but
+from hard-headed facts. Yet they are not entirely free from sentiment,
+even in such seemingly purely commercial matters as delivery. The very
+condition and upkeep of the vehicles of a high-grade department-store
+show this. "Spic-and-span" is hardly the phrase by which to describe
+them. Fresh paint and gold striping&mdash;the smooth sides so cleaned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> and
+polished, that one might see his face reflected mirror-like upon them,
+the horses to the last state of perfection&mdash;this is the Macy standard of
+delivery. A Macy truck and wagon is designed to be one of the store's
+best advertisements.</p>
+
+<p>A skillful trucking contractor from the lower west side of New York went
+to a department-store owner a dozen years or more ago and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. A&mdash;&mdash;, after a little study of your delivery service, I am
+convinced that if you would turn it over to me, I could save you more
+than fifty per cent. in its operation."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. A&mdash;&mdash; was a pretty hard-headed business man, "hard-boiled" is the
+word that might well be used to describe him. He turned quickly to the
+contractor.</p>
+
+<p>"You interest me," said he. "How would you propose to do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"At the outset, by making the wagon equipment a little less elaborate.
+It could be just as efficient without so much varnish and brass and
+gold-stripe."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. A&mdash;&mdash; shook his head negatively.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," he said, "we know that much ourselves. If we were to do that,
+we should lose fifty per cent. of our advertisement upon the streets of
+New York."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>We have left milady's package where she left it, in the hands of the
+salesclerk who sold it to her. The purchaser does not see it thereafter,
+not at least until it has come to her home. With an astonishing celerity
+and according to a carefully set-down program and practice it is wrapped
+right within the floor upon which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> the selling department is situated,
+and then dropped into a chute which leads with a straight, swift run
+into that nether world of Macy's&mdash;the basement headquarters of the
+delivery department. In reality this chute is a carrier, so designed as
+to carry the small individual packages with safety and order, as well as
+with celerity.</p>
+
+<p>There are fourteen of these conveyors, coming down from all the selling
+floors save that of furniture which has its own special delivery
+organization on the ninth floor. Together they pour their almost
+constant stream of merchandise upon the so-called "revolving-ring" in
+the very center of the basement floor. This "revolving-ring," in purpose
+very much like the great and slowly revolving disc-like wooden wheels
+used in the freight stations of the express companies for a similar
+service, is, in reality, much larger than they. It is a
+"square-ring"&mdash;if I may use that paradoxical phrase&mdash;built of four
+slowly moving conveyor belts upon which a package may travel an
+indefinite number of round-trips. At various points upon the outer edge
+of this moving square the conveyor chutes drop their merchandise. Near
+the center are the wide-open mouths of other conveyors, which lead to
+distant corners of the basement.</p>
+
+<p>The nimble-fingered and nimble-witted young men who stand within the
+"revolving-ring" feed the packages from it into these last conveyors. To
+each individual package is affixed a duplicate portion of the leaf of
+the salesbook. On it the salesclerk has written, or printed, the address
+to which the merchandise is to go, the cost, whether or not it is
+collect on delivery<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> (known hereafter in this telling as C. O. D.) and
+other essential information. It is the addresses, however, which attract
+the eyes of the genii of the "revolving-ring." In their minds these fall
+into four great categories: City, meaning those portions of Manhattan
+Island south of Seventy-second Street on the east side and Ninety-ninth
+Street on the west; Harlem and the Bronx, the incorporated city of New
+York north of those two streets; Brooklyn and New
+Jersey&mdash;self-explanatory; and Suburban: all the rest of the territory
+within the far-flung limits of Macy's own generously wide delivery
+service. While for those points that are unfortunate enough to lie just
+outside of it&mdash;Boston or Philadelphia or Kamchatka or Manila (There
+hardly is an address to stagger the Macy delivery department)&mdash;the
+packages go direct to the shipping room, in its own corner of the
+basement.</p>
+
+<p>Here these last are checked and wrapped for long-distance shipment. They
+are checked against the payment or the non-payment of transportation
+charges; the store has very definite rules of its own. A paid purchase
+of but $2.50 is entitled to free delivery within any of the Eastern
+States, of $5 and over to any of the Middle States as well, of $10 and
+over to any corner of the whole United States. Freight and express
+prepayments are arranged upon a somewhat similar basis. The majority of
+the long-distance shipments go by parcel post, however. Still, in the
+course of a twelvemonth, there are enough to go both by express and
+freight to make a pretty considerable transportation bill in themselves.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span></p><p>Again we have neglected that precious package of milady's. It may be
+only an extra pair of corset-laces&mdash;in which case the saleswoman must
+have suggested that madam herself transport it to her habitat&mdash;or it may
+be an eight or ten-yard piece of heavy silk for her new evening gown, or
+the evening gown itself. In any case it receives the same care and
+attention. We have already seen how it is packed, sent through the
+conveyor-chute down into the basement and then upon the "revolving-ring"
+before the nimble eyes of the men with nimble hands and wits as well.</p>
+
+<p>Milady lives in West One Hundred and Fourth Street. The sorter's eyes
+catch that much from the address slip, torn originally from the
+salesclerk's book and pasted upon the package's outer wrappings.
+"Harlem" his mind reports back to his eyes. Into the chute-entrance
+labeled "Harlem and The Bronx" goes the package.</p>
+
+<p>"Harlem and The Bronx" is a sizable room for itself. The further end of
+the second conveyor to receive milady's precious package rests upon a
+table in its very center. Roundabout the table are small compartments or
+bins, each about the size of a small packing case; each numbered and
+corresponding to a definite wagon route or run. Run No. 87 (the number
+is purely fictitious) takes in West One Hundred and Fourth Street. Into
+compartment No. 87 goes milady's packages. But not, of course, until the
+clerical young man technically known as the sheet-writer has made a
+record of it. Into his records, also, go all the other packages destined
+that day for that particular room.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> If there should be, as sometimes
+happens, an overplus of packages for the single run, then it is the
+business of one of the assistant superintendents of delivery to meet the
+emergency either by stretching momentarily the runs of the adjoining
+routes or by sending a special wagon up from the main store. Experience
+and judgment must cut the cloth to fit the case.</p>
+
+<p>Under any ordinary procedure milady's package will go out early in the
+morning of the day following her purchase. That, at least, is the
+store's ordinary guarantee of delivery. As a matter of fact, it does far
+better than this. On ordinary days, when weather and street conditions
+in Manhattan have not gone in conditions of near-impassability, there
+are at least two regular deliveries to every part of the island south of
+One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street, with a single one at least to every
+other part of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, to say nothing of the
+downtown portions of Jersey City and Hoboken. Easily said, this thing.
+But when one comes to realize how tremendously widespread the
+metropolitan district of Greater New York is these days, the performance
+of it becomes a transportation marvel, a masterpiece of organization.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not bore you with a description of the printed forms, the checks
+and counter checks that accompany the delivery of milady's package. It
+is enough to say that they are both complete and necessary. The
+complications of C. O. D. add greatly to their perplexities. For,
+discourage it as they may and do, the department-store owners of New
+York never have been able to wean milady from the joys of this method
+of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> shopping. When she says "C. O. D." in Macy's the salesclerk
+immediately and courteously replies: "Have you tried having a
+depositor's account, madam?" A good many of them have, and all who have
+have liked the method. Yet the C. O. D. still has its great appeal. And
+out of all the deliveries from the big store in Herald Square more than
+half of them are collect-on-delivery. This means, in turn, a good deal
+of complication for the delivery department. Its drivers have to be
+cashiers, in miniature. When they report at the main store at half-past
+seven in the morning, each is furnished with five dollars in change; a
+sum which is doubled in the case of the suburban drivers. Moreover, for
+the correct handling of the forms, a double amount of care and
+understanding is required. One does not wonder that the department-store
+proprietors discourage the C. O. D.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it all requires a high type of wagon representative. Hardly less
+than the salesclerk does the wagon driver of the store have it in his
+power to make or lose friends for his house. His is no small opportunity
+for real salesmanship. The big stores realize this, and select these men
+with great care and discernment. They know that the man who shouts
+"Macy's" up the areaway or elevator-shaft once or twice a week is apt to
+become the same sort of good family friend and ally as the iceman or the
+butcher's boy. The man knows that, too: particularly in the vicinity of
+Christmas week. His own trials are many and varied. Apartment house
+superintendents and janitors, with prejudices of their own, are rarely
+co-operative, generally obstructive, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> fact. Some people&mdash;even store
+patrons&mdash;are naturally mean. They take out all their meanness upon the
+department-store man who, because of his very position, is unable to
+strike back.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the job has its compensations, aside from the warm remembrances of
+the holiday season. People, in the main, are decent after all. If Mrs.
+Jinks, who lives in Albemarle Road, Flatbush, is out at the matinee or
+the movies for the afternoon, Mrs. Blinks, who lives next door, will
+take in her packages. The Macy man has been long enough on the route to
+know that by this time. Such knowledge is a part of his stock in trade.
+He must not only know the regular patrons of the store, but all of their
+neighbors. While by the correct and courteous handling of both he may
+not only retain trade for it but bring new customers to its doors.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Let us now suppose that milady does not live in either Manhattan,
+Brooklyn or the Bronx, but in one of those smart suburbs: Forest Hills,
+New Rochelle, Englewood or the Oranges, to pick four or five out of
+many. She still is well within the limits of Macy's own delivery
+service. If she lives in the first of these&mdash;Forest Hills&mdash;she will be
+served, not direct from the Herald Square establishment, but from the
+little Long Island community of Queens. Fifteen wagon and motor truck
+routes run from the Macy sub-station there, which in turn is fed by the
+merchandise coming out over the great Queensborough bridge, each
+evening, on heavy five-ton trucks. And, to go back even further, these
+have been filled from the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>super-sized compartments at the end of the
+conveyor-chute marked "Suburban."</p>
+
+<p>Similarly, if she dwell in New Rochelle, she will be served by one of
+the fifteen motor trucks running out from the sub-station at Woodlawn,
+remembered by travelers upon the trains to Boston chiefly as the place
+of the enormous cemetery. It serves the great suburban territory north
+of the direct delivery routes out from the main store&mdash;a line drawn
+through Kingsbridge and Pelham Avenue&mdash;out as far as Ossining, Mt. Kisco
+and Stamford.</p>
+
+<p>Englewood and the New Jersey territory roundabout are served by Macy's
+Hackensack sub-station, with nine more routes; while the Oranges, mighty
+Newark, Montclair and that immediate vicinage draws its merchandise
+through a fourth sub-station, right in the heart of Newark, itself, and
+operating ten regular motor truck routes. The fifth and last
+all-the-year sub-station is at West New Brighton, Staten Island. It
+serves that far-flung and least populated of New York's five boroughs,
+Richmond.</p>
+
+<p>In the summer months another sub-station is added to the list, at
+Seabright, down on the New Jersey coast, and serving all those populous
+resorts from the Atlantic Highlands on the north to Spring Lake on the
+south. This is an expensive feature of Macy service, and one for which
+the store receives no extra compensation. It is one of the many
+expensive things that must be charged to profit-and-loss or the somewhat
+indefinite "<i>overhead</i>"&mdash;indefinite enough when one comes to consider
+its ramifications, but always fairly definite in its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> drain upon the
+daily financial balances of the store.</p>
+
+<p>At each of these sub-stations there are, in addition to the fairly
+obvious necessary facilities for re-sorting the merchandise, complete
+garage facilities for the wagons and trucks running out from them;
+these, of course, are in addition to the store's main stables and
+garages in West Nineteenth Street and also in West Thirty-eighth,
+Manhattan. Together all of these form a very considerable fleet upon
+wheels, with a personnel in keeping. For the delivery routes alone, and
+taking no account of the sizable force employed in the upkeep of
+vehicles and horses, there are employed, in the city service of the
+store, one hundred and ninety drivers and chauffeurs, with one hundred
+and eighty-six helpers, and in the suburban service, seventy-four
+drivers and eighty-six helpers.</p>
+
+<p>Through the hands of these there pours a constant and a terrific stream
+of merchandise. The conveying system in the basement of the Herald
+Square store has a generous maximum carrying capacity of five thousand
+packages an hour&mdash;a capacity which sometimes is actually reached toward
+the close of an exceptionally busy day, say toward the end of the
+pre-Christmas season. Twenty-five thousand packages is an average day's
+work for that basement room; upon occasion it has gone well over
+forty-one thousand. It should be borne in mind, moreover, that a package
+does not always represent a single purchase; in fact, it rarely does.
+Inside of one assembled package&mdash;generally assembled, as we saw in a
+previous chapter, at the store's transfer desk&mdash;there may be all the way
+from two to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> ten separate parcels. You may take your own guess as to the
+average number.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, is the great and complicated system in its simplest form.
+Its ramifications are many and astonishing. For instance, milady is apt
+at times to change her mind. Yes, she is. And send the package back.
+Even though not as often in Macy's as in the charge account stores. Here
+is another decided benefit in the cash system&mdash;not alone to the store,
+but, because of its habit of passing on its economies, to its patrons as
+well. Yet in the course of a year a considerable number of packages must
+come back. Despite a thorough educational system and constant oversight
+and admonition there is bound to be a percentage of incorrect address
+slips. These and other causes produce a certain definite return flow of
+merchandise; which must have its own forms and safeguards, for the
+protection both of the store and its customer. They all make detail, but
+extremely necessary detail.</p>
+
+<p>In the basement there is a store room whose broad shelves hold a variety
+of merchandise, bought and paid for, but never delivered. The store
+makes at least two attempts to deliver every article given to its
+delivery department. That department is unusually clever with telephone
+books, club lists and other less used avenues of finding recalcitrant
+addresses. But there come times when even its resourcefulness is
+entirely baffled. Then the undelivered goods must go to the store room
+until some properly accredited human being comes up somewhere, sometime
+to demand them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> In an astonishing number of cases the some one does not
+come up sometime or somewhere. In such a case after a fair length of
+time the goods themselves go back to stock. But the record of the
+transaction stays accessible in the store's files, so that its bureau of
+investigation, at any future time, may order a duplicate of the lost
+shipment out of the stock&mdash;out of the open market if the stock then
+fails to hold it&mdash;in order that Macy's may keep full faith with its
+patrons.</p>
+
+<p>Such a holdover is, of course, to be entirely distinguished from those
+which are held in advance of delivery; in certain cases up to thirty
+days without advance payment, in others up to sixty upon partial payment
+and in still others up to six months after full payment. This last,
+however, is a merchandising procedure quite common to most retail
+establishments.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>One feature of the delivery department remains for our consideration;
+the branch of it which is situated upon the ninth floor and which, oddly
+enough, handles the heaviest merchandise shipped out of the
+store&mdash;furniture. There are, of course, heavy shipments that go out of
+the basements&mdash;hundreds of them on an average that are entirely too
+heavy for the conveyor-chutes and the "revolving-ring." A notable one of
+these is an electric washing-machine, which, crated, will weigh slightly
+in excess of two hundred pounds. Shipments such as these go to the
+basement on hand trucks and by the freight elevators. There they are
+boxed and crated; often a considerable job. As a rule the expert packers
+of the delivery department can put<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> even a fairly sizable or unwieldy
+purchase into boxing within twelve or fifteen minutes; an elaborate and
+fragile bit of statuary has been known to take a full hour and a half
+before it was safely prepared for wagon shipment.</p>
+
+<p>Likewise the furniture craters upon the ninth floor oftimes find their
+job a sizable one indeed. The boxing of a divan or a dining-room table
+is no easy task whatsoever. And in cases where the delivery is to be
+made within the limits of Macy service it is often avoided entirely. The
+freight elevators of the store are of the largest size ever designed; so
+big that a heavy motor truck is no particular strain upon their
+individual capacity. One of these trucks can be and is driven straight
+to and from the ninth floor. After it has reached the department the
+placing of fine furniture in its cavernous interior is merely a nicety
+of planning and arrangement, a skillful use of ropes and blankets and
+padding. The truck may run to any point within forty or fifty miles of
+the store at less cost than crating; even though crating be done at
+cost, itself.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>So spread the tentacles of Macy's, those long arms of distribution that
+keep the store from ever being a merely abstract thing. The bright red
+and yellow wagons and trucks&mdash;each bearing its good-luck symbol of the
+red star&mdash;carry Herald Square to the far limits of a far-flung city. The
+men who ride them are upon the outposts of salesmanship. Yet through
+system and through organization they are forever closely connected with
+it. The blood that courses through your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> finger-tips comes straight from
+your heart. The life-blood of understanding, of enthusiasm, of morale,
+that Macy's outriders bring with them is the life-blood of the humanized
+machine that functions so steadily there in the heart of Manhattan.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>VI. The Macy Family</span></h2>
+
+<p>In the bazaars of ancient Bagdad, the human factor was not only the
+great but the sole dominating influence. The ancient Bagdadians,
+including those commuters and suburbanites, far and near, who came
+cameling into town at more or less frequent intervals, did business, not
+with a machine, not with a system, but with men. Which, being freely
+translated, meant bargaining. They not merely bargained, but haggled,
+and haggled at great length. Prices? There were none. The price was what
+you made it&mdash;you and the merchant with whom you finally came to
+agreement; if finally you did come to agreement.</p>
+
+<p>In the great bazaars of the modern Bagdad one does not need to bargain
+or to haggle. One is doing business primarily with a system. Prices are
+fixed, and firmly fixed. This is so generally understood and accepted a
+rule today that it would be a mere waste of time to discuss it at
+further length, save possibly to recall once again the large part which
+Rowland Hussey Macy and the men who followed him played in giving a
+Gibraltar-like firmness to this solid modern business principle.</p>
+
+<p>Yet even in these same modern, scientifically organized bazaars of
+today, the system rarely ever can be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> better than the men who direct it.
+Four thousand years of business progress between the two Bagdads have
+not taken from man his God-given power to make or break the best of
+systems. And Macy's, with its own business system organized, carefully
+developed and upbuilded through sixty-three long years, is still
+dependent to no little degree upon the faith and loyalty and interest of
+its men and women; that same thing which in the days of the war just
+past we first learned to know by that new name&mdash;morale.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Under the sign of the Red Star there are at all times these days not
+less than five thousand workers; in the Christmas season this pay-roll
+list runs quickly to seven thousand or over. Then it is that the Macy
+family takes its most impressive dimensions. Seven thousand souls! It is
+the population of a good sized town! It is four good regiments&mdash;it is
+the New York Hippodrome with every one of its seats filled and eighteen
+hundred folk left standing up!</p>
+
+<p>Yet even the all-the-year minimum of five thousand men and
+women&mdash;roughly speaking, one-third men and two-thirds women&mdash;is an
+impressive array. It is a human force which only gains impressiveness
+when one finds that all but three hundred of it are employed beneath a
+single roof. The small outside group chiefly comprises those in the
+delivery stations.</p>
+
+<p>To bring action, foresight, co-operation, correlation&mdash;and finally
+morale&mdash;into such a force is a thing not gained by merely talking or
+thinking about it, but by long study, experimentation and great
+continued effort.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> Which means, in turn, that Macy's, among several
+other things, is a responsibility. For, as we shall presently see, there
+are any number of problems in addition to those of buying and selling;
+problems in the solving of which unceasing demands are made upon the
+store's time, money and heart. It is, in the last analysis a matter of
+mere good business at that. Yet at Macy's it has been considerably more.
+And the store's satisfaction in realizing that it was a very early and a
+very advanced pioneer in developing personnel&mdash;and morale&mdash;as necessary
+factors in modern merchandising is a very large one indeed.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>A machine or a family&mdash;or a department-store&mdash;is only as good as its
+component parts, and by the fact that there is a strict interdependence
+between the whole and its parts, the success of Macy's must mean that
+the rank and file of its employees maintain a high average of
+intelligence, initiative and loyalty. That these qualities are
+successfully co-ordinated in Macy's is due to real leadership, and it is
+to this same leadership that we may look for the basis of the store's
+morale.</p>
+
+<p>Little things indicate. And indicate clearly. Here on the wall of the
+passageway at the head of the main employee's stair is a placard which
+reads:</p>
+
+<p>"Once each month three prizes are given to the employees who make the
+best suggestions for the betterment of store service or conditions.
+Don't hesitate to try for a prize, even if your suggestion does not
+appear important. We need your ideas and like to have as many as
+possible presented each month. Write plainly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> and drop your suggestions
+in the boxes furnished for this purpose. The first prize is $10.00, the
+second $5.00, and the third $2.00."</p>
+
+<p>Here is only a single one of the many evidences of Macy co-operation
+with the employees. Yet it illustrates clearly the house's policy of
+making its workers feel an interest in and beyond the mere amount of
+money that they draw at the end of the week. Not a few of these prizes
+are awarded for suggestions as to procedure in technical matters
+relating to the details of the business. Some of them result in the
+saving of time&mdash;and consequently money&mdash;and others in the improvement of
+working conditions. For example: ten dollars was awarded to the man who
+suggested that the doors of fitting-rooms be equipped with signals to
+show whether or not they are occupied; five dollars went to the one who
+made the suggestion that the fire-axe and hook standing in the corner of
+the customers' stairway be placed on the wall in a suitable case so that
+children could not play with them; two dollars to her who advanced the
+very reasonable idea that a scratch-pad in the 'phone booths would
+prevent memoranda and art manifestations being made upon the walls. Here
+are a few suggestions that were proffered and acted upon. The entire
+list runs to a considerable length.</p>
+
+<p>There is another notice upon the big bulletin board at the head of the
+employees' stairs&mdash;a sort of town-crier affair with temporary and
+permanent notices of interest to the store's workers&mdash;which tells the
+working force that when vacancies occur within the big store<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> they will
+be promptly posted on this and other bulletin boards. The workers are
+advised to apply for any position which they may feel they are competent
+to fill. Ambition is not curbed in Macy's. On the contrary, it is
+stimulated to every possible extent. The employee is restricted only by
+his own limitations, if he has them. It is a firmly-fixed house policy
+to promote, wherever it is at all possible, from its own ranks. Among
+its high-salaried men and women are not a few who have worked their way
+up from the bottom. In fact, among these six or eight of the best paid
+men in the store, is one who boasts that he first came to New York
+fifteen years ago, with but a suitcase and eleven dollars in his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>The employment department must have been very much on the job when it
+hired this man. It generally is very much on its job.</p>
+
+<p>Obviously, the hiring of workers for an enterprise as huge as Macy's
+cannot be conducted on any hit-and-miss plan. We have gone far enough
+with the store in these pages to see that hit-and-miss does not figure
+at any time or place in its varied functionings&mdash;and nowhere less than
+in its employment department. The hiring of new workers for the store is
+indeed a branch of the business machine that receives constant and great
+care and systematic attention. A store must employ the right sort of
+people in order to be a good store. This is fairly axiomatic these days.</p>
+
+<p>These workers are gathered in a variety of ways&mdash;by volunteer
+applications, by newspaper advertisements (in New York and outside of
+it), by outside free<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> employment agencies, by circular appeals generally
+to educational institutions, and, best of all, through the solicitation
+of its regular employees. There is no appeal for a worker that, in my
+opinion, can compare with the suggestion made by an employee that the
+place of his or her employment is a good place for his or her friends,
+as well.</p>
+
+<p>I am warmly concurred with in this opinion by the store's employment
+manager, a big, upstanding man, who in his Harvard days was a famous
+football player. The rules of that fine game he has brought to the
+understanding of his present problem.</p>
+
+<p>"One of the most desirable class of applicants is that brought by our
+own employees," he says, frankly, "as in hiring these people we have a
+feeling of security; especially if they have been brought in by some of
+the old and most loyal employees. It has been our experience that such
+applicants enter more readily into the spirit of their work and develop
+more rapidly than those obtained from other sources. We advertise in the
+classified columns of the newspapers only when it is absolutely
+necessary. Our regular daily advertisements keep the store constantly
+before the public eye&mdash;and generally that is enough.</p>
+
+<p>"During the recent war period, however, we had no scruples about
+advertising, as nearly every other line of endeavor was in the same boat
+as we. Never before have the newspapers carried so much classified
+advertising. Yet when all is said and done, besides the moral
+undesirability of this source of supply, we found it also very expensive
+indeed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p><p>"Some people believe that the function of an employment department is
+merely to keep in touch with the labor market and engage employees," he
+continued. "This is erroneous. The duty of this employment department is
+to raise the standard of efficiency of the whole working force by the
+proper selection, placing, following up and promotion of employees and
+so bringing about a condition that will result in their rendering as
+nearly as possible one hundred per cent. service to the store. That is
+the real reason why employment departments such as this first came into
+existence. Business some years ago awoke to the realization of the fact
+that its indiscriminate handling of the entire labor problem was causing
+a tremendous economic waste, not alone to the employee and to society,
+but to itself. It then began for the first time to deal with the problem
+of its personnel in a scientific and practical way."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The market for workers&mdash;like pretty nearly every other sort of
+market&mdash;is, as we have just seen, subject to fluctuations; there are
+seasons when the employment manager&mdash;ranking as the store's fourth
+assistant general manager&mdash;must look sharply about him for the
+maintenance of its ranks, other seasons when long files of would-be
+workers present themselves each morning at his department doors. For the
+five or six years of the World War period the first set of conditions
+prevailed. It was difficult for any department-store, ranked by the
+Washington authorities in war days as a non-essential industry, always
+to maintain its full working force, to say nothing of its morale.
+Recently the pendulum<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> has swung in the other direction. America is not
+exempt from the labor conditions which are prevailing in the other great
+nations of the world. And there are plenty of people who would work in
+Macy's. Yet the store has refused to use this situation as a club over
+its workers. Throughout the darkest days of the business depression it
+told them that it had no intention either of reducing its force of
+workers (beyond the usual lay-off of extra Christmas people) or of
+reducing their individual salaries. Which was a considerable help to its
+<i>Esprit de corps</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Yet even in the hardest days of labor shortage Macy's never ceased to be
+most particular as to the quality of its help. Applicants for positions
+underneath its roof were scrutinized with great care to make sure as to
+their desirability as additions to the organization. And before they
+finally were accepted and turned over to the training school, they were
+examined, with as much thoroughness as if there were hundreds of others
+in the file behind them, from whom the store might pick and choose.</p>
+
+<p>All this is part and parcel of the definite management policy of the
+employment department, just as it is part of its policy to make sure
+that the prospective member of the Macy family has more than one arrow
+to his or her quiver. Alternate capabilities are assets not to be
+scorned. And there is an obvious store flexibility in being able to use
+its human units in a variety of endeavor that the management can hardly
+afford to ignore. And it does not.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span></p><p>There is a function of the employment department of the modern business
+machine that Macy's recognizes as second in importance only to that of
+engaging its workers. I am referring to that moment when they may leave
+its employ, either from choice or otherwise. If "otherwise"&mdash;in the
+colloquial phrasing of the store being "laid-off"&mdash;there is the greatest
+of care and discretion used.</p>
+
+<p>"Remember the Golden Rule," says its general manager to his assistants,
+and says it again and again. "Do unto others as you would have them do
+unto you. And remember that there is never a time when this Golden Rule
+is more necessary or applicable in business than in the moment of
+discharge."</p>
+
+<p>Translated into the terms of hard fact this means that in Macy's no
+buyer, no department head, no department manager has the power to
+dismiss one of his workers. He may recommend the "lay-off" but only the
+general manager himself may actually accomplish the act. In which case
+he first refers the case to one of his five assistants, for personal
+investigation and recommendation.</p>
+
+<p>When the saleswoman&mdash;or man, as the case may be&mdash;leaves of her own
+volition the matter becomes, in certain senses, more serious. Why is she
+dissatisfied? Are the conditions of labor more onerous at Macy's than in
+the other stores of the city, the remuneration less satisfactory? Macy's
+does not intend that either of these causes shall obtain beneath its
+roof. So the retiring employee, before she may leave its pay-roll, is
+carefully examined as to her reasons for going. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> last impressions of
+the store must be quite as good as the earliest ones&mdash;even upon the
+minds of its workers. And a careful system of observation and of record
+has been upbuilded to make sure that this is being obtained; which may
+often lead to valuable opportunities for the correction of store system,
+particularly in the relationship between Macy's and its employees.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>We come now face to face with the training department&mdash;another
+individual organization strong enough and important enough to demand as
+its head an officer of the rank and title of assistant general manager.
+But before we come to consider it in some of the many aspects of its
+workings&mdash;before we come to see how in these recent years education has
+come to be the hand-maiden of merchandising, let us consider the actual
+experience of a young woman who recently entered the employment of the
+store. She was a college woman&mdash;a good many of the store people are
+these days. The mass of young women who come trooping out of our
+colleges each June are apt to find their employment bents trending more
+or less to a common course and in great cycles. Yesterday the cycle was
+teaching; the day before, literature or the sciences; today it is
+merchandising. The great department-stores of our metropolitan cities in
+America are, as we already know, today paying their executives and
+sub-executives salaries more than commensurate with the earnings of
+those in other lines of industry and well ahead of those in the learned
+professions. Moreover, they have brought their hours of employment down
+to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> a point at least approaching those of other business organizations.
+Their appeal thus has become measurably greater. And they are reaping
+the reward&mdash;in the attraction of a higher grade of executive young
+women.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="z238.jpg" id="z238.jpg"></a><img src="images/z238.jpg" width='475' height='700' alt="THE SCIENCE OF MODERN SALESMANSHIP" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">THE SCIENCE OF MODERN SALESMANSHIP</p>
+
+<p class="bold">Education places the saleswoman of today at highest efficiency.<br />
+A Macy schoolroom</p>
+
+<p>This young woman was of that type. And here is how she came to
+Macy's&mdash;told in her own words:</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all long, long ago, I went rather hesitatingly into the rooms
+labeled 'employment office' at Macy's. 'Hesitatingly' because, if you
+have ever gone around very much looking for a job, you know that
+'Welcome' is not always written on the door-mat that receives you. But
+it is at Macy's&mdash;and a woman, who made me feel that she was my friend by
+the warmth of her smile, talked with me and after filling out the usual
+blanks I was told when to report for work. They were mighty decent, too,
+about trying to place me selling the kind of merchandise that <i>I</i> wanted
+to sell&mdash;and that means a lot!</p>
+
+<p>"The Monday morning that I came to work was, of course, rather
+hard&mdash;it's not easy to go into any strange and new place and be crazy
+about it right at first! There were a lot of us&mdash;all new girls&mdash;and it
+was fun to see what they did to us. We went from the employment office,
+where there is a good sign reading 'Say "we" not "I" and "ours" not
+"my",' to our locker room (which, by the way, is the best of any of the
+places I have ever worked in) and then up to the training department for
+a little first time; after which they sent us to our respective
+departments. We felt rather like ping-pong balls, being knocked hither
+and thither,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> and though we didn't know why we were doing any of these
+things we trusted that those holding the ping-pong bat did.</p>
+
+<p>"While we were waiting up there in the training department, we had a
+chance to get to know each other a little&mdash;two or three of us were
+charmingly Irish&mdash;and time to note the people busy about that
+department. Nice efficient-looking people they were&mdash;and of course we
+labeled and cubby-holed them. One man, we all decided, could well be a
+matinee idol and another might have hailed from down Greenwich Village
+way.</p>
+
+<p>"At last we parted and went down through the store to our own
+departments&mdash;and on the way any importance which we may have felt was
+quickly submerged in seeing what a distressingly small part we were of
+the large Macy organization. Even so, we later found out how many, many
+other 'we's' like each of us could make a deal of trouble for it, should
+we fail to carry on our work correctly. A talk we had from the store
+manager, a little later on, made me feel directly responsible to the
+poor fellows who are the Macy delivery men. If I were not careful to
+write the address clearly in my salesbook, the delivery man would get in
+trouble&mdash;and all because of my handwriting! Funny, how we were all
+linked up together.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, to go back, I got to my department feeling decidedly unimportant,
+and was put to work behind a counter which sold women's and children's
+woolen gloves and women's kid gloves. That was the first counter I had
+ever sold from. In other stores I have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> sold from what are known as
+'open departments'; the counter trade was a revelation to me. Did you
+ever notice the lack of space behind the counters in the stores? Well,
+with the Christmas rush and all the extra salesgirls, it is lucky indeed
+that some of us have a sense of humor.</p>
+
+<p>"I had not been behind the counter for two whole minutes before a
+customer came along and asked for something. I tried to look wise and
+answer. It was all terribly new. The customers are always so plentiful
+in Macy's that a new girl hardly has time to have the old girls tell her
+about the stock. Moreover, our counter was very near the store's main
+entrance&mdash;which meant that we were an informal but very busy little
+information bureau on our own account&mdash;not only about Macy's but
+apparently anything else in the city of New York.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, I didn't have a salesbook that day; I didn't receive one
+until after I had had some training and was beginning to know something
+about the Macy system. However, customers could not see the
+'new-and-green' written on my face, so I waited on them thick and fast;
+even through that first morning. And a wild time I had of it&mdash;gym was
+never so exhausting as stooping down to look for a certain pair of
+gloves which must be a certain color combined with a certain size, plus
+a certain style and so on. Some people must stay up nights figuring
+along the lines of permutations and combinations, so as to work out some
+unheard of ones for the things they ask for in Macy's. The other girls
+were mighty nice to me, though, and as helpful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> as could be. And our
+having to almost walk upon one another and squeezing past and bumping so
+often&mdash;why, you all get clubby, mighty soon. At the end of that first
+day I was rather wrecked, though happy&mdash;for in my desire to find things
+for customers speedily I had, in bending down, burst through the knee of
+one stocking, broken a corset-stay and ripped loose a garter! Henceforth
+I managed to dress in a manner prepared for doing gymnastic stunts, such
+as deep-knee-bending and leap-frog.</p>
+
+<p>"My first lesson on the store system came on my first day in the
+store&mdash;and then one every day for an hour, during the whole first week.
+I liked that&mdash;for then I knew how things were supposed to be done. They
+even took us out into departments that were not busy early in the
+morning and had us make out certain kinds of sales right behind the
+counter, and carry the whole thing through&mdash;all that was lacking being
+the <i>real</i> customer. It gave us confidence and showed us things that we
+thought we knew, but that, when it came right down to it, we didn't know
+at all. The training department also gave us pamphlets and notices about
+how to use the telephones and telling us to do certain things, as well
+as how our salary and commission were to be figured. Also one leaflet
+told us about Macy's underselling policy, and what we should do in case
+a customer reported merchandise as being cheaper somewhere else&mdash;and,
+although I had heard before of this policy of Macy's, I came to believe
+in it faithfully, after I had read the booklet.</p>
+
+<p>"When you're new in a department the 'higher up'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> man can do much to
+make you feel glad that you are there. My section manager and buyer were
+both fine. The buyer told us in a talk she gave us all about how she'd
+been with Macy's for twenty-five years; that she had worked for several
+years, when she first began, at six dollars a week. She made us feel
+that there surely must be a chance for every one of us&mdash;that a firm that
+is worth staying with that long must be pretty fine indeed&mdash;and that it
+was just up to us individually, whether or not we would go ahead. As for
+our section manager, he was always so nice in the way he handled any
+transaction with us&mdash;giving us an extended lunch-hour or signing any
+sales checks that needed his 'O. K.' In many stores the section managers
+are so disagreeable about doing their work that the salesgirls hate to
+have them 'O. K.' things&mdash;but I have found it quite the opposite at
+Macy's. And when he had the time and saw any of us looking glum or tired
+our man would talk to us and succeed in cheering us up.</p>
+
+<p>"There are many things, too, that I discovered Macy's doing for its
+employees&mdash;all sorts of clubs and parties. One of the most useful of the
+first of these I found to be the umbrella club. All I had to do one day
+when it began unexpectedly to rain was to go up to the training
+department, deposit fifty cents and receive an umbrella. If I left
+Macy's within the month, I would get my fifty cents back. Of course, I
+was to return the umbrella the very first clear day but any time
+thereafter that I needed one I could go upstairs and get it.</p>
+
+<p>"Then, too, there's the recreation room&mdash;you have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> two fifteen-minute
+relief periods a day in the store in addition to your lunch time. You
+can go to the dressing rooms and wash up a bit and then go to the
+recreation room, where there are plenty of large, comfy chairs, a piano,
+books and the like. The room is a veritable social center all the day
+long&mdash;I always found lots of friends there, no matter at what time I
+took my relief periods. And you go back to your work refreshed and 'full
+of pep' once again. Another place where you have a chance to see your
+friends is the employees' lunchroom&mdash;and it certainly is a popular
+place. Despite the clatter and rush, the Macy folks have a good time in
+their cafeteria; the crowds that eat there every day prove the
+wholesomeness of its food. It is good home cooking and, as far as its
+cheapness is concerned&mdash;well, I've eaten veritable dinners there at the
+noon hour, day after day, and never had my check total more than
+twenty-five cents; with thirteen or fifteen nearer the average.</p>
+
+<p>"One morning we all came early to the store&mdash;to a courtesy rally.
+Thousands of us&mdash;yes, literally thousands of us&mdash;gathered on the main
+floor, on the central stair and everywhere roundabout it, and we sang
+songs about smiling; and other optimistic things. Then, after good
+addresses by Mr. Straus and Mr. Spillman, we all sang again and, in
+response to an inquiry from one of the store executives, all shouted
+that we would try to carry on with the new Macy slogan of 'A smile with
+every package' and 'a thank you as goodbye.'"</p>
+
+<p>Frank testimony, indeed. And honest.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span></p><p>To bring this atmosphere about the worker in the store may no more be
+the result of hit-and-miss than the right sort of hiring. In the modern
+marts of the new Bagdad the creation of morale, not merely the retention
+of a good industrial relationship between a store and its workers but a
+constant bettering of it, has come to be as important a problem as that
+of the buying or the delivering of its merchandise, or even its problems
+of making its public constantly acquainted with its offerings and
+advantages.</p>
+
+<p>The work of such a department&mdash;in Macy's the department of
+training&mdash;divides itself quite logically and clearly into two great
+avenues; the one educational, the other recreational. Each takes hold of
+the newcomer to the store almost from the very moment that he or she
+enters upon its lists of employment. The new salesgirl's name is hardly
+upon the rolls of the department to which she is assigned before a
+member of the store's reception committee is upon her heels and steering
+her straight through all the maze of fresh experiences that necessarily
+must await the novitiate. She is told all about her time disc of
+brass&mdash;the individual coin that bears her distinctive number (built up
+of her department number plus her own serial one) which she must drop
+into its allotted slot at the employees' entrance when she comes to it
+in the morning and which she must see is returned to her before the day
+is done in order that she may have it to use again upon the morrow; how,
+going from the locker room to her department at the day's beginning, she
+must sign its own time-roll, which then becomes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> accountable for her
+comings and goings through the rest of the day; how she can go and when
+she must return; how she is paid&mdash;her salary, her quota, her
+commissions, her bonuses.</p>
+
+<p>All of this might sound complicated, indeed, to the new girl, were it
+not for the kindness of her assigned "committeeman." Complications in
+the hands of a woman who has been through the mill, herself, and who has
+come to see how they are really not complications at all, but cogs in
+the grinding wheels of a great and systematic machine, are easily
+explained. The new girl catches on. The simple but accurate
+psychological tests through which she was put before she was accepted
+for Macy's assure this. She catches on and within a year&mdash;perhaps within
+a space of but a few months&mdash;she, herself, is on the reception committee
+and helping other new girls through the maze of first employment.</p>
+
+<p>The new girl catches on&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>There lies before me, as I write these paragraphs, a neatly typewritten
+loose-leaf memorandum book. It is the work of a girl who has yet to
+round out her first year in Macy's and it is a work that all must
+produce before they may hope for very definite advancement.</p>
+
+<p>This typewritten book is, in itself, a book of the Macy store. Its pages
+are a brief, succinct and thorough account of the store's organization,
+its selling policies&mdash;including, of course, the stressed under-selling
+policy&mdash;and its methods. Yet it is much more, too. It is, if you please,
+a manual of salesmanship. Under a heading, "Steps in an Ideal Sale,"
+these are not only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> enumerated but are given relative values in
+percentages. Thus we see that "attracting attention" is twenty per
+cent.; "arousing interest," twenty; "creating desire," fifteen; "closing
+sale," twenty; "introducing new merchandise," ten; and "securing good
+will," fifteen. Under each of these sub-heads, the salesclerk has
+collected a group of points necessary to their attainment. Thus, under
+"attracting attention" one finds "facial expression" and under it, in
+turn, "pleasant and expectant."</p>
+
+<p>All of these things have been taught the salesgirl author of this
+book&mdash;the volume, itself, is the result of her notes at her lecture
+classes. When she is taught "attracting attention" she is told that
+alongside of "facial expression" there comes "tone of voice," and under
+this last there are five distinct classifications: "audible, distinct,
+sincere, rhythmical, suited to customer." Truly the science of
+salesmanship goes to far lengths these days. From time to time the store
+has engaged a professional teacher of elocution to take up and carry
+forward this last function of its work. Here is this saleswoman being
+taught that "swell" is a word forever to be avoided over the counter,
+"smart," "stylish," "fashionable," "original," and some others being
+substituted. Similarly "elegant," "grand," "nifty," "classy," "cheap,"
+"awfully" and "terribly" are under the ban, appropriate synonyms being
+suggested to replace them. "Flat" is not to be used, when "apartment" is
+meant. The entire list of words to be avoided in a Macy sales
+conversation runs to a considerable length.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p><p>This particular saleswoman was trained to textile salesmanship.
+Consequently, although the first half of her book, which treats of the
+store's methods and policies, is common to those that are being prepared
+by her fellows in all the other selling departments, the second half is
+the result of the special training that was given her in the department
+of training along the lines of her own merchandise. Not only did she
+spend long hours of the firm's time in its classroom upon the third
+floor of the store and surrounded by cabinets in which were displayed
+textile materials of every sort and in every stage of development, but
+she was given a printed booklet which told her much about her
+merchandise, its history, its production fields and the details of its
+manufacture.</p>
+
+<p>From it she evolved her own history of textiles, setting down with
+accuracy the four fundamental cloths&mdash;cotton, linen, silk and wool&mdash;and
+not alone tracing their development and manufacture, but by means of
+carefully hand-made diagrams, pointing out the difference between the
+different textures and weavings. "Warp" and "weft" and "twill" have come
+to be more than mere words to her. They are a part of her business
+capital, which she can&mdash;and does&mdash;turn to the good account of the store.
+So she is to her compeer of twenty-five years ago&mdash;selling dress-goods
+in the old Macy store down on Fourteenth Street&mdash;as the electric light
+of today is to the old-fashioned lamps of that day and generation.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Back of this little black-bound notebook there is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> system&mdash;organization
+if you would read it that way. Education, of a truth, has become the
+handmaiden of merchandising. And the store's school has become one of
+its ranking functions.</p>
+
+<p>As teachers in this school there is a specially trained corps of men and
+women who do nothing but instruct and then follow up their pupils to see
+that they put into practice the things that they have learned. The
+educational work consists of individual instruction, informal classes
+and practical demonstrations. And the result of it all is not merely to
+make the employee valuable to the house, but to lend interest to
+merchandising, itself, and to lift the salesperson out of the mere
+mechanical process of taking orders for goods.</p>
+
+<p>The moment that a new employee comes into the Macy store his or her
+instruction in its system, organization and salesmanship begins. We have
+just seen how one typical new saleswoman began receiving her training
+from the first day of her employment. She was no exception to an
+inflexible rule. The training is given invariably. It does not matter
+whether the applicant has had experience in other large
+department-stores. Even a former Macy employee, accepting re-employment,
+must go through the department of training for, like everything that
+grows, the store system changes steadily from year to year and from
+month to month.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>A school such as this must have teachers. It is futile to add that they
+must be specially trained and thoroughly competent in every way to
+fulfill the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> unusual task set before them. And this, of itself, has been
+a problem, not alone with Macy's, but with the other large
+department-stores of New York. They have co-operated to solve it, with
+the direct result that some two or three years ago retail store training
+became a practical factor in the city's educational system. Under the
+enthusiastic aid of Doctor Lee Galloway, its head, the successful and
+rapidly expanding business division of New York University created the
+school of retail selling, bearing the name of and affiliated with the
+parent institution. The merchants of New York raised a fund of $100,000
+for the establishment and promotion of this enterprise and from it last
+June came its first graduating class&mdash;young men and women qualified to
+teach store training in the great bazaars of our modern Bagdad.</p>
+
+<p>The purposes of this school are set forth succinctly in its first
+manual, which has come off the press. Its object is "to dignify retail
+selling through education in the following ways: To train teachers in
+retail selling for public high schools and for retail stores, to train
+employees of retail stores for executive positions and to do special
+research work for the department managers of retail stores."</p>
+
+<p>In accordance with the first of these expressed avenues of its endeavors
+the Board of Estimate of the city of New York already has begun to move
+in full co-operation. A high school in the lower west side of
+Manhattan&mdash;the Haaren High School at Hubert and Collister Streets&mdash;has
+been designated as training center for this work. Girls are there being
+taught retail<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> selling. Nearly one hundred already are entered in the
+course and within a few short months the larger stores of the city will
+begin to benefit by this highly practical educational work.</p>
+
+<p>That this experiment will prove successful seems now to be well beyond
+the shadows of doubt. Yet such success will be in no small measure due
+to the individual efforts of Dr. Michael H. Lucey, principal of the
+Julia Richman High School&mdash;in West Thirteenth Street, just back of
+Macy's original store&mdash;who has devoted great energies to its launching.
+Convinced, from the outset, of the real necessity of a training course
+in retail selling in the city schools, Dr. Lucey makes no secret of his
+dubious fears at the beginning of the experiment:</p>
+
+<p>"I honestly didn't see how we were going to do it," he says, in frankly
+discussing the entire matter, "the tradition in favor of an office
+career rather than a selling one in a store has so long ruled in the
+high schools of the city. There are several reasons for this&mdash;the most
+important one, in my mind, the feeling in the average high school girl's
+head that less education having been required in past years for the girl
+behind the counter than for the girl behind the typewriter, she lost a
+certain definite sort of caste, if she followed the first of these
+callings. Of course, that is utter rubbish. I have no hesitancy today in
+telling my girls that if they are looking for a genuine career retail
+selling is the thing for them. In office work, if they are very good,
+they may get up to forty or even fifty dollars a week but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> there they
+are pretty nearly sure to come to a standstill."</p>
+
+<p>The skilled educator shakes his head as he says this.</p>
+
+<p>"You see the difficulty is that so many girls coming out of schools such
+as these look upon business not as a boy would look at it, as a career
+with indefinite and permanent possibilities, but rather as a bridge
+between schooling and matrimony&mdash;a bridge of but four, or five, or six
+years. And when they are frank with me&mdash;and they often are&mdash;and tell me
+of this bridge that is in their minds, I am frank to advise office work.
+It offers better immediate returns&mdash;yet in the long run none that are
+even comparable with those of a high-grade department-store."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Following the successful plan of the University of Cincinnati in its
+technical engineering courses, the students down at Haaren are grouped
+into working pairs, which means that, in practice and working in
+alternation, each goes to school every other week. In the week that one
+is in the classroom, her partner is in one of the city stores studying
+retail selling at first hand. When, at the end of six days, she returns
+to her schoolroom she has many questions derived from her actual
+practice to put to her instructor. So the practice and the principles of
+this new hard-headed science are kept hand in hand with its actual
+workings.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is this all: some six or seven hundred young women&mdash;and young men,
+too&mdash;are also making a special study of retail selling in the city's
+evening schools. A single course at the DeWitt Clinton High<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> School is
+quite typical of these. Four evenings a week, for two hours each
+evening, a huge class is being taught&mdash;in an even more detailed way than
+is possible under a department-store roof&mdash;the principles and
+manufacture of textiles. In these classes a goodly number of the Macy
+family are enrolled. Another goodly enrollment goes into the special
+lectures given by a museum instructor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
+on certain evenings and Sunday afternoons.</p>
+
+<p>Truly, indeed, education has become the handmaiden of merchandising.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>As teachers in Macy's department of training there are enrolled today
+only those men and women who have received a thorough normal school
+education in this great new science of retailing. They do nothing but
+instruct the store's workers and then follow up to make sure that these
+are putting into practice the principles in which they have just been
+instructed. Except for the training of the future executives the school
+time is taken entirely from regular business hours and so, at the
+expense of the house, itself. This schooling&mdash;under the Macy roof,
+please remember&mdash;consists of individual instruction, informal classes
+and practical demonstration.</p>
+
+<p>Specialized training under the roof includes instruction under the
+direct supervision of the Board of Education in fundamental school
+subjects to those classed as "juniors" and "delinquent seniors"; a
+junior salesmanship course given to all employees promoted from the
+non-selling divisions of the store to its selling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> divisions; a senior
+salesmanship class&mdash;including the study of textiles and non-textiles,
+and covering three busy months; the instruction of special groups of
+salesclerks to be transferred for special sales; "demonstration sales,"
+in which teacher and pupil "play store," with the teacher impersonating
+various types of customers; the executive course to prepare employees
+for high executive positions of different rank and order; and the
+specialized instruction for dictaphone and comptometer operators,
+correspondence and file clerks and the like.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In the limited space of this book, I shall have no opportunity to carry
+you further into the details of this fascinating department of the
+modern store. The saleswoman's little black book that we saw but a few
+minutes ago ought to show it more clearly to your eyes than any
+elaborate presentments of schedules and curriculums. The result's the
+thing. And Macy's has the results. It has already achieved them. Not
+only has it lifted retail selling from the hard and rutty road of cold
+commercialism but it has lifted the individual seller, himself&mdash;which,
+to my way of thinking, is to be accounted a good deal of a triumph. In
+such a triumph society at large shares&mdash;and shares not a little.</p>
+
+<p>It is house policy&mdash;sound policy&mdash;to encourage employees to look out not
+only for the store's interest, but for their own. An ambitious salesman
+is indeed an asset; and there are ways of keeping him ambitious. There
+is, for instance, the system of bonuses for punctuality, which takes the
+final form of extra holidays in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> the summertime. A week's holiday with
+pay is given without fail to each and every employee of eight months'
+standing. But a record of good attendance and punctuality for fifty long
+weeks brings another week of vacation, also with full pay.
+Department-stores not so long ago used to penalize their workers for
+tardiness. The new Macy plan works best, however.</p>
+
+<p>The list of those bonus possibilities is long. There is, of course,
+chief amongst them, the bonus which takes the concrete form of a sales
+commission. The salesclerk is set a moderate quota for his or her week's
+work. On sales that reach above this figure he or she is paid a
+percentage commission. And, lest you may be tempted to dismiss this
+statement with a mere shrug of the shoulders, as a perfunctory thing
+perhaps, permit me to tell you that but last year a retail salesman in
+the furniture department earned in excess of $6,000 in wages and
+commissions.</p>
+
+<p>One other thing before we are done with this main chapter on the Macy
+family and starting up another which shall show the super-household at
+its play; it is a thing closely associated both with department-store
+employment and training: this "special squad" which has become so
+distinctive a feature of the big red-brick selling enterprise in Herald
+Square. Concretely, it is a group of college graduates&mdash;the heads of the
+firm are themselves college men and have none of the contempt for
+education that has become so blatant a thing in the minds of so many
+"self-made business captains" of today&mdash;who desire to enter upon this
+fascinating and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> comparatively new field of department-store service.</p>
+
+<p>As one of the executives of the department of training himself says,
+"Many of these young grads come in here with the rattle of their
+brand-new diplomas so loud in their ears that for quite a while they
+can't hear anything else."</p>
+
+<p>Yet they are good material&mdash;as a rule, uncommonly good material. So Dr.
+Michael Lucey says, and Dr. Lucey knows. As a supplement to his
+educational work in the commercial high schools he entered Macy's last
+summer and spent the two months of his vacation in the special squad,
+studying the store from a variety of intimate and personal angles. On
+his first day in it, the distinguished educator sold clothing&mdash;men's
+clothing&mdash;and he sold to his first customer, an accomplishment which he
+notes with no little pride. His pride at the moment was large. But the
+next moment was destined to take a fall. A floor manager down the aisle
+espied the new clerk.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't let those trousers sweep the floor," he admonished.</p>
+
+<p>And the educator had his first taste of store discipline.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Sooner or later all these young men out of college get that first taste.
+It does not harm them. And it is not very long before they begin to
+observe that, after all, there are still a few things about which they
+know practically nothing. After which their real education begins.</p>
+
+<p>A department-store is, among other things, a great melting pot. An
+Englishman who came into Macy's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> special squad last year inquired just
+what work might be expected of him. He was told.</p>
+
+<p>"Manual labor," he protested, "I can't think of it. I wear the silver
+badge."</p>
+
+<p>Which meant that he was one of the King's own&mdash;a pensioner of the late
+war. The store executive who first handled this bit of human raw
+material possessed a deal of real tact; most of them do. He smiled
+gently upon the Britisher.</p>
+
+<p>"After all," he suggested, "you know you don't have to tell your King
+that you had to use your two good hands in hard work."</p>
+
+<p>The Englishman saw the point. He laughed, shook hands and went to work.
+In six months he was an executive, himself. It's a way that they have at
+Macy's. And here is part of the way.</p>
+
+<p>Manual labor is demanded invariably of those who enlist in the special
+squad. It has a regular system through which each of its workers must
+pass. First he is given the history and development of the store and of
+its policies. This work is followed by a week on the receiving platform
+and then a good stiff session in the marking-room. The college boy
+follows the merchandise along a little further. He proceeds for a while
+to sell it&mdash;then does the work of a section manager. After which there
+come, in logical sequence, the delivery department, the bureau of
+investigation, the comptroller's office, the tube system, an intensive
+study of the departments of employment and of training. These are not
+only studied but written reports are made upon them. After which he
+should have a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> pretty fair idea of the store and the things for which it
+stands.</p>
+
+<p>The course is only varied in slight detail for the woman college
+graduate. Macy's has naught but the highest regard for the gentler
+sex&mdash;not alone as its patrons but as members of its staff&mdash;yesterday,
+today and tomorrow. A woman may not be able to handle heavy cases upon
+the receiving platform. But there are other sorts of cases that she may
+handle&mdash;and frequently with a tact and diplomacy not often shown by the
+more oppressed sex. I might cite a hundred instances from within the
+store where she has shown both&mdash;and initiative as well. But I shall give
+only one&mdash;where initiative played the largest part. Some few months ago
+a young woman who has climbed high in the store organization, to the
+important post of buyer of a most important line of muslin wearing
+apparel, found herself in France, but a few hours before the steamer
+upon which she was booked to sail to the United States was to depart
+from Southampton. To take a steamer across the Channel and then catch
+her boat was quite out of the question. She did the next best thing. She
+hopped on an a&euml;roplane and flew from Paris to London; seemingly in
+almost less time than it here takes to tell it. She caught her boat. Her
+instructions were to catch the boat. And long since she had acquired the
+Macy habit of obeying orders.</p>
+
+<p>Upon this, again, a whole volume might be written&mdash;upon the thoroughness
+of an organization which really organizes, a training department that
+really trains, a system which really systematizes. And all under the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>
+title of a family group&mdash;in which affection and tact and understanding
+come into play quite as often as discipline and energy and initiative.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>VII. The Family at Play</span></h2>
+
+<p>In the business machine of yesterday there were no adjustments for play.
+It prided itself upon its efficiency. And in the next breath it
+proclaimed that such efficiency left no room whatsoever for such
+foolishness as recreation. Today we know much better. We know that
+play&mdash;healthy, uniform play in a decent amount&mdash;is one of the very
+finest of tonics for the human frame. And so count it as one of the very
+highest factors in our modern schemes of efficiency.</p>
+
+<p>Macy's plays and makes no secret of the fact. On the contrary, it is
+intensely proud of its provisions for the welfare of its workers.
+Industrial recreation is no mere idle phrase to it. In hard fact no
+small portion of the remarkable esprit de corps of the store is due to
+its well organized recreational and social service work. In a large
+measure this part of the operation of the store corresponds to what the
+War and Navy Departments did through their Commissions on Training Camp
+Activities during the great war. Bearing in mind our likening Macy's to
+an army in an earlier chapter, the parallel now becomes a close one
+indeed. Organized recreation promoted better team work in the war; it
+now promotes better team work in business. Ergo, it is for the welfare
+of Macy's that it shall promote organized recreation beneath its own
+roof.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span></p><p>And yet that very phrase, "welfare work," is not often used underneath
+that roof. It has the flavor of patronage which is so wholly lacking in
+this family of thousands, and so it is thrust forever into the discard.
+"The bunch" gets together&mdash;you see, you may call the family by almost
+any name that pleases you best&mdash;various groups are forever assembling at
+the Men's Club or the Community Club and making plans for their numerous
+activities. And these last cover a surprisingly large range.</p>
+
+<p>Any male employee of the store may join the Macy Men's Club. It is a
+wholly self-governing body and, aside from making up the inevitable
+deficits that accrue, the store has no paternalistic or direct attitude
+whatsoever toward it. The club itself is situated at 156 West
+Thirty-fifth Street, just west of the store, but entirely separated from
+it. It occupies two floors of an extremely comfortable building. In its
+externals it differs very little from any other sort of men's club.
+There are a reading room and a smoking room where, toward the close of
+the day and well into the evening, its members may relax. And there is a
+restaurant serving extremely good meals.</p>
+
+<p>It is only as one pokes beneath the surface that he begins to find out
+how very real this small institution, that is an offshoot of the larger
+one, really is. Its restaurant serves meals at considerably less than
+cost. And the fact that this club is regarded as something more than a
+mere combination of eating-place and rest-room is shown by its
+organization activities in other directions. For example, its members
+interest <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>themselves in general athletics to the extent that, in the
+proper seasons, they have very creditable teams of baseball, basketball,
+football and the like, while occasional outings with suitable field
+events are arranged. Each Thursday evening there is organized athletic
+work in a large private gymnasium that is especially hired for the
+purpose.</p>
+
+<p>In fact it is at this last point that the Men's Club comes in contact
+with the Community Club, which is the nucleus organization covering
+other recreational activities among the women, the girls and the younger
+men of the store family. For, by careful planning, both of these clubs
+manage to use the big gymnasium of a single evening, while, after the
+athletic work is over, the floor is cleared and there is dancing until
+going-home time.</p>
+
+<p>These comforts are not given without some cost to the Macy folk. That
+would be very bad business indeed. It has been so decided long since.
+And so, while it may be human nature to be ever on the lookout for
+"something for nothing," it is quite as human to derive very much
+additional enjoyment from the things for which one pays. Even the
+suggestion of charity is not pleasant. And with this in view these clubs
+charge nominal sums for their privileges. In so doing they earn the
+respect of those who share in them.</p>
+
+<p>Dues for the Men's Club are placed at three dollars a year&mdash;that surely
+is a nominal figure. These go toward the development of club activities
+outside of its actual running expenses (rent, the restaurant, etc.). The
+gymnasium fee is another three dollars, which is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> much less than one
+would pay for a similar facility elsewhere in New York.</p>
+
+<p>The scale of charges for the Community Club is quite different. The dues
+here are but twenty-five cents a year&mdash;its membership is made up mainly
+of lower-salaried folk&mdash;with small extra charges for special activities.
+For instance, the Spanish class, which is taught by one of the Spanish
+interpreters in the store and which has a constant attendance of about
+forty, costs its pupils the very inconsiderable sum of five cents a
+lesson. The gymnasium charge is kept in a like ratio. There are a few
+others in addition. The aggregate cost, however, of as many activities
+as an average employee can take up is of little moment or burden to him
+or to her&mdash;nothing as compared with the sense of independence that goes
+with the small act of payment.</p>
+
+<p>The Choral Club, under the direction of a competent leader, meets
+Wednesday evenings in the big recreation room on the third floor of the
+store, with a usual attendance of about two hundred men and women who
+are trained in part singing and in chorus work of various sorts. This is
+not only enjoyable and popular for its own sake but it has an added
+value in leading toward the organizing of the store's talent for
+concerts and for musical plays.</p>
+
+<p>And it has such talent. Do not forget that&mdash;not even for a passing
+moment. It would be odd, indeed, if a family of five thousand folk did
+not develop upon demand much real histrionic and artistic ability of
+every sort. And when such potentialities are fostered and encouraged,
+the results&mdash;well, they are such as to warn<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> Florenz Ziegfeld and the
+rest of the Forty-second Street theatrical producers to keep a sharp
+eye, indeed, upon Macy's.</p>
+
+<p>On Monday evenings, the entire winter long and well into the spring, the
+Dramatic Club meets and here every budding Maxine Elliott or Ina Claire
+has her full opportunity. On Tuesday there is a get-together
+evening&mdash;one begins to think with all these evenings so neatly filled of
+the calendar of a real social enterprise&mdash;and then one sees the store
+family at its fullest relaxation. Here was a recent Tuesday night. It
+was just before Christmas and the store was approaching the annual peak
+load of its year's traffic. Yet it had no intention whatsoever of
+relaxing a single one of its social endeavors.</p>
+
+<p>On this particular Tuesday evening our salesgirl&mdash;the one whom we saw
+but a moment ago being inducted into the selling organism of the
+store&mdash;made her first personal acquaintance with the Community Club. Let
+her tell her own story, and in her own way:</p>
+
+<p>"Up in the recreation room a few hundred of us gathered for a regular
+party. Some few of us had gone home after store hours for our dinner;
+the others had had it right in the store's own lunchroom. It surely is
+great the way that you <i>can</i> get a meal there in Macy's at any time you
+are staying late&mdash;either on duty or on pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>"At about six-thirty the evening's program got under way&mdash;so that the
+many friendly, chattering groups of girls in the big room finally had to
+simmer down to something approaching silence. Then the Choral Club<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>
+began singing for us&mdash;some good, old-time Christmas carols first, and
+then some other songs. All of us joined finally in the chorus, leaving
+the club to carry the difficult parts. They could do that all right,
+too. Mr. Janpolski, their leader, finally gave us a solo and after that
+there was a grand march led by our own beloved Marjorie Sidney.
+Everybody joined in&mdash;not only in body, but in spirit. It was like
+Washington's Birthday in the big gym up at Northampton. Messenger girls,
+college graduates, salesfolk, deliverymen, managers&mdash;everyone was just
+the same in that bless&egrave;d hour. Distinctions of the store were gone. We
+were boys and girls&mdash;some of us a bit grown up and grayed to be sure,
+but all with Peter Pannish hearts&mdash;having a real party once again.</p>
+
+<p>"The grand march ended in dancing for every one&mdash;with a jolly negro at
+the piano doing his level best to uphold the reputation of his race for
+really spontaneous music. Finally, after many encore dances, everybody
+withdrew from the floor and out came Mr. Salek, the director of the
+Men's Club, and Miss Knowles, doing an almost professional dance. The
+Castles had very little on this couple&mdash;the way Salek lifted his partner
+and then let her down&mdash;slowly, slowly, still more slowly&mdash;reminded me of
+Maurice and Walton. Their performance brought down the house. Of course
+they had to respond to encores; again and again and again.</p>
+
+<p>"Following this&mdash;for Macy's believes that variety is the spice of all
+life&mdash;a Junior recited the unforgetable ''Twas the night before
+Christmas and all through the house.' She really was a darling. And how
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>Christmassy she looked, with her big butterfly sash and her hairbow of
+scarlet tulle.... Next on the program came dancing&mdash;for everybody.
+First, however, there was another march, so that each couple received a
+number&mdash;while every little while certain numbers (the couples that held
+them) were eliminated from the floor. The nicest part about this
+elimination dance, as they called it, was that instead of only the last
+couple getting the prize, as is generally done&mdash;every couple, as soon as
+its number was called and it left the floor, went over to a big
+chimney-top, with a proverbially jolly 'Santa' peering out of it. There
+Santa gave to each one a little gift, such as a whistle, a stick of
+candy, or a jolly little rattle. Then, after more dancing, refreshments
+were served by gaily garbed Junior waitresses. After which the dancing
+continued until the merry Community Club Christmas dance was entirely
+over."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Already I have touched upon the annual vacation of the Macy worker&mdash;one
+week with pay after eight months continuous employment, two weeks after
+two years, three weeks after five years, and a month after twenty-five
+years of service. A charming retreat among the hills of Sullivan County,
+eighty-seven miles from New York and, through the foresight of the
+management of the store, purchased long ago, provides an ideal vacation
+spot for the Macy girls who wish to spend their holidays among truly
+rural surroundings. For this purpose a large farm house and a hundred
+acres of surrounding land were acquired by Macy's and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> more than fifty
+thousand dollars spent in enlarging the house, beautifying the grounds
+and otherwise making them suitable for their summertime uses. In
+addition to the big and immaculately white farm house there are three
+cottages upon the property. As many as sixty-five girls can be
+accommodated at a single time upon it.</p>
+
+<p>Three jumps or so from the main house and stretched out in front of it
+is a lake; a regular lake, if you please, big enough for boating and for
+bathing, although not so large that one of the keen-eyed chaperones may
+keep her weather eye on those of her charges whose tastes run toward
+water sports. In this Adamless Eden bloomers and middy blouses are <i>de
+rigueur</i>, and as the few restraints imposed are only those inspired by
+ordinary good sense, the girls experience the real joys of living.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>All of these activities and interests&mdash;and many, many more besides&mdash;are
+faithfully chronicled in the Macy house organ, <i>Sparks</i>. Here is a
+monthly magazine&mdash;of some sixteen pages, each measuring seven by ten
+inches&mdash;that in appearance alone would grace any newsstand, while its
+contents almost invariably bear out the attractiveness of its cover
+designs. Practically the entire publication is prepared by its staff,
+which, in turn, is composed of members of the Macy family.</p>
+
+<p>House organs, such as this, are, of course, no novelty in the American
+business world of today. There probably are not less than fifty
+department-stores alone which are now printing brisk contemporaries of
+<i>Sparks</i>. The internal publications of a house, such as Macy's,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> have
+long since come to be recognized as one of its most valuable media for
+the promotion of morale. It costs money, but it is money well expended.
+So says modern business. And modern business ought to know. For it has
+tested the results. And the house organ long since became one of the
+really valuable aides.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, in <i>Sparks</i> is not only a medium in which the Macy folks may
+come the better to know about one another, a bulletin board upon which
+the heads of the house may from time to time carry very direct and
+sincere messages to their big family, but a mouthpiece in which the
+embryo literary genius may become articulate. And, lest you be tempted
+to believe that I have permitted simile to carry me quite away from
+fact, let me show you a single instance&mdash;there are a number of others
+beside&mdash;in which a real literary genius has come to bloom underneath the
+great roof that looks down upon Herald Square:</p>
+
+<p>His pen name is Francis Carlin&mdash;but his real name, the one under which
+he entered Macy's, is James Francis Carlin MacDonnell. Of him <i>Current
+Opinion</i> but a year or two ago said: "The writer (Carlin) ... was until
+a few weeks ago a floorwalker in one of the big department-stores of New
+York City (Macy's) and was discovered by Padraic Colum. He had his book
+obscurely printed and it has been unobtainable at bookstores until
+recently.... It has the true Celtic quality. The dedication alone is
+worth the price of admission: 'It is here that the book begins and it is
+here, that a prayer is asked for the soul of the scribe who wrote it for
+the glory of God, the honor of Erin and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> the pleasure of the woman who
+came from both&mdash;his mother.'"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. MacDonnell has written two books: this first, <i>My Ireland</i>, and more
+recently the <i>Cairn of Stones</i>. That he has great talent is again
+attested by <i>The Boston Transcript</i> which said recently: "Mr. Carlin's
+Celtic poems, ballads and lyrics are nearer the fine perfection of the
+native poets belonging to the Celtic renaissance than those produced by
+any poet of Irish blood born in America."</p>
+
+<p>After which, who may now dare say that genius may not blossom in a
+department-store? And even were it not for the gaining glory of Carlin,
+the pages of any current issue of <i>Sparks</i> would show that there is more
+than a deal of artistic merit in the widespread ranks of the Macy
+family. The desire for self-expression is never stunted. And the pages
+of its avenue of expression are read by none more closely than the
+members of the family who hold the ownership of Macy's.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>And yet these men&mdash;the heads of the great merchandising house&mdash;are not
+only accessible to their business family through the printed word. They
+are not standoffish. On the contrary, they are most widely known
+throughout the store; most reachable, both within their offices and
+without. Take the single matter of grievances, for a most important
+instance: A Macy worker may feel that justice on some point or other is
+being denied him by a superior. In such a case he has immediate recourse
+to any one of three <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>expedients: he may take his case to the department
+of training, to the general manager of the store, or to one of the
+officers of the corporation. As a rule, however, the difficulty can be
+straightened out in the first of these avenues of appeal, which is an
+automatic clearing-house for all matters of personnel. The heads of this
+department have been chosen as much as anything for the sympathy which
+enables them to review any employee's case intelligently and fairly and
+for the influence that makes it possible for them to see at all times
+that full justice is being done. While the fact that the worker,
+himself, may take the matter to the general manager or even to one of
+the three members of the firm, is a practical guarantee against
+persecution of any sort.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="z272.jpg" id="z272.jpg"></a><img src="images/z272.jpg" width='700' height='486' alt="THE SUMMER HOME OF THE MACY FAMILY" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">THE SUMMER HOME OF THE MACY FAMILY</p>
+
+<p class="bold">Recreation in the modern store stands side by side with education in<br />
+perfecting the individual employee</p>
+
+<p>Just off the corner of the recreation room on the third floor is the
+private office of the assistant superintendent of training. Her title
+sounds rather formidable and does justice neither to her job nor to her
+personality: for in reality she combines the qualities of a charming
+hostess, an efficient manager and a mother confessor.</p>
+
+<p>In the Macy book of information for employees there is a paragraph under
+the heading, "Department of Training," which says: "It is the purpose of
+this department to interest itself in all the employees of this
+organization. Do not hesitate to go with your troubles to the assistant
+superintendent of training, whose duty it is to interest herself in you:
+both in the store and at your home. She will be glad to give you advice,
+both in business and in personal matters."</p>
+
+<p>And so she has her hands full, and sometimes her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> heart as well; for,
+among five thousand folk of every sort and kind, there are bound to be
+many perplexing personal problems and troubles, to which the very best
+kind of help is the kindly and disinterested advice of a sympathetic and
+understanding person. And when that person is a woman&mdash;a woman of rare
+tact&mdash;the problem is generally apt to approach its solution. Which makes
+for friendship, not merely between the worker and that woman, but
+between the worker and the store. And so still another rivet is clinched
+in the great morale bridge between the business machine and the human
+units that enable it to function so very well indeed. And the Macy
+spirit becomes an even more tangible thing.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>As one goes through the store he finds many evidences of the things that
+go to upbuild that spirit. It may be only a printed sign cautioning
+courtesy and cheerfulness, not merely between the store workers and its
+patrons, but between the members of the Macy family, themselves. "A
+smile with every package and a 'thank you' as good-bye," rings one. And
+remember that other, again more cautious: "In speaking say 'we' and
+'our,' not 'I' and 'mine.'" It may be the warm hand of friendship from
+the member of the reception committee to the new girl that comes to work
+under the Herald Square roof, or it may be any of the long-planned,
+coolly devised methods of social justice to the store employee. These
+last are never to be overlooked.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, three months after the day that a new employee first
+arrives to work at Macy's, membership<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> in the Macy Mutual Aid
+Association becomes automatic. In no small way it becomes a real part of
+his job. It is the object of the M. M. A. A. to provide and maintain a
+fund for the assistance of its members during sickness and of their
+families or dependents in case of death. Dues in this association are
+graded according to the worker's salary, consist of one per cent. of the
+salary up to thirty dollars; while the sick benefits are two-thirds of
+the salary, limited by a benefit of twenty dollars. The death benefits
+are five times the weekly salary, with a minimum of sixty dollars and a
+maximum of one hundred and fifty dollars.</p>
+
+<p>It is obvious that these dues do not of themselves pay the benefits. The
+house "chips in." Yet not through sympathy, but through one of the
+tenets of good business as we moderns have now begun to know it.</p>
+
+<p>"It would be poor business for me, indeed," said a silk manufacturer of
+Connecticut to me not long ago, "to let my people become sick. I want no
+germ diseases in my mills. Neither do I want the mills to cease their
+continuous operation. That, too, is poor business. And so the sickness
+that may cost my worker ten dollars may easily cost me twenty-five&mdash;in
+the stoppage of my plant, alone."</p>
+
+<p>The control of the Macy Mutual Aid Association is, moreover, vested
+solely in the hands of the store employees. An itemized statement of its
+receipts and its disbursements as well as its proceedings is posted each
+month on the store bulletin boards and printed in <i>Sparks</i>, so that
+every member of the organization may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> know its exact affairs. It
+decidedly does not work in the dark.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>I should be derelict, indeed, in regard to this whole question of health
+in modern industry&mdash;and of the particular modern industry of which this
+book treats&mdash;if I neglected in these pages that corner of the high-set
+eighth floor&mdash;flooded by sunshine during the greater part of each
+pleasant day&mdash;where sits the Macy hospital, conducted by the Macy Mutual
+Aid Association. It is, of course, solely an emergency hospital, yet one
+where doctors, nurses, dentists and a chiropodist are constantly on
+duty. Three doctors&mdash;two men and one woman&mdash;consult with and prescribe
+for the patients, two dentists look after their teeth, and a chiropodist
+takes care of that prime asset to all salespeople&mdash;the feet. Those
+members of the hospital staff are professional men and women of the
+first rank and they work with the best and latest equipment. Although
+the emergency hospital is primarily for the services of the store
+workers it stands also at the service of any one who may come into the
+building and need its services. For instance, in case a customer becomes
+ill, a wheelchair is sent, and he or she, as the case may be, is taken
+to the hospital for immediate restorative treatment.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>One or two final phases of this family life upon a huge scale in the
+very heart of New York and I am done with it. Thrift, in the Macy
+category of the making of a good worker, comes only next to good health.
+Under that same widespread roof there is a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> savings bank for the sole
+use of Macy folk. Any amount from five cents upward is accepted as a
+deposit and the fact that good use is made of this constant incentive to
+thrift is evidenced by the continued and prosperous operation of the
+institution. It has not been necessary to organize it as a full-fledged
+savings bank. At the end of each day it transfers its funds, by means of
+a special messenger, to one of the largest of New York savings banks
+which handles the accounts directly. The law does not permit a savings
+bank in the State of New York to open branches&mdash;else that would have
+been done at Macy's long ago. The messenger method was the only feasible
+substitute.</p>
+
+<p>Believing that even the most provident may occasionally have good
+reasons, indeed, for wishing to borrow money, the heads of the house
+have set aside a permanent fund as a loan reserve for the Macy folk. Any
+one who has been in the store's employ for at least three months may,
+upon advancing even ordinarily satisfactory reasons, borrow from this
+fund. The limit is a sum which can be repaid in ten weekly installments.
+No security is required nor is any interest charged. The employee is
+bound by nothing but his honor.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>That sixty-four years of continuous operation have established the
+commercial success of Macy's should be patent to you by this time. But
+now that you have known of the present-day family that dwells beneath
+its roof, you may ask: Has this policy toward its personnel worked out
+in hard practice? The question is indeed a fair one. To carry it still
+further, is this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> machine of modern business humanized and inspired in
+fact as well as in theory? One cannot help but think of the machine.
+Machines <i>are</i> hard. Generally they are fabricated in that hardest of
+all metals&mdash;steel. Can steel be warmed and tempered? Can the fact be
+recognized that the units of the Macy store are human and warm; and not
+steel and cold?</p>
+
+<p>I think so. I imagine that you would have the answer to all these
+questions if you could talk for a little time with Jimmie Woods, whom we
+saw, but a short time hence, as a push-cart horse for the early Macy's
+and who has come today to be the assistant superintendent of the store's
+delivery department. His new job requires much more push than that
+old-time one. As a caption-line in a recent issue of <i>Sparks</i> aptly
+said: "Jimmie Woods delivers the goods." Metaphorically speaking, the
+house of Macy does the same thing. And at no point more than in its
+treatment of its human factors.</p>
+
+<p>The day was not so very long ago when the life of a salesperson, even in
+a New York store of the better class, was not a particularly enviable
+thing. We saw, when we discussed the earlier Macy's, the long hours and
+the low wages of the rank and file of the organization. These things
+have changed today&mdash;in all department-stores that are worthy of the
+name. Public opinion was partly responsible for the change. But I think
+quite as large a factor was the realization that gradually was forced
+upon the minds of the merchants themselves that the old methods were
+poor business methods. Macy's knows that today. We have seen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> the man
+who came to New York fifteen years ago with eleven dollars and a
+suitcase come to a high-salaried position with the house today; the
+retail furniture salesman earning over six thousand dollars a year, the
+twenty-five buyers at ten thousand a year and upward, as well as those
+at twenty-five thousand a year and upward. And we know that every one of
+these men and women have been the product of the Macy organization&mdash;from
+the moment that they began at the very bottom of the ladder.</p>
+
+<p>And, lest you still think I befog the question, permit me to add that
+the minimum weekly wage of the woman employee in Macy's today is $14.00;
+and the average pay&mdash;apart from that of the executives and
+sub-executives&mdash;the men and women who, in the store's own nomenclature,
+are classed as "specials" and exempted from the time-disc record of
+their comings and their goings&mdash;is $25.00.</p>
+
+<p>Have I now answered your question fairly? If still you wobble and are
+uncertain, permit me to call your attention to the service records of
+the store. They speak more eloquently than aught else can of the loyalty
+and the interest of its workers. Qualities such as these are not
+generated under bad working practices of any sort.</p>
+
+<p>The records tell&mdash;and tell accurately, as well as eloquently. A Macy man
+was recently retired on a pension&mdash;the store's list of pensioners runs
+to a considerable length&mdash;after a round half-century of service. Others
+will soon follow in his footsteps. There are today upon the rolls
+ninety-two men and women who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> have been with it for more than
+twenty-five years. In the delivery department alone there are
+twenty-three men who have records of twenty years or more; and of these
+there are three who have been there more than forty years. Three hundred
+members of the Macy family have records of fifteen years or over,
+fifteen hundred have been with it upwards of five years and&mdash;despite the
+recent after-the-war difficulties of maintaining labor morale and
+organization&mdash;only about one-quarter of the force have come within the
+twelvemonth. The labor turnover in Macy's is low indeed&mdash;and constantly
+is growing lower.</p>
+
+<p>These figures, it seems to me, are the surest indication that the
+store's workers are treated fairly. Moreover, they alone show clearly
+the workings of its announced policy to give its own people every
+possible opportunity to grow within its ranks. In fact, no man or woman
+can stand still long at Macy's and continue to hold his or her job.
+Progress is a very necessary requisite there. And in order that progress
+may be recognized, steadily and fairly, system comes in once again to
+stabilize a very natural phase of human development. As the Macy
+employee shows new capabilities or additional industry, recommendations
+for increases in his remuneration are made by his department manager to
+a salary committee, appointed for this sole purpose. Periodically this
+committee receives a list of all the store folk who have not received an
+increase for a period of six months. The list is carefully reviewed and,
+whenever and wherever it can be justified, the pay envelope of the
+employee is fattened.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span></p><p>Macy's is, after all, a very human institution. The machine may be
+steel-like, but it is not steel. It is flesh and blood and human
+understanding. I sometimes think of it as a country town, rather than as
+a family&mdash;one of those nice, old-fashioned sorts of country towns, where
+most of the residents know one another, where there is an efficient
+governing body and where the community spirit is one of the strongest
+factors in its progress. Being human it is fallible, being fallible it
+still has something for which to work; and in fulfilling this obligation
+of work it is carrying out its destiny.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span><i>Tomorrow</i></span></h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>I. In Which Macy's Prepares to Build Anew</span></h2>
+
+<p>Yesterday, when Milady of Manhattan went for her shopping along the
+tree-lined reaches of Fourteenth Street, and found her way into that
+perennially fascinating shop at the corner of Sixth Avenue which
+specialized in its ribbons and its gloves and its rare exotic imported
+perfumes, she dreamed but little, if indeed she dreamed at all, of a
+Macy's that some day should stand intrenched at Herald Square and
+embrace a whole block-front of Broadway. Today Milady, finding her way
+into that small triangular "Square" in the very heart of
+Manhattan&mdash;still on the sharp lookout for ribbons and gloves and rare
+exotic perfumes&mdash;and Heaven only knows what else beside&mdash;may little
+dream of the changes that a tomorrow&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Tomorrow&mdash;what business has a book such as this to be talking of
+tomorrow; a vague, fantastic thing that only fools may seek to interpret
+in advance?</p>
+
+<p>We have seen between these covers quite a number of things&mdash;some of them
+passing odd things&mdash;yet classified among the factors of good business,
+according to all of its modern definitions. And to them we shall now add
+another&mdash;the understanding and the correct interpretation of tomorrow. I
+think that when I depicted Mr. Macy standing with his daughter,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>
+Florence, at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway half a
+century ago and explaining how there would be the business center of New
+York fifty years hence, I called attention to the sharp commercial fact
+that a great machine of modern business goes ahead quite as much upon
+the vision and the foresight of the men that guide it as upon their
+prudence. Which means in still another way, the proper understanding of
+tomorrows. And that understanding today is quite as much an asset of
+Macy's as its real estate, its cash balances in the banks, or the
+millions of dollars standing in the stock upon its shelves.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>More than a decade ago the big store in Herald Square first began to
+feel its own growing pains. The fact that ten years before that it had
+been planned as the largest single department-store building in the
+United States, if not in the entire world, availed nothing when business
+came in even greater measure than the most far-sighted of its planners
+had dared to dream. Within three or four years after the time that the
+caravans of trucks and drays had moved Macy's the mile uptown from the
+old store to the new, changes were under way in the new building,
+changes seeking to make an economy of space here, another economy
+there&mdash;everywhere that an odd corner could be utilized to the better
+advantage of the store and its patrons, it was at once so used. Finally
+it became necessary to abandon the exhibition hall that was originally
+located on the ninth floor and thrust that great space into one of the
+larger non-selling departments of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>enterprise; and two or three
+years later an entire extra floor was added atop of the big
+building&mdash;adding a goodly ten per cent. to its million square feet of
+floor space already existing.</p>
+
+<p>Yet even these changes could not solve the final problem. Macy's still
+refused to stay put. Its growth was relentless, unending. Each fresh
+provision made for its expansion was quickly swallowed up, with the
+result that the proprietors of the store finally faced the inevitable:
+the need of making a real addition to their plant, not a series of
+picayune little extensions, but one fine, sweeping move which should be
+as distinct a step forward in Macy progress as the mighty hegira that
+occurred when the store moved north from Fourteenth Street to
+Thirty-fourth&mdash;a little more than eighteen years ago.</p>
+
+<p>And, facing the inevitable, Macy's quickly made up its mind. It never
+has been noted for any particular hesitancy. It decided to step ahead.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Forecasting tomorrow in New York is not, after all, so vast a task as it
+might seem to be at a careless first glance. That is, if you do not put
+your tomorrow too far ahead&mdash;say more than ten or a dozen years at the
+most. I am perfectly willing to sit in these beginning days of 1922 and
+to assert that to attempt to forecast 1952 or even 1942 is not a
+particularly alluring pastime&mdash;if one has any real desire for accuracy.
+But 1932 is not so difficult. It is the business of skilled experts to
+interpret 1932 in 1922; a business which incidentally is rendered vastly
+easier in New York today<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> than it was ten years ago by two hard and
+settled facts&mdash;the one, the wonderfully efficient new zoning plan of the
+city, and the other, the construction of the Pennsylvania Railroad
+Station on Seventh and Eighth Avenues, from Thirty-first to Thirty-third
+Streets.</p>
+
+<p>The first of these factors should hold the strictly commercial
+development of the city&mdash;save for local outlying hubs or centers&mdash;south
+of Fifty-ninth Street. The block-a-year uptown movement of Manhattan for
+whole decades past has finally been halted; and halted effectually.
+Central Park has of course proved no little barrier in fixing
+Fifty-ninth Street as the arbitrary point of stoppage. But the zoning
+law, protecting the fine residence streets north of that point, and the
+Pennsylvania Station are also factors not to be overlooked.</p>
+
+<p>True it is that at the very moment that these paragraphs are being
+written whole groups of new business buildings are being opened, in
+Fifty-seventh, Fifty-eighth and Fifty-ninth Streets, in the center of
+Manhattan. But other and bigger buildings are going up in the
+cross-streets far to the south of these. Count that much for the
+Pennsylvania Station. For it, and it alone, has proved the salvation of
+Thirty-fourth Street. Macy's, Altman's, McCreery's, the Waldorf-Astoria,
+the Hotel McAlpin&mdash;none of these alone nor all of them together&mdash;might
+have been able to save Thirty-fourth Street from becoming another
+Fourteenth, or another Twenty-third&mdash;a dull, wide thoroughfare given
+almost entirely in its later days to wholesale trade of one sort or
+another.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span></p><p>The Pennsylvania Station could do, and did do, the trick. Opened in
+1910&mdash;but eight years after Macy's came first to Thirty-fourth Street
+and that brisk thoroughfare of today was in the very youth of its
+prosperity&mdash;the traffic which it handled day by day and month by month
+at that time was more than doubled in 1920. Not only has the business of
+the parent road that occupies it practically doubled in that decade, but
+the inclusion of the important through trains of the Baltimore &amp; Ohio
+and the Lehigh Valley Railroads, to say nothing of the traffic of the
+huge suburban Long Island system increasing by leaps and bounds each
+twelvemonth, has begun at last to tax the facilities of a structure
+seemingly far too big ever to be severely taxed. In recent months the
+cementing of a closer traffic alliance between the New Haven and the
+Pennsylvania systems renders it a foregone conclusion that more and more
+of the through trains from New England will be brought to the big
+white-pillared station in Seventh Avenue.</p>
+
+<p>You cannot down a street on which there stands a city gateway,
+particularly if the city gateway be one through which there sweeps all
+the way from fifty to sixty thousand folk a day. Thirty-fourth Street
+cannot be downed. Remember that, if you will. It will not be compelled
+to share the rather bitter fate of its former wide-set compeers just to
+the south. This much is known today.</p>
+
+<p>And being known, it settles forever even the possibility of Macy's
+moving uptown once again. It, too, is fixed. It has cast its die with
+the street called <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>Thirty-fourth and with Thirty-fourth it is going to
+remain. So Macy's buys the realty to the west of its present building
+and prepares thereon to erect, in connection with its present edifice, a
+great new store building&mdash;in ground space one hundred and twenty-five by
+two hundred feet&mdash;in height, nineteen full floors above the street (and
+two basements beneath)&mdash;in all, some 500,000 square feet of floor-space
+or close to fifty per cent. added to the 1,100,000 square feet of the
+present store.</p>
+
+<p>Offhand, it would seem to be a comparatively easy matter for the
+proprietors of a store, such as Macy's, to go to their architect and say
+to him:</p>
+
+<p>"Here is a fine plot, one hundred and twenty-five feet by two hundred.
+We want you to design and build for us upon it a modern retail
+building&mdash;high enough to provide all necessary facilities and scientific
+enough to bring it not merely abreast of other stores across the land,
+but a good long jump ahead of them."</p>
+
+<p>After which the architect would call for his young men and their
+draughting-boards and proceed, upon white paper, to erect his
+department-store.</p>
+
+<p>But his problem in this case is not white paper&mdash;at least white paper
+undefiled. The real problem is a perfectly good store building at the
+east end of the Macy plot&mdash;a building far too good and far too modern to
+be "scrapped"&mdash;in any recognized sense of the word. It was built to last
+all the way from half a century to a full century and its owners have
+not the slightest intention of pulling it down. It must remain the chief
+front of the enlarged Macy store. The caryatides<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> upon either side of
+its main doors, the red star that surmounts them, must continue to look
+down into busy Broadway, as they have been looking for nearly two
+decades past.</p>
+
+<p>It happens, too, that the store itself was never designed for extensions
+toward the west. In the conception of its original architect there was a
+distinct section set out at the west end of the present building for
+purely service and non-selling purposes. These included, upon the
+ground-floor, the great tunnel and merchandise unloading docks for
+incoming trucks, similar ones for the outgoing merchandise, freight
+elevators a-plenty; and in between them and through them a truly vast
+variety of working provision, shops, offices, school and comfort rooms,
+and the like. A good feature, this section&mdash;which occupies almost the
+exact site of the former Koster &amp; Bial Theater&mdash;but tremendously in the
+way when one comes to consider the extension of the store toward the
+west.</p>
+
+<p>A final factor of this particular reconstruction problem&mdash;and perhaps
+the greatest of all&mdash;lies in the fact that it must be carried forward
+while the store is doing its regular business. Even when the peak load
+of its traffic is reached&mdash;those fearfully hard weeks that immediately
+precede the Christmas holiday&mdash;the workaday routine of Macy's must not
+be seriously disturbed. Which complicates vastly the architect's
+problem. It is one thing to design and to erect a store building whose
+tenant does not approach the structure with his wares for sale until the
+merchant has given his final release, and another&mdash;infinitely
+harder&mdash;thing to build,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> and build efficiently, as business goes forward
+all the while. The machine as it grinds must be rebuilded. And all the
+while it must lose none of its efficiency.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Yet, when all is said and done, an architect's life is made up of a
+number of things of this sort. And the associated architects of the new
+Macy store&mdash;Messrs. Robert D. Kohn and William S. Holden&mdash;have not
+permitted the overwhelming problem of its reconstruction to fill them
+with anything even remotely approaching a state of panic. For that is
+not an architect's way.</p>
+
+<p>They have, from the beginning, come toward the big problem quietly,
+sanely and efficiently. At the very beginning and in company with two of
+the officers of the corporation they went upon an extended trip through
+the more modern department-stores across the land. Here, there,
+everywhere, they found features worth noting and collating. When they
+were done with their journeys they had, as a foundation for their
+studies upon the new Macy store, a sort of standardized practice of most
+of its fellows across the land.</p>
+
+<p>This preliminary completed, the engineering member of the partnership,
+Mr. Holden, began an intensive study of the fundamental factors of the
+business machine that he was to enlarge. To begin with there was its
+traffic&mdash;divided, as we have seen in earlier chapters, into three great
+and fairly distinct avenues: the merchandise, the shoppers who come to
+purchase it, and the employees who wait upon their needs.</p>
+
+<p>It is fairly essential that these three streams of traffic be kept
+separate, save at such points where, for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> conduct of the business,
+they must be brought together.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, was a real opportunity for study. Mr. Holden began with the
+traffic streams of the shoppers.</p>
+
+<p>Obviously, and despite the growing importance and activity of the
+Pennsylvania Station, to say nothing of the west side subway, which runs
+down Seventh Avenue in front of it, the main traffic streams of shoppers
+must continue to come into Macy's from Broadway. The star of Broadway is
+even more firmly set in the heavens of New York than that of
+Thirty-fourth Street.</p>
+
+<p>These main traffic streams within the store are, then, roughly speaking,
+three in number; one comes from the northeast corner&mdash;at Thirty-fifth
+Street&mdash;another from the southeast corner at Thirty-fourth Street&mdash;the
+third still shows a decided fondness for the impressive center doors
+upon Broadway. Within the store they unite and then separate into a
+variety of smaller currents. A goodly portion of these violate all the
+similes of streams and proceed upstairs at the rate of about 10,300 folk
+an hour at the busiest times of busy days. And there are an
+astonishingly large number of these times. Of these 10,300, about 7,400
+will ascend upon the great escalator, which reaches up into the sixth,
+or last selling floor, of the present store.</p>
+
+<p>When this escalator was first built, eighteen years ago, it was looked
+upon as hardly less than a transportation marvel. Every similar device
+that had preceded it was known as a single-file moving-stairway, with
+the capacity estimated at sixty persons a minute, or 3,600 an hour. By
+making its escalator double-file, Macy's not only slightly more than
+doubled its capacity but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> rendered it the full equivalent of at least
+twenty-five passenger elevators of the largest size.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The man whose business it is to have a sort of first-hand acquaintance
+with 1932 said that by that year Macy's would need to take close to
+twenty thousand folk an hour to its upper floors. He was not only
+estimating upon the growth of New York, but upon the growth of the store
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>"You will have to add another of the double escalators," said he, "that
+will bring your lifting capacity upon the two moving stairways up to
+almost fifteen thousand persons an hour."</p>
+
+<p>An elevator of modern size and speed in a department-store with seven or
+eight selling floors ought to lift two hundred and forty persons an
+hour. This, as you can quickly find out for yourself, means that there
+will be needed for the new store but twenty passenger elevators to make
+good that deficit between increased escalator capacity and the total
+number of folk to be carried upstairs. And this, in itself, is a most
+moderate increase. The store already has fourteen modern passenger
+elevators. Credit this much, if you will, to the escalator.</p>
+
+<p>So it goes, then, that the new Macy's will have a second double-file
+escalator on the opposite side of the main aisle, which is the store's
+own Broadway, and in the same relative relation to it. It will run as
+far as the fourth floor which in the new scheme of Macy things is to be
+devoted to the important business of toy selling.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span></p><p>What goes up must come down. Shoppers are no exception to this old
+rule. If you still think that they are, stand late some busy afternoon
+at the main stair of Macy's and watch them descend. They frequently come
+at the rate of one hundred to the minute. And yet this is but a single
+stair!</p>
+
+<p>It is neither practical nor modern greatly to increase stairway capacity
+in remodeling Macy's and so the question of a descending escalator
+thrusts itself upon the architects' attention. Despite a certain
+old-fashioned prejudice against it on the part of some old-fashioned New
+Yorkers, a descending escalator is not only practicable but entirely
+safe. Otherwise Macy's would not even consider its installation. The
+store planning experts went out to Chicago a few months ago, however,
+and into a great retail establishment there which boasts twelve selling
+floors. Escalators were its one salvation&mdash;descending, as well as
+ascending. The Macy party saw old ladies, women with children in their
+arms&mdash;everyone who walked, save only those walking upon crutches, using
+this quick and constant method of descent. They found the same devices
+in Boston&mdash;in subway stations as well as department-stores&mdash;and being
+used with equal facility. Straightway they decided that the New York
+shopper was neither more timid nor more reluctant to use a new idea than
+was her Boston or her Chicago sister. A descending escalator was placed
+in the plans for the new Macy's&mdash;for the use of the store's patrons.</p>
+
+<p>Still another ascending and descending escalator; this time for the
+store's own family. Remember that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> here is a second stream, whose prompt
+and efficient handling is quite as important as that of the shoppers.
+The broad stair in Thirty-fourth Street at which the majority of the
+family arrives, between eight-thirty and eight-forty-five of the
+business morning, is frequently choked with the rush of incoming
+employees. It will never be choked once the new Macy's is done. For then
+the workers will be handled in great volume upon a double escalator, not
+merely double-file, but double in the sense that ascent and descent are
+handled simultaneously and in compact space, very much as the double
+stairways that are installed in modern school-houses and industrial
+plants.</p>
+
+<p>In the enlarged building the locker rooms and the other facilities of
+the arrival of the store's employees will be placed upon the second
+floor and the first and second mezzanines; retained from the present
+plan, but very greatly enlarged. The Macy worker comes to them by means
+of the escalator, quickly and easily, and in a similar fashion ascends
+or descends to his or her department. It sounds simple and easy but it
+is not quite so easy when one comes to plan for a maximum of 8,800
+employees&mdash;in 1932.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>A third traffic stream remains for our consideration&mdash;and the
+architect's. In many respects it is the most difficult. Human beings, to
+a large extent at least, can move themselves. Goods cannot. Yet
+obviously the great stream of merchandise into the building and then out
+again must never be permitted to clog its arteries&mdash;not for a day, nor
+even for an hour. This means that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> there must be not only plenty of
+channels and conduits for it, but ample reservoir space as well. Which,
+being translated, means of course generous warehousing rooms, of one
+sort or another.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it would be well before we come to the ingenious plans for
+making this inanimate stream most animate indeed, to consider the
+general plan of Macy's as it will be after its structural renaissance.
+The exterior of the present great building will remain practically
+unchanged. Just back of it and to the west of it on the new plot, one
+hundred and twenty-five feet in depth in both Thirty-fourth and
+Thirty-fifth Streets, and extending the full two hundred feet between
+them, will be erected a new steel and concrete building, harmonizing in
+its fa&ccedil;ade and of the most modern type of construction; as we have
+already seen, nineteen stories in height with two sub-basements in
+addition. The first ten stories of this structure, at the exact floor
+levels of the old, will be thrown into the existing building and the
+lower seven of them used for selling purposes. The uppermost three
+stories of the combined building&mdash;covering the entire Macy site&mdash;will be
+used, as we shall see in a moment or two, for the reception and the
+warehousing of the merchandise, and other non-selling activities of the
+store.</p>
+
+<p>The nine stories of the new addition which will rise tower-like above
+the parent building are destined to be used entirely for non-selling
+functions. Thus from the architects' plans we see the executive and
+financial offices, including that of advertising upon the thirteenth and
+the fifteenth floors of this super-cupola;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> and the store's own great
+laundry upon the high nineteenth. The department of training and the
+bureau of planning, with an assembly room, will share the sixteenth. The
+more purely recreational features, however, the Men's Club and the
+Community Club and the lounging rooms and library, are placed as low as
+the accessible eighth floor. The general manager's and employment
+offices will be as low as the second mezzanine&mdash;for obvious reasons of
+convenience.</p>
+
+<p>None of these departments will be hampered for a long time to come, as
+they have been hampered for a number of years past, by a fearful lack of
+elbow room. The new plans have provided for abundant facilities of this
+and every other sort. The employees' cafeterias also are to go into the
+new section&mdash;also upon the eighth, or public restaurant floor. They will
+be greatly enlarged over their present capacity.</p>
+
+<p>These non-selling facilities are given their own elevator service from
+the street; a separate and distinct entrance there. The purpose of this
+last quickly becomes evident. There are many occasions&mdash;nights and
+Sundays even&mdash;when some or all of the recreation facilities are in use
+far beyond the regular store hours. Access to them, entirely free and
+separate from the store itself, is an enormous working convenience, and
+the new Macy's has been planned to be filled with working conveniences.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The elevator as well as the escalator will play a vastly important part
+in the fabrication of the new Macy's. The one has by no means been
+overshadowed by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> growing importance of the other. There are to be in
+all fifty-six elevators, of one type or another, in the reconstructed
+building. Of all these none is more interesting than the ingenious lifts
+by which whole motor trucks, laden as well as empty, are carried into
+the structure, up eleven floors to the merchandising reception rooms and
+down into the basement and sub-basement for filling for the city
+delivery.</p>
+
+<p>Now are we back again to the handling of that merchandise stream which
+we first began to consider but a moment ago. At the beginning we can
+make assertion that in the entire history of retail selling no more
+ingenious scheme has been devised for the orderly and rapid movement of
+goods in and out of a department-store.</p>
+
+<p>This flow is kept normal and downward by the simple process of first
+taking the loaded incoming trucks up to the eleventh floor of the
+building for unloading. In the present store&mdash;as well as in a good many
+other stores&mdash;a great amount of immensely valuable ground floor space is
+given over to the various functions of receiving and distributing
+merchandise. We have seen long ago how a modern store values this ground
+floor space. For instance, in relation to the value of, let us say, the
+third floor, it is about as ten to one.</p>
+
+<p>Neither does Macy's propose to clutter the sidewalk frontage of even the
+least important of its frontage streets&mdash;Thirty-fifth Street&mdash;by long
+lines of motor trucks or drays, receiving or discharging goods. In fact
+this sort of thing has become practically impossible in the really
+important cities of the America of today.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> If municipal ordinance
+permits it, public sentiment rarely does. And the keen merchant of
+today&mdash;to say nothing of tomorrow&mdash;never ignores public sentiment.</p>
+
+<p>So, to the eleventh floor the motor trucks must go&mdash;on two huge
+high-speed freight elevators which open directly into Thirty-fifth
+Street. Our horseless age makes this possible. The modern architect,
+planning for the congested heart of the island of Manhattan, can indeed
+and reverently thank God for the coming of the gasoline engine and the
+electric storage battery&mdash;to say nothing of the engineers who helped to
+make them possible.</p>
+
+<p>Upon that eleventh floor there will extend, for the full width of the
+building, a giant quay, or high-level platform, with its stout floor at
+the exact level of the floors of the standardized motor trucks of Macy's
+(the comparatively small proportion of "foreign" or outside vehicles
+that bring merchandise to the store are to be unloaded at the
+Thirty-fifth Street doorways and not admitted within the building). The
+unloading under the present well-developed system is a short matter; the
+trucks may quickly be despatched back to the street once again; while
+the refuse and debris of the packers goes to appropriate bins behind
+them.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Through chutes and sliding-ways the merchandise descends a single floor
+to the great tenth story&mdash;extending through both the present building
+and the new one to come. Here it will be quickly classified and placed
+upon a conveyor which moves at the level of and between the two sides of
+a double table some five or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> six hundred feet in length which will
+extend the greater part of the length of the enlarged store. From this
+center table&mdash;the backbone of the whole scheme of this particular
+distribution&mdash;will extend in parallel aisles at right angles to it,
+whole hundreds of bins and shelves and compartments. The entire
+arrangement will resemble nothing so much as a huge double gridiron,
+with many tiny interstices.</p>
+
+<p>Now do you begin to see the operation of this scheme? If not, let me
+endeavor to make it more clear to you. This miniature and silent city,
+whose straight and regular streets are lined in turn with miniature
+apartment houses of merchandise, is zoned&mdash;into six great zones. Every
+selling department of the store&mdash;118 in the present one&mdash;is assigned to
+one or the other of these zones. There it keeps its reserve stock. It
+is, in truth, a reservoir.</p>
+
+<p>Now, see the plan function! The men's shoe department is out of a
+certain small part of its highly diversified stock. It sends a
+requisition up to its representative upon the tenth floor. It is a
+matter of minutes&mdash;almost of seconds&mdash;to locate the necessary cartons in
+the simplified and scientifically arranged compartments and shelves; a
+matter certainly of mere seconds to despatch them down to the selling
+department.</p>
+
+<p>For this, the second thrust of the goods-stream through the new Macy's,
+especial provisions have been made by the installation of six so-called
+utility units. Three of these are placed at equal intervals along the
+Thirty-fourth Street wall of the enlarged building;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> the other three at
+equal intervals upon its Thirty-fifth Street edge. Each unit consists of
+one elevator (large enough to hold two of the rolling-carts,
+standardized for the floor movement of merchandise through the aisles of
+the selling departments of the store), one small dummy elevator (for the
+handling of single packages of unusual size or type), and a spiral chute
+(this last for the despatch of sold goods).</p>
+
+<p>The selling-floor location of these utility units determines the zoning
+system of the warehouses on the tenth. There is a zone to each unit.
+While from that zone the requisitioned merchandise descends to the
+selling department which has asked for it by its own unit&mdash;which always
+is closest to it. Haul is reduced to a minimum. And system becomes
+simplicity.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>With the actual selling of the goods in the store that is to come we
+have no concern at this moment. It is quite enough to say that the
+methods and the ideals that have brought Macy selling up to its present
+point are to be continued there, in the main at least, although
+broadened and advanced as future necessity may dictate. But with the
+despatch of the goods once sold in the new store we have an intimate and
+personal interest.</p>
+
+<p>We have bought our pair of shoes. The financial end of the transaction
+is concluded. We have asked&mdash;as most of us ask&mdash;to have them delivered.
+Now follow their movement:</p>
+
+<p>The clerk takes them to the packer. This, however, is but a mere detail.
+It is their future course that interests us. And if we had eyes properly
+X-rayed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> and farseeing we might observe that from the hands of the
+packer they will go presently to the spiral descending chute of the
+nearest utility unit.</p>
+
+<p>Now we shall indeed need our new X-ray eyes. They follow the package for
+us&mdash;down the chute&mdash;with its gradients and curvatures so cleverly
+devised as to bring our purchase to the basement in just the right time
+and in just the right order&mdash;and into and upon the next stage of its
+progress.</p>
+
+<p>Steadily moving conveyor-belts along each outer wall of the building
+receive the constant droppage of the packages from the six spirals of
+the utility units. Together these two long belts converge upon a
+terminal, the revolving-table, in the terminology of the present store.
+And here our packages receive fresh personal attention.</p>
+
+<p>In the chapter upon Macy's delivery department we paid a careful
+attention to this revolving-table&mdash;which really is not a table at all
+and does not revolve. We saw it, then, as the very heart of the complex
+clearing-house of Macy distributions. It is, however, in itself a
+wonderfully simple thing, and yet when it was first installed it was
+regarded as nothing less than a triumph of efficiency.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately we do progress in this gray old world. Today we see how the
+revolving-table can be improved. For one thing, today we see it cramped
+and inelastic&mdash;no more than eight men may work at it at a single shift.
+Yet when it was built no one in Macy's dreamed that more than eight men
+would ever be required to work<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> at it at a single time. And even in
+times of great emergency, but eight!</p>
+
+<p>At the revolving-table in the new store, not eight but forty men may
+work simultaneously&mdash;when necessity dictates. The change has been
+effected by the simple process of elongating the "table." If a
+revolving-ring may be changed from round to square&mdash;and this was the
+very thing that Macy's accomplished in its present basement&mdash;why not
+from square to oblong? There is no negative answer to this question. And
+oblong it will become. And a present handling capacity of forty thousand
+packages a day can be increased to all the way from seventy-five
+thousand to ninety thousand.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the main principle changes not. It is only in detail that one sees
+one's shoes traveling outward on a different path in 1931 from that of
+1921. The great conveyors that lead from the revolving-table of today to
+the various delivery classifications as they are now made, will so lead
+in the new arrangement of things to such classifications as may then be
+made: only they will no longer be revolving-tables, but will in due time
+become the moving backbone of very long tables in the basement
+mezzanine, similar to the one which we saw extending the full length of
+the great tenth floor. And from those long tables, running the entire
+width of the building and up just under the basement ceiling, the
+sheet-writers will recognize their individual group of packages (by
+means of the clearly written numerals upon them), lift them off the
+slowly moving belt and make record of them, for the delivery
+department's own protection. After which, it is but the twist of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>
+wrist to thrust them into the bins, separately assigned to each driver's
+run.</p>
+
+<p>So go our shoes, or come, if you prefer to have it that way. Rapidly,
+orderly, systematically. System never departs from their handling. Even
+in the driver's own little compartment-bin there are four levels, or
+shelves, and each is inclined gently and floored with rollers so that he
+can pick out the packages for his run with greater facility. And in
+placing the packages upon each of these levels, the sheet-writer, well
+trained to his job, begins a rough process of assortment by streets.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Now we are come to wagon delivery, itself. Now we shall see why Macy's
+will not have to clutter Thirty-fourth Street with a long row of its
+delivery trucks. The length of such a row may easily be estimated when
+one realizes that sixty electric trucks will stand simultaneously at
+sixty loading stations in the new basement, with a reserve or reservoir
+space there for twenty-two more. Moreover, this basement will serve as a
+garage at night and on Sundays for these trucks. There is no fire risk
+whatsoever in the storage of an electrically driven motor vehicle. So
+the new Macy basement will not only be able to store this considerable
+fleet but to charge its batteries and make necessary light repairs upon
+it from time to time.</p>
+
+<p>Access to and from this basement&mdash;and the sub-basement&mdash;is by means of
+elevators; not only the two which we have seen reaching aloft to the
+eleventh floor, but two more just beside them for sole service between<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>
+the level and the two basements. As a matter of operating expediency it
+will be easy indeed to arrange in the early morning rush, or at any
+other time when emergency may so demand, to operate all four elevators
+in exclusive service between the street and basements. With such a
+battery Macy's can perform a genuine rapid-fire of discharging
+merchandise.</p>
+
+<p>To the mind of the novice there immediately flashes the thought: why not
+use ramps&mdash;long, sloping driveways&mdash;from the street level to the
+basement? Long ago the architects of the new building asked themselves
+that very question. It was, in this particular case at least, rather
+hard to answer. The main basement of Macy's is very high. To install a
+ramp&mdash;double-tracked, of course, for vehicles both ascending and
+descending&mdash;of any easy practical grade would therefore have required a
+great deal of valuable floor-space. So, for the moment, they dismissed
+the ramp idea for motor trucks and held to that of elevators. The Boston
+Store in Chicago solved the problem. It is the same store that has
+successfully installed descending escalators, floor upon floor.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the sub-basement of that Chicago store the Macy investigators saw
+thirty-two cars come, all inside of eight minutes; and all upon
+elevators. That settled the question for the big shop in Herald Square.
+Elevators it should have for this service, and elevators it will have,
+even for the big five-ton trucks that go into the deep sub-basement for
+the hampers for suburban delivery as well as large special packages.
+Furniture, however, as in the present store, will be both sold and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>
+packed and shipped from an upper floor of its own, the large truck
+elevators to the eleventh floor being also used for this purpose.</p>
+
+<p>The sub-basement of the new plan is in so many respects a replica of the
+main basement delivery service that it requires no special description
+here. It, too, has been designed, not only amply large enough for the
+present needs of Macy's, but for that mythical traffic of 1932, which we
+now know is really not mythical at all, but a matter of rather exact
+scientific reckoning.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Architects' drawings are indeed fascinating things; doubly fascinating
+when one comes to consider all the infinite thought and labor and
+patience which have entered into their fabrication. I shall not,
+however, carry you further into the details of the plans for the new
+Macy's. You now have seen enough to give you at least a fair idea of the
+main structure for the enlarged store. You have seen how carefully and
+how ingeniously the great main traffic streams through the huge edifice
+are to be carried&mdash;to be brought together, when they needs must be
+brought together, and kept apart when properly they should be kept
+apart. Add, in your own mind, to this fundamental structure, all of the
+refinements which you expect to find in the modern retail establishment
+today and you may begin to depict for yourself the Macy's that is to
+come&mdash;to construct for yourself at least a partial vision of the year
+1932 in Herald Square.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>II. L'Envoi</span></h2>
+
+<p>Yesterday Milady of Manhattan in her hoopskirt and crinoline; today
+Milady in thick furs above her knees and thin silk stockings and
+high-heeled pumps below them: tomorrow....</p>
+
+<p>Why will you persist in dragging in tomorrow? Is it not enough to know
+that tomorrow Milady of the great metropolis of the Americas will still
+be shopping? You may set tomorrow a year hence, twenty years hence,
+fifty years in the misty future that is to come upon us and still make
+that statement in perfect safety. And twenty years, fifty years, a
+hundred years hence, even, Macy's should still be in Herald Square ready
+to wait upon her needs and upon the needs of her men and children, too.</p>
+
+<p>To forecast far into the future is indeed dangerous. Only rash men
+undertake it. We know that 1932 is one thing, but that 1952 or even 1942
+is quite another one. A savant of uptown Manhattan, who has a nice
+facility for handling census figures, not long ago predicted that by
+1950 little old New York would hold within its boundaries sixteen
+million people. He may know. I don't. And you are privileged to take
+your guess&mdash;with one man's guess almost if not quite as good as
+another's.</p>
+
+<p>A New York of sixteen million souls is an alluring<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> picture, if a
+bewildering one, withal. It is a fairly bewildering town with its six
+million of today. But I have not the slightest doubt that Rowland Hussey
+Macy said the selfsame thing of the New York of six hundred and fifty
+thousand souls, to which he first came, away back there in 1858.</p>
+
+<p>And the Macy's of 1952, serving its fair and goodly portion of those
+sixteen million souls, is indeed an alluring picture, which you may best
+construct for yourself. The store, itself, does well when it plans so
+definitely for 1932. Nevertheless, before you finally close the pages of
+this book, I should like to have it record a final picture upon your
+mind. It is the picture of a really great store. It runs from Broadway
+to Seventh Avenue, perhaps all the way to Eighth. It begins at
+Thirty-fourth Street and runs north&mdash;one, two, possibly even three or
+four blocks, or goodly portions of them. It employs ten, twelve, fifteen
+thousand workers. There are a thousand motor trucks in its delivery
+service&mdash;and a hundred a&euml;roplanes as well. It has sixteen sub-stations,
+instead of six. Its own delivery limits run north to Peekskill and east
+to Bridgeport and to Huntington and west and south through at least half
+of New Jersey.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, above all this new enterprise there still towers the high addition
+which 1923 saw completed and added to the edifice, with the huge and
+flaming word "MACY'S" emblazoned by white electricity upon the blackened
+skies of night, visible all the way from Seventh Avenue to the thickly
+peopled range of the Orange mountains.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span></p><p>"Macy's," whistles the small boy upon the North River ferryboat, who
+has traveled afar with his geography book. "Macy's! That's a regular
+Gibraltar of a store!"</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">THE END</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Romance of a Great Store, by Edward Hungerford
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+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's The Romance of a Great Store, by Edward Hungerford
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Romance of a Great Store
+
+Author: Edward Hungerford
+
+Illustrator: Vernon Howe Bailey
+
+Release Date: February 18, 2012 [EBook #38921]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF A GREAT STORE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ROMANCE OF A GREAT STORE
+
+[Illustration: THE NEW YORK TO WHICH MACY CAME--IN 1858
+
+Looking south from 42d Street--The old Reservoir and the Crystal Palace
+in the foreground]
+
+
+
+
+The Romance of a Great Store
+
+by Edward Hungerford
+
+Author of "The Personality of American Cities,"
+"The Modern Railroad," etc.
+
+Illustrated by Vernon Howe Bailey
+
+New York
+
+Robert M. McBride & Company
+1922
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & CO.
+
+_Printed in the United States of America_
+
+Published, 1922
+
+
+To the Men and Women of The Great Macy Family Whose Fidelity and
+Interest, Whose Enthusiasm and Ability Have Upbuilded A Lasting
+Institution of Worth in The Heart of a Vast City This Book is
+Affectionately Dedicated by its Author.
+
+E. H.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                         PAGE
+
+INTRODUCTION                                      ix
+
+
+_Yesterday_
+
+  I. THE ANCESTRAL BEGINNINGS OF MACY'S            3
+
+ II. THE NEW YORK THAT MACY FIRST SAW              7
+
+III. FOURTEENTH STREET DAYS                       31
+
+ IV. THE COMING OF ISIDOR AND NATHAN STRAUS       47
+
+  V. THE STORE TREKS UPTOWN                       63
+
+
+_Today_
+
+  I. A DAY IN A GREAT STORE                       87
+
+ II. ORGANIZATION IN A MODERN STORE              109
+
+III. BUYING TO SELL                              145
+
+ IV. DISPLAYING AND SELLING THE GOODS            163
+
+  V. DISTRIBUTING THE GOODS                      185
+
+ VI. THE MACY FAMILY                             201
+
+VII. THE FAMILY AT PLAY                          233
+
+
+_Tomorrow_
+
+  I. IN WHICH MACY'S PREPARES TO BUILD ANEW      255
+
+ II. L'ENVOI                                     279
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+The New York to Which Macy Came--in 1858      _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                 FACING PAGE
+
+The Beginnings of Macy's                                  18
+
+The Fourteenth Street Store of Other Days                 34
+
+The Herald Square of Ante-Macy Days                       66
+
+The Macy's of Today                                       82
+
+Where Milady of Manhattan Shops                          114
+
+The Science of Modern Salesmanship                       210
+
+The Summer Home of the Macy Family                       242
+
+
+
+
+Introduction
+
+
+"Caveat emptor," the Romans said, in their day.
+
+"Let the Buyer beware," we would read that phrase, today.
+
+For nearly four thousand years, perhaps longer, _caveat emptor_ ruled
+the hard world of barter. Yet for the past sixty years, or thereabouts,
+a new principle has come into merchandising. You may call it progress,
+call it idealism, call it ethics, call it what you will. I simply call
+it good business.
+
+_Caveat emptor_ has become a phrase thrust out of good merchandising. It
+is a pariah. The decent merchant of today despises it. On the contrary
+he prides himself upon the honor of his calling, upon the high value of
+his good name, untarnished. The man or the woman who comes into his
+store may come with the faith or the simplicity of the child. He or she
+may even be bereft of sight, itself--yet deal in faith and fearlessly.
+
+_Caveat emptor_ is indeed a dead phrase.
+
+How and whence came this murder of a commercial derelict?
+
+You may laugh and at first you may scoff, but the fact remains that the
+development of the department store as we know it in the United States
+today first began some sixty or sixty-five years ago. And almost
+coincidently began the development of a code of morals in merchandising
+such as was all but undreamed of in this land, at any rate up to a
+decade or two before the coming of the Civil War. Not that there were no
+honest merchants in those earlier days of the republic. Oh no, there was
+a plenty of them--men whose integrity and whose sincerity were as little
+to be doubted as are those same qualities in our best merchants of
+today. Only yesterday these honest men were in the minority. The moral
+code in merchandising was yet inchoate, unformed.
+
+It might remain unformed, intangible today if it had not been for the
+coming of the department store. The enormous consolidation and
+concentration that went to make these enterprises possible brought with
+them a competition--bitter and to the end unflinching--which hesitated
+at no legitimate means for the gaining of its end. But competition
+quickly found that the best means--the finest battle-sword--was honest
+commercial practice, and so girded that sword to its belt and bade
+_caveat emptor_ begone.
+
+The great department store around which these chapters are written
+assumes for itself, neither yesterday, today nor tomorrow, any monopoly
+of this virtue of commercial honesty. But it does assert, and will
+continue to assert that it was at least among the pioneers in the
+complete banishment of _caveat emptor_, that its founder--the man whose
+name it so proudly bears today--fought for these high principles when
+the fighting was at the hardest and the temptations to move in the other
+direction were most alluring.
+
+Of these principles you shall read in the oncoming chapters of this
+book. There are many, they are varied--in some respects they vary
+greatly from those upon which other and equally successful and equally
+honest merchandising establishments are today operated. Macy's has no
+quarrel with any of its competitors. It merely writes upon the record
+that, for itself, it is quite satisfied with the merchandising
+principles that its founder and the men who came after him saw fit to
+establish. Upon those the store has prospered--and prospered greatly.
+And because of such prosperity--social as well as commercial--because it
+feels that its selling principles are quite as valuable to its patrons
+as to the store itself, it has no intention of giving change to them.
+Macy's of today is like in soul and spirit to Macy's of yesterday;
+Macy's of tomorrow is planned to be like unto the Macy's of today--only
+vastly larger in its scope and influence.
+
+For the convenience of the reader this book has been divided into three
+great parts, or books. Time has formed the logical factor of division.
+Time, as in the theater, forms these three books, or acts--Yesterday,
+Today, Tomorrow. They move in sequence. The stage-hands are placing the
+setting for the New York of yesterday--the New York that already has
+begun to fade, far from the eyes of even the oldest of the humans who
+shall come to read these pages. It is a charming New York, this American
+city of the late 'fifties, the city whose ladies go shopping in
+hoopskirts and in crinoline. It has dignity, taste, bustle, enterprise.
+
+But anon of these. The stage is set. The director's foot comes stamping
+down upon the boards. The curtain rises. The first act begins.
+
+
+
+
+_Yesterday_
+
+
+
+
+I. The Ancestral Beginnings of Macy's
+
+
+Interwoven into the history of the ancient island of Nantucket are the
+names and annals of some of the earliest of our American families--the
+Coffins, the Eldredges, the Myricks, and the Macys. Their forbears came
+from England to America fully ten generations ago. They settled upon the
+remote and wind-swept isle and there to this day many of their
+descendants ply their vocations and have their homes.
+
+In the beginning the vocation of these settlers was found to lie almost
+invariably upon a single path; and that path led down to the sea. They
+were sea-faring folk, those early residents of Nantucket: God-fearing,
+simple of speech and of action, yet mentally keen and alert. And from
+them sprang the segment of a race which was soon to grow far beyond the
+narrow barriers of the little island and to spread its splendid
+enthusiasm and energy far into a newborn land.
+
+Among the very earliest of these Nantucket settlers was one Thomas Macy,
+who, from the beginning, took his fair place in the development of its
+fishing and its whaling industries. From him came a long line of
+descendants--a clean and sturdy record--and in the eighth generation of
+these there was born--on August 29, 1822--as the son of John and Eliza
+Myrick Macy, the man whose name chiefly concerns this book--Rowland
+Hussey Macy.
+
+The record of this young man's youth is not so consequential as to be
+worth the setting down in detail. It is enough perhaps to know that at
+the age of fifteen he followed the common Nantucket custom of those days
+and went away to sea; upon a whaling voyage which was to consume four
+long years before again he saw the belfried white spire of the South
+Church rising through the trees back of the harbor and which was to make
+him in fact as well as in name, Captain Macy.
+
+Three years later he married. He chose for his wife, Miss Louisa
+Houghton, of Fairlees, Vermont. Their pleasant married life continued
+for thirty-three years, until the day of Mr. Macy's death. Mrs. Macy
+lived for several years afterwards, dying in New York City in 1886. They
+had three children, one of whom, Mrs. James F. Sutton, the widow of the
+founder of the American Art Galleries in New York, still survives and is
+living at her suburban home in Westchester County.
+
+Such is the simple statistical record of the man who lived to be one of
+New York's great merchant princes, who, upon the simple foundations of
+good merchandising, of strength, integrity and initiative, upbuilded one
+of the great and most distinctive businesses of the greatest city of the
+two American continents. Back of it is another record--not so simple or
+so quickly told. It is the story of successes and of sorrows, of
+triumphs and of failures--but in the end of the final triumph of New
+England conscience and energy and vision. It is with this last story
+that this book has its beginning.
+
+
+It was not many moons after his marriage that young Macy started in
+business, in store-keeping in Boston. He was convinced that the sea was
+no calling for a married man, and, with the Yankee's native taste for
+trading, decided that the career of the merchant was the one that had
+the largest appeal to him. So he made immediate steps in that direction.
+
+The record of that early Boston store is meagre. It is enough, perhaps,
+to say here and now that it failed, and that if its collapse had really
+dismayed the young merchant, this book would not have been written. As
+it was, the failure seemed but to stir him toward renewed efforts. He
+stood in the back of his little store and flipped a coin. It was a habit
+of his in all periods of indecision.
+
+"Heads up, and I go north," said he. "Tails and next week I start
+south."
+
+Heads came. And Rowland Macy and his wife went north. They went to
+Haverhill and there upon the bank of the Merrimac he set up his second
+store. This venture was far more successful than the first. It
+prospered, if not in large degree, at least far enough to encourage its
+proprietor. But he did not cease regretting that the coin had not come
+tails-up. Then he would have gone to New York. For New York, he was
+convinced, was about to become the undisputed metropolis of the land.
+Already it was going ahead, by leaps and bounds. And men who slipped
+into it quickly and who possessed the right qualities of commercial
+ability would go ahead quickly. Rowland Macy was convinced of this.
+
+He was not a man who lost much time in vain repinings. To New York he
+would go. He suited action to thought, sold his Haverhill business at a
+fair profit, again bundled his wife and small family together and set
+out for the metropolis of the New World.
+
+
+
+
+II. The New York That Macy First Saw
+
+
+In 1858 New York was just beginning to come into its own. It was ceasing
+to be an overgrown town--half village, half city--and was attaining a
+real metropolitanism. It had already reached a population of 650,000
+persons, and was adding to that number at the rate of from twelve
+thousand to fifteen thousand annually. Its real and personal property
+was assessed at upward of $513,000,000. New building was going apace at
+a fearful rate. Already the town was fairly closely builded up to
+Forty-ninth Street, and was paved to Forty-second. Above it up on
+Manhattan Island were many suburban villages: Bloomingdale, where Mayor
+Fernando Wood had his residence, upon a plot about the size of the
+present crossing of Broadway and Seventy-second Street, Yorkville,
+Harlem and Manhattanville. To reach the first two of these communities
+one could take certain of the horse railroads. John Stephenson had
+perfected his horse-car and these modern equipages--how quaint and
+old-fashioned they would seem today--were already plying in Second,
+Third, Sixth, Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Slowly but surely they were
+displacing the omnibuses, which dated back more than half a century. A
+goodly number of these still remained, however; twenty-six lines
+employing in all 489 separate stages--New York certainly was a
+considerable town.
+
+To reach the more remote communities of Manhattan Island--Harlem or
+Manhattanville--one took the steam-cars: either the trains of the Hudson
+River Railroad in the little old station at Chambers Street and West
+Broadway, from which they proceeded up to the west side of the island
+and, as to this day, through a goodly portion of Tenth Avenue, or else
+the trains of the New York & Harlem, or the New York & New Haven, from
+their separate terminals back of the City Hall and Canal Street up
+through Fourth Avenue, the tunnel under Yorkville Hill and thence across
+the Harlem Plain to the river of the same name. A little later these
+railroads were to consolidate their terminals, in a huge block-square
+structure at Madison and Fourth Avenues, Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh
+Streets, the forerunner of the present Madison Square Garden; but the
+first of the three successive Grand Central Stations was not to come
+until 1871.
+
+Fifth Avenue, too, was just beginning to come into its own. Some of the
+handsome homes in the lower reaches of that thoroughfare and upon the
+northern edge of Washington Square which have been suffered to remain
+until this day had already been built and an exodus had begun to them
+from the older houses to the south. All of the churches were gone from
+down town with but a few exceptions, the most conspicuous of which were
+the two Episcopalian churches in Broadway--Trinity and St. Paul's--the
+Roman Catholic Church of St. Peter's in Barclay Street, St. George's in
+Beekman, the North Dutch in William, the Middle Dutch in Nassau and the
+Brick Presbyterian, also in Beekman Street. This last, in fact, had
+already been sold for secular purposes and had been abandoned. The
+congregation was building a new house up in the fields at Fifth Avenue
+and Thirty-eighth Street, a step which was regarded by its older members
+as extremely radical and precarious, to put it mildly. The ancient home
+of the Middle Dutch Reformed had also gone for secular purposes. In it
+was housed the New York Post Office, already a brisk place, which soon
+was to outgrow its overcrowded quarters and to expand into its ugly
+citadel at the apex of the City Hall Park.
+
+The two great fires--the one in 1833 and the other in 1845--had removed
+from the lower portions of the city many of their more ancient and
+unsightly structures. The rebuilding which had followed them gave to the
+growing town much larger structures of a finer and more dignified
+architecture. Six and seven story buildings were quite common. This
+represented the practical limitations of a generation which knew not
+elevators, although the new Fifth Avenue Hotel which already was being
+planned upon the site of the old Hippodrome, at Broadway and
+Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Streets, was soon to have the first of
+these contraptions that the world had ever seen.
+
+Gone, too, were other old landmarks of downtown--some of them in their
+day distinctly famous--the City Hall, the Union Hotel, the Tontine
+Coffee House, the Bridewell and the reservoir of the Manhattan Company
+in Chambers Street. The new Croton Works, with their wonderful
+aqueduct, the High Bridge, upon which it crossed the ravine of the
+Harlem, and the dual reservoirs at Forty-second Street and at
+Eighty-sixth, had rendered this last structure obsolete. The State
+Prison had disappeared from its former site at the foot of East
+Twenty-third Street. A new group of structures at Sing Sing had replaced
+the old upon the island of Manhattan.
+
+Even then the elegant New York was moving rapidly uptown. Union Square,
+still known, however, to older New Yorkers as Union Place, was the heart
+of its life and fashion. It was lined by the fine houses of the elect
+and two of the most superb hotels of the metropolis, the Brevoort and
+the Union Square, while the Clarendon, which was destined soon to house
+the young Prince of Wales, stood but a block away. At Irving Place and
+Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets had just been completed the new Academy
+of Music. New York at last had a real opera-house, with a stage and
+fittings large enough and adequate to present music-drama upon a scale
+equal to that of the larger European capitals. She had plenty of
+theaters, too: the Broadway, the Bowery, Laura Keene's, Niblo's Garden,
+and Wood & Christy's Negro Minstrels, chief amongst them. While down at
+the point where Chatham Street (now Park Row) debouched into Broadway,
+Barnum's Museum already stood, with its gay bannered front beckoning
+eagerly to the countrymen.
+
+And how the countrymen did flock into New York--in those serene and busy
+days before the coming of a tragic war. New York harbor was a busy
+place. For not all of them came by the well-filled trains of the three
+railroads that reached in upon Manhattan Island. There were
+sailing-ships and steamboats a plenty bumping their noses against the
+overcrowded piers of the growing city; ferries from Brooklyn and
+Williamsburgh and Jersey City and Hoboken and Astoria and Staten Island;
+steamboat lines down the harbor to Amboy and to Newark and to
+Elizabethtown; and up the Sound to Fall River, to Providence and to the
+Connecticut ports. But the finest steamers of all plied the Hudson.
+There the rivalry was keenest, the opportunities for profit apparently
+the greatest. And despite the fact that New York was already the port of
+many important ocean lines--the Cunard, the Collins, the Glasgow, the
+Havre, the Hamburg and the Panama steamers, for the fast-growing fame of
+the metropolis of the New World was already attracting great numbers of
+travelers from overseas--the fact also remains that when the _Daniel
+Drew_, of the Albany Night Line, was first built, in 1863, she exceeded
+in size and in passenger-carrying capacity any ocean liner plying in and
+out of the port of New York.
+
+So came the countrymen and the residents of the other smaller towns and
+cities of the land, along with many, many foreigners, to this new vortex
+of humanity. They found their way, not alone to the hotels of the Union
+Square district, but to such equally distinguished houses as the Astor,
+the Brevoort, the St. Nicholas, the Metropolitan, the New York. They
+went to the theaters and almost invariably they climbed the brown-stone
+spire of old Trinity, in order to drink in the view that it commanded:
+the wide sweep of busy city close at hand, the more distant ranges of
+the upper and lower harbors, the North and the East Rivers, Long Island,
+Staten Island, New Jersey and the western slopes of the Orange
+Mountains. And some, loving New York and realizing the fair
+opportunities that it offered, came to stay.
+
+
+In among this throng of folk who rushed into the town in 1858 there
+came--among those who came to stay--Rowland H. Macy. The partial success
+of his Haverhill store, to an extent overbalancing the initial failure
+in Boston, had brought him into the metropolis of America, the city of
+wider, if indeed not unlimited opportunity. In those days there were few
+large stores in New York; nothing to be in the least compared with its
+great department stores of today. One heard of its hotels, its churches,
+its theaters, its banks, but very little indeed of its mercantile
+establishments. They were, for the most part, very small and exceedingly
+individual. They were known as shops and well deserved that title. There
+were a few exceptions, of course: A. T. Stewart's--still on Broadway
+between Worth and Chambers Streets--Ridley's, Lord & Taylor's and John
+Daniell's in Grand Street (this last at Broadway), McNamee & Company's,
+Arnold, Constable & Co., McCreery's, Hearn's, and one or two others,
+perhaps, of particular distinction.
+
+It is hardly possible that Macy, as he found his way into these larger
+establishments, believed that he might ever in his own enterprise match
+their elegance and distinction. It is difficult to believe that in those
+very earliest days he had the vision of a department store. At any rate
+the extremely modest establishment which he opened at 204 Sixth Avenue,
+between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets, in conjunction with his
+brother-in-law, Samuel S. Houghton, devoted itself at first, and for a
+long time afterward, exclusively to the sale of fancy goods. For
+specializing was the fashion of that day and generation; John Daniell
+sold nothing but ribbons and trimmings then; Aiken laces, and Stewart's
+chiefly dress-goods.
+
+Yet Macy had vision. The department store idea must slowly have forced
+itself into his mind. For, five years later, we find his small business,
+originally on Sixth Avenue, just a door or two below Fourteenth Street,
+expanding so rapidly that he was forced to secure more room for it. And
+this despite the fact that not only was he two long blocks distant from
+Broadway but the particular corner which he had chosen for his store was
+known locally as unlucky--two or three other stores had gone bankrupt on
+it. Macy had no intention of going bankrupt. He added to his original
+shop the store at 62 West Fourteenth Street, at right angles to and
+connecting in the rear with it, and in this he installed a department of
+hats and millinery. He was beginning to come and come quickly--this
+country merchant to whom at first New York refused to extend either
+recognition or credit.
+
+Now was the complete department store idea fairly launched, for the
+first time in the history of America, if not in the entire world. Yet,
+when one came to fair and final analysis, it represented nothing else
+than the country-store of the small town or cross-roads greatly expanded
+in volume. And so, after all, it is barely possible that the canny New
+Englander may have had the germ of his surpassing idea implanted in his
+mind, a full decade or more before he had the opportunity to make use of
+it. Incidentally, it may be set down here, that Mr. Macy in the rapidly
+recurring trips to Paris which he found necessary to make in the
+interest of his business developed a great admiration for the Bon Marche
+of that city. He studied its methods carefully and adopted them whenever
+he found the opportunity.
+
+From hats to dress-goods--the addition of still another adjoining store
+was inevitable--came as a fairly natural sequence. And one finds the
+successful young merchant who had had the enterprise and the initiative
+to leave Broadway--supposedly the supreme shopping street of the New
+York of that day--laying in his stocks of alpaca, of black bombazine, of
+silks and muslins, sheetings and pillow-cases and all that with these
+go. The idea once born was adhered to. As it broadened it gained
+prosperity. And as a natural sequence there came gradually and with a
+further steady enlargement of the premises, jewelry, toilet-goods and
+the so-called Vienna goods. Toys were added in 1869, and gradually
+house-furnishing goods, confectionery, soda water, books and stationery,
+boys' clothing, ladies' underwear, crockery, glassware, silverware,
+boots and shoes, dress-goods, dressmaking, ready-to-wear clothing, and,
+in due time, a restaurant.
+
+For many years it was the only store in town to carry soaps and
+perfumes. This, of itself, brought to the store a clientele of its
+own--the most beautiful women of New York, among the most notable of
+them, Rose Eytinge, the actress, who was just then coming to the
+pinnacle of her fame.
+
+
+Mr. Macy, accompanied by his wife and daughter--the latter of whom is
+still alive at an advanced age--took up his residence at first over the
+store and then, a little later, in a small house in West Twelfth Street,
+within easy walking distance of his place of business. From this he
+afterward moved to a larger residence in West Forty-ninth Street. He was
+a man of sturdy build, of more than medium height and thick-set,
+extremely affable in manner. He wore a heavy beard, and an old employee
+of the store was wont to liken his appearance to that of the poet,
+Longfellow. His tendency toward black cigars and to appearing in the
+store in his shirt-sleeves did not heighten the resemblance, however.
+
+He was a man of almost indomitable will. Such a quality was quite as
+necessary for success in those days as in these. The modern ideas of
+beneficence and generosity to the employee were little dreamed of then.
+The successful merchant, like the successful manufacturer or the
+successful banker, drove his men and drove them hard. Macy was no
+exception to this rule. If he had been, it is doubtful if he would have
+lasted long. For while '58 was a year of seeming prosperity in New York
+it also followed directly one of the notable panic-years in the
+financial history of the United States and was soon to be followed by
+four years of internecine struggle in the nation--in which its credit
+and financial resources were to be strained to the utmost.
+
+It is entirely possible that the record of the Macy store might not be
+set down as one of final and overwhelming success, if it had not been
+for the driving force of a woman, who was brought into the organization
+not long after the opening of the original store in lower Sixth Avenue.
+This woman, Margaret Getchell, was also born in Nantucket. She had been
+a school-teacher upon the island, until the loss of one of her eyes
+forced her to seek less confining work. She drifted to New York and,
+taking advantage of a girlhood acquaintance with Mr. Macy, asked him for
+employment in his store. He knew her and was glad to take her in. She,
+in turn, engaged rooms in a flat just over a picture-frame store, in
+Sixth Avenue, across from her employment, so that she might devote every
+possible moment of her time, day and night, to its success.
+
+So was born a real executive--and in a day when the possibilities of
+women ever becoming business executives were as remote seemingly as that
+they might ever fly. For decades after she had gone, she left the
+impress of her remarkable personality upon the store. An attractive
+figure she was: a small, slight woman, with masses of glorious hair and
+a pert upturn to her nose, while the loss of her eye was overcome, from
+the point of view of appearance at least, by the wearing of an
+artificial one, which she handled so cleverly that many folk knew her
+for a long time without realizing her misfortune.
+
+At every turn, Margaret Getchell was a clever woman. Once when Mr. Macy
+had imported a wonderful mechanical singing-bird--a thing quite as
+unusual in that early day as was the phonograph when it came upon the
+market--and its elaborate mechanism had slipped out of order, it was
+she, with the aid of a penknife, a screw-driver and a pair of pliers--I
+presume that she also used a hair-pin--who took it entirely apart and
+put it together again. And at another time she trained two cats to
+permit themselves to be arrayed in doll's clothing and to sleep for
+hours in twin-cribs, to the great amusement and delectation of the
+visitors to the store. Later she caused a photograph to be made of the
+exhibit, which was retailed in great quantities to the younger
+customers. Miss Getchell was nothing if not businesslike.
+
+It was her keen, commercial acumen that made her alert in the heart
+center of the early store--the cashier's office. She tolerated neither
+discrepancies nor irregularities there. There it was that the New
+England school-ma'm showed itself most keenly. Did a saleswoman
+overcharge a patron two dollars? And did the cashier accept and pass the
+check? Then the cashier must pay the two dollars out of her meagre
+pay-envelope on Saturday night. "Overs" were treated the same as
+"unders." It made no difference that the store was already ahead two
+dollars on the transaction. Discipline was the thing. Discipline would
+keep that sort of offense from being repeated many times, and Macy's
+from ever being given the unsavory reputation of making a practice of
+overcharging.
+
+"Don't ever erase a figure or change it, no matter what seems to be the
+logical reason in your own mind," she kept telling her cashiers. "The
+very act implies dishonesty."
+
+So does the New England conscience ever lean backward.
+
+Yet it is related of this same Margaret Getchell that when a little and
+comparatively friendless girl had been admitted to the cashier's cage--a
+decided innovation in those days--and had been found in an apparent
+peculation of three dollars and promptly discharged by Mr. Macy, Miss
+Getchell dropped everything else and went to work on behalf of the
+little cashier. Intuitively she felt that another of her sex in the cage
+had made the theft--a young woman who had come into the store from a
+prominent up-state family to learn merchandising. The up-state young
+woman was fond of dress. Her dress demands far exceeded her salary. Of
+that Miss Getchell was sure.
+
+Yet intuition is one thing and proof quite another. For a fortnight the
+store manager worked upon her surpassing problem. She induced Macy to
+suspend for a time his order of discharge and she kept putting the women
+cashiers in relays in the cage, to suit her own fancy and her own plans.
+The petty thefts continued. But not for long. The plans worked. The
+altered checks were found to be all in the time of one of the
+cashiers--and that was not the one who had been discharged. Miss
+Getchell drove to the home of Miss Upper New York and there, in the
+presence of her family, got both confession and reparation.
+
+[Illustration: THE BEGINNINGS OF MACY'S
+
+The original small store in Sixth Avenue just south of 14th Street. Here
+the business starts in 1858]
+
+She was forever seeking new lines of activities for the store--branching
+out here, branching out there, and turning most of these new ventures
+into lines of resounding profits. "If necessary, we shall handle
+everything except one," she is reputed to have said. And upon being
+asked what that one was, she replied brusquely, "Coffins." Once she
+embarked Macy upon the grocery business--whole decades before the
+establishment of the present huge grocery department--and while
+eventually the store was forced to drop for a time this line of
+merchandise, she succeeded in taking so much business from New York's
+then leading firm of grocers that they came to Macy, himself, and begged
+him to drop the competition.
+
+
+In the retailing world of that day, tradition and habit still governed
+and with an iron hand. Stores opened early in the morning and kept open
+until late in the evening, and did this six days of the week. Their
+workers rose and left their homes--before dawn in many months of the
+year--and did not return to them until well after dark. Yet they did not
+complain, for that was the fashion of the times and was recognized as
+such. Wages were as low as the hours were long. But food-costs also were
+low, and rentals but a tiny fraction of their present figure. The
+apartment house had not yet come to New York. It was a development set
+for a full two decades later. The store-workers lived in
+boarding-houses, in small furnished rooms or with their families. The
+greater part of them resided within walking distance of their
+employment.
+
+Mr. Macy had all of his fair share of traditional New England thrift.
+One of the favorite early anecdotes of "the old man," as his
+fellow-workers were prone to call him, and with no small show of
+affection, concerned his refusal to permit shades to be placed upon the
+gas-jets in the store, saying that he paid for the light and so wanted
+the full value for his money. He was skeptical, at the best, about
+innovations. Moreover, necessity compelled him to keep close watch upon
+the pennies. At one time he reduced the weekly wages of his cash-girls
+from two dollars to one-dollar-and-a-half, saying that the war was over
+and he could no longer afford to pay war wages. Yet when a courageous
+sales-clerk went to him and told him that she could not possibly live
+any longer upon her weekly wage of three dollars, he promptly raised it
+a dollar, without argument or hesitation. And the following week he
+automatically extended the same increase to every other clerk in the
+store.
+
+Labor conditions in that day were hard, indeed. The working hours, as I
+have already said, were long. In regular times the store hours were from
+eight to six, instead of from nine to five-thirty, as today. On busy
+days the clerks worked an extra hour, putting the stock in place, while
+in the fortnight which preceded Christmas the store was open
+evenings--supposedly until ten o'clock, as a matter of fact, often until
+long after ten, when the workers were well toward the point of
+exhaustion. Other conditions of their labor were slightly better. There
+were no seats in the aisles and conversation between the clerks was
+punishable by discharge. They might make their personal purchases only
+on Friday mornings, between eight and nine o'clock, and they received no
+discount whatsoever. In Mr. Macy's day the only discounts ever given
+were to the New York Juvenile Asylum in Thirteenth Street nearby, which
+was an institution peculiarly close to his heart.
+
+There were no lockers in the early days of the old store. In one of its
+upper floors several small rooms were set aside as a crude sort of
+cloak-room for the employees. A few nails around the walls sufficed for
+their outer wraps but there were never enough of these nails to go
+around. One of the clerks was chosen to come early and stay late in
+order to supervise these rooms. Inasmuch as there was neither glory nor
+remuneration in this task, it was not eagerly sought after.
+
+Nevertheless, here was the enlightened day at hand when women would and
+did work in stores--not alone in great numbers but in a great majority
+and in many cases to the exclusion of men. It was one of the sweeping
+economic changes that the Civil War brought in its train. When the men
+must go to fight in the armies of the North, women must take their
+places--for only a little while it seemed up to that time. Yet so well
+did they do much of men's work, that their retention in many of their
+positions came as a very natural course. So while the decade that
+preceded the Civil War found few or no professions open to women--save
+those of teaching or of domestic employment--the one which followed it
+found them coming in increasing numbers, into a steadily increasing
+number and variety of endeavors.
+
+So it was then that the great war of the last century brought women
+behind the counters of the stores--Macy's was no exception to the
+invasion. They came to stay. And stay they have, to this very day, even
+though most of the New York stores still retain men to a considerable
+extent in some of their departments--notably those devoted to the sale
+of furniture, dress-goods and boots and shoes. For some varieties of
+stock the male clerk still is the most suitable and successful sort of
+salesman.
+
+
+In his store in Haverhill, Mr. Macy had adopted as his trade-mark a
+rooster bearing the motto in his beak, "While I live, I'll crow." For
+his nascent enterprise in New York, however, he adopted a different and,
+to him at least, a far more significant device, which to this day
+remains the symbol of the great enterprise which still bears his name.
+
+It was a star, a star of red, if you will. And back of that simple
+symbol rests a story: It seems that in the days of his youth when he
+sailed the northern seas in a whaling ship he had gradually acquired
+such proficiency that he was made first mate and then master. It was in
+the earlier capacity, however, and upon an occasion when he was given a
+trick at the wheel that Macy found himself in a thick fog off a New
+England port--one version of the story says Boston, the other New
+Bedford. To catch the familiar lights of the harbor gateways was out of
+the question. The cloud banks lay low against the shore. Overhead there
+was a rift or two, and in one of them, well ahead of the vessel's prow,
+there gleamed a brilliant star.
+
+For the young skipper this was literally a star of hope. His quick wit
+made it a guiding star. By it he steered his course and so successfully
+into the safety of the harbor that the star became for him thereafter
+the symbol of success. With the strange insistency that was inherent in
+the man, he was wont to say that the failure of his Boston store was due
+to the fact that he had not there adopted the star as his trade-mark. He
+made no such mistake in his New York enterprise. The star became the
+forefront of his business. And to this day it is a prominent feature of
+the main facade of the great establishment which bears his name.
+
+Mr. Macy never lost his boyhood affection for the sea--the one thing
+inborn of his ancestral blood. It is related of him that one morning on
+his way to the store he found a small silver anchor lying on the
+sidewalk, picked it up, placed it in his pocket and thereafter carried
+it until the day of his death, regarding it as a talisman of real value.
+There was one souvenir of his early connection of which he was greatly
+ashamed, however. As a boy he had permitted his shipmates to tattoo the
+backs of his hands. In later years he regretted this exceedingly, and
+developed a habit of talking to strangers with the palms of his hands
+held uppermost, so that they might not see the tattoo marks.
+
+
+From the very beginning Macy adopted certain fixed and definite policies
+for his business. These showed not alone the vision but the breadth and
+bigness of the man. For one of the most important of them he decided
+that in his business he would have cash transactions only. This applied
+both ways--to the purchase of his merchandise as well as to its retail
+sale. It is a bed-rock principle that has come down to today as a
+foundation of the business that he founded. It is perhaps the one rule
+of it, from which there is no deviation, at any time or under any
+circumstance. It is related that a full quarter of a century after Macy
+had first adopted this principle, one of the then partners of the
+concern was approached by a warm personal friend, a man of high
+financial standing, who said that he wished to make a rather elaborate
+purchase that morning, but not having either cash or a check handy,
+asked for an exception to the no-credit rule. The partner shook his
+head, smiled, rather sadly, and said:
+
+"No, Mr. Blank, I cannot do that, even for you. But I can tell you what
+I can, and shall do."
+
+And so saying he reached for his own check-book, wrote out a personal
+voucher for two hundred dollars, stepped over to the cashier's office,
+had it cashed and presented the money, in crisp green bills to his
+friend.
+
+"You can repay me, at your convenience," was all that he said.
+
+Convinced that trust--as he insisted upon calling credit--was a
+millstone upon the neck of the merchant--let alone a struggling man of
+thirty-five who previously had known failure--Macy insisted upon
+matching his purchases for any ensuing week close to his sales for the
+preceding one. He did all his own buying at first; and for a number of
+years thereafter he employed no professional buyers whatsoever. In this
+way he kept his margin closely in hand and at all times well within the
+range of safety. There was little of the spirit of the gambler in him.
+It would not have sat well with his Yankee blood.
+
+A second principle of the store in those early days which has come
+easily and naturally down to these--when it is accepted retailing
+principle everywhere--was the marking of the selling price upon each and
+every article. It seems odd to think today that the installing of such a
+fair and commonsense principle should once have been regarded as a
+stroke of daring initiative in merchandising. Yet the fact remains that
+in the days when Macy's was young, in the average store one bargained
+and bargained constantly. There was no single price set upon any
+article. Even when one went into as fine and showy a store as New York
+might boast one bartered. _Caveat emptor_, "Let the buyer beware," was
+seemingly the dominating retail motto of those days.
+
+But not in Mr. Macy's. The selling price went on every article displayed
+in the store in those days and in such plain and readable figures that
+any fairly educated person might clearly understand. This principle
+alone was one of the huge factors that went toward the early and
+immediate success of the enterprise.
+
+There was still another merchandising idea born of that great and
+fertile New England brain that needs to be set down at this time. For
+many years a notable feature of the advertising of the Macy store has
+been in the peculiar shading of its prices--at forty-nine cents or
+ninety-eight, or at $1.98 or $4.98 or $9.98 rather than in the even
+multiples of dollars. A good many worldly-wise folk have jumped to the
+quick conclusion that this was due to a desire on the part of the store
+to make the selling price of any given article seem a little less than
+it really was. As a matter of fact it was due to nothing of the sort.
+With all of his respect for the honesty of his sales-force, the Yankee
+mind of R. H. Macy took few chances--even in that regard. He felt that
+in almost every transaction the money handed over by the customer would
+be in even silver coin or bills. To give back the change from an
+odd-figured selling-price the salesman or the saleswoman would be
+compelled to do business with the cashier and so to make a full record
+of the transaction. With the commodities in even dollars and their
+larger fractions the temptation to pocket the entire amount might be
+present.
+
+It required a good deal of logic, or long-distance reasoning, to figure
+out such a possibility and an almost certain safeguard against it. But
+that was Macy. His was not the day of cash-registers or other checking
+devices. The salesman and the saleswoman in a store was still apt to
+find himself or herself an object of suspicion on the part of his or
+her employer. Business ethics were still in the making. A long road in
+them was still to be traversed.
+
+
+Mr. Macy's brother-in-law, Mr. Houghton, did not long remain in
+partnership with him, but retired to Boston, where he became senior
+partner of the house of Houghton & Dutton, which is still in existence.
+For a long number of years thereafter Macy conducted his business alone.
+Its steadily increasing growth, however, the multiplication of its
+responsibilities and problems, and his own oncoming years finally caused
+him to admit to partnership on the first day of January, 1877, two of
+his oldest and most valued employees, Abiel T. LaForge and Robert M.
+Valentine. It had long been rumored in the store that Miss Getchell's
+years of faithful service were finally to be rewarded by a real
+partnership in it. But even in 1876, woman's place in modern business
+had not been firmly enough established to permit so radical a step by a
+business house of as large ramifications and responsibilities as Macy's
+had come to be. Yet the point was quickly overcome--and in a most
+unexpected way. Early in 1876 Miss Getchell became Mr. LaForge's wife.
+And so, in a most active and interested way, she gained at the end a
+real financial interest in the profitable business, in the upbuilding of
+which she had been so large a factor.
+
+Mr. LaForge had been a major in the Northern Army during the Civil War;
+in fact it was there that he had contracted the tuberculosis which was
+to cause his early demise. He had come into the store in the middle of
+the 'seventies as one of its first professional buyers--being a
+specialist in laces--and had developed real executive ability. He had
+great affection for things military. And when Mr. Macy told him of the
+uniformed attendants of his beloved Bon Marche, LaForge promptly
+proceeded to place the entire salesforce of Macy's in uniform. Neat
+uniforms they were, too: of a bluish-grey cadet cloth, and with stiff
+upstanding collars of a much darker blue upon the points of which were
+interwoven the familiar device of the bright red star. The Macy uniforms
+did not long remain, however. New York is not Paris. And in that day,
+when uniforms in general were looked upon as something quite foreign to
+the idea of the republic, American labor was particularly averse to
+them.
+
+His important partnership step taken, Mr. Macy began to lay down his
+responsibilities. Despite his great fame and vigorous constitution his
+health had begun to fail under the multiplicity of duties. Again he
+turned toward the sea. He embarked upon a long voyage to Europe; in
+which he was to combine both business and pleasure. From that voyage he
+never returned. His health sank rapidly and he died in Paris, on the
+twenty-ninth day of March, 1877.
+
+
+Two days later in New York, Mr. LaForge and Mr. Valentine formed a
+partnership, Mr. LaForge, although the younger of the two men, becoming
+the senior member of the firm. It was provided in the co-partnership
+papers that the business should be continued under the name of R. H.
+Macy & Co., until January 1, 1879; and thereafter under the new firm
+name of LaForge and Valentine. However, Mr. LaForge's death in 1878,
+followed a year later by that of his wife, prevented this scheme from
+being carried out. The question of changing the name of a
+well-established business--now come to be one of the great enterprises
+of the city of New York--was never again brought forward. The name of
+Macy had attained far too fine a trade value to be easily dropped, even
+if sentiment had not come into the reckoning. And sentiment still ruled
+the big retail house in lower Sixth Avenue, sentiment demanded that the
+name of one of New York's greatest merchant princes should be henceforth
+perpetuated in the business which he had so solidly founded. And so that
+name continues--in growing strength and prosperity.
+
+
+
+
+III. Fourteenth Street Days
+
+
+By 1883 the Macy store had rounded out its first quarter century of
+existence. The big, comfortable, homely group of red brick buildings on
+Sixth Avenue from Thirteenth to Fourteenth Streets had come to be as
+much a real landmark of New York as the Grand Central Depot, Grace
+Church, Booth's Theater, the Metropolitan Opera House or the equally new
+Casino Theater in upper Broadway. Its founder had been dead for six
+years. But the business marched steadily on--growing steadily both in
+its scope and in its volume. It already was among the first, if not the
+very first in New York, in the variety and the magnitude of its
+operations. It employed more than fifteen hundred men and women, a great
+growth since 1870 when an early payroll of the store had shown but one
+hundred on its employment list.
+
+Other stores had followed closely upon the heels of Macy's. Stewart's
+had moved up Broadway from Chambers Street to its wonderful square iron
+emporium between Ninth and Tenth Streets, where, after the death of the
+man who had established it, it enjoyed varying success for a long time
+until its final resuscitation by that great Philadelphia merchant, John
+Wanamaker. Benjamin Altman had moved his store from its original
+location on Third Avenue to Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street, Koch
+was at Nineteenth Street, but Ehrich was still over on Eighth Avenue.
+None of these had been an important merchant in the beginning. But all
+of them, by 1883, were beginning to come into their own. The Sixth
+Avenue shopping district of the 'eighties and the 'nineties was being
+born. Mr. Macy's vision of more than twenty-five years years before was
+being abundantly justified. The new elevated railroad, which formed the
+backbone of Sixth Avenue and which had been completed about a decade
+before, all the way from South Ferry to One Hundred and Fifty-fifth
+Street, had proved a mighty factor in bringing shoppers into it. Mr.
+Macy in 1858 might not have foreseen the coming of this remarkable
+system of rapid transit--the first of its kind in any large city of the
+world. But he foresaw the coming of both Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth
+Street. There is no doubt of that. He had a habit of reiterating his
+prophecy to all with whom he came in contact.
+
+The prophecy came to pass. Union Square no longer was surrounded by fine
+residences. Trade had invaded it, successfully. Tiffany's, Brentano's,
+_The Century's_ fine publishing house had come to replace the homes of
+the old time New Yorkers. So, too, had Fourteenth Street been
+transformed. Delmonico's was still at one of its Fifth Avenue corners
+and back of it stood, and still stands, the Van Buren residence, a sort
+of Last of the Mohicans in brick and stone and timber and plaster. All
+the rest was business; high-grade business, if you please, and Macy's
+stood in the very heart of it.
+
+We saw, in a preceding chapter, how just before the passing of Mr. Macy
+he had taken into partnership Mr. LaForge and Mr. Valentine. Mr.
+LaForge, as we have just seen, lived hardly a year after Mr. Macy's
+death in Paris, and Mr. Valentine died less than a twelvemonth later--on
+February 15, 1879. Yet the force and impress of both of these men
+remained with the organization for a long time after their going. Miss
+Prunty, one of the older members of it, still remembers as one of her
+earliest recollections, seeing Mr. LaForge taking groups of the
+cash-girls out to supper during the racking holiday season. The little
+girls were duly grateful. Theirs was a drab existence, at the best; long
+hours and wearying ones. A type that has quite passed out of
+existence--in these days of automatic carriers--that old-time cash girl
+in the big store, with her red-checked gingham frock and her hair in
+pig-tails, which had a fashion of sticking straight out from her small
+head. Lunch in a small tin pail and a vast ambition, which led many and
+many a one of them into positions of real trust and responsibility.
+
+The most of them continued in the business of merchandising. They rose
+rapidly to be saleswomen, buyers and department managers--not alone in
+Macy's; but in the other great stores of the city. A Macy training
+became recognized as a business schooling of the greatest value. While
+at least one of these Macy graduates--Carrie DeMar--came to be an
+actress of nation-wide reputation, a comedienne of real merit.
+
+There were times when the existence of these smart, pert little girls
+grew less drab. One of them told me not so long ago of the _entente
+cordiale_ which she had upbuilded between Mr. S---- and herself; nearly
+fifty years ago.
+
+"Mr. S---- was the only floorwalker that the store possessed in those
+days," said she. "Mr. Macy had been much impressed by his fine
+appearance and had created the post for him. On duty, he seemed a most
+solemn man. That was a part of his work. Behind it all he was most
+human, however; and sometimes on a hot day in midsummer he would begin
+to think of the cooling lager that flowed at The Grapevine, a few blocks
+down the avenue. That settled it. He would have to slip down there for
+five minutes. And slip down he did, while I stood guard at the
+Thirteenth Street door. I felt that Miss Getchell's far-seeing eye was
+forever upon us or that Mr. Macy might turn up quite unexpectedly.
+
+"In return for all this, Mr. S---- would occasionally stand guard while
+I would slip over to John Huyler's bakery at Eighth Avenue and
+Fourteenth Street--sometimes to get one of his wonderful pies, and other
+times to buy the lovely new candies upon which he was beginning to
+experiment. We were great pals--S---- and I."
+
+
+Nowadays in the great department stores they order this entire business
+of collecting both cash and packages in a far better fashion. The
+merchant of today has a variety of wondrous mechanical contraptions--not
+only cash-carriers but cash-registers--which do the work they once did,
+much more rapidly and efficiently. Even in those long ago days of the
+'eighties the Macy store was beginning to install pneumatic tubes for
+carrying the money from the saleswomen at the counters to the high-set
+booths of the head cashiers, who seemingly had come to regard it as a
+mere commodity, to be regarded in as fully impersonal a fashion as boots
+or shoes or sugar or broom-sticks. Put that down as progress for the
+'eighties.
+
+[Illustration: THE FOURTEENTH STREET STORE OF OTHER DAYS
+
+By the early 'seventies Macy's had absorbed the entire southeastern
+corners of 14th Street and 6th Avenue, and had come to be a fixture of
+New York]
+
+The Macy store prided itself during that second generation, as now, upon
+its willingness to take up innovations, particularly when they showed
+themselves as possessing at least a degree of real worth. Mr. Macy, with
+his old fashioned prejudices against innovations of any sort, was gone.
+His successors took a radically different position in regard to them.
+Here was the electric-light--that brand-new thing which this young man
+Tom Edison over at Menlo Park was developing so rapidly. It was new. It
+had been well advertised; particularly well advertised for that day and
+generation. How it drew folk, to gaze admiringly upon its hissing
+brilliancy! Ergo! The Macy store must have an electric light. And so in
+the late autumn days of 1878 one of the very first arc lamps to be
+displayed in New York was hung outside the Fourteenth Street front of
+the store and attracted many crowds. It was hardly less than a
+sensation.
+
+In the following autumn arc lamps were placed throughout all the retail
+selling portions of the store. Of course, they were not very dependable.
+Most folk those days thought that they would never so become. The
+store's real reliance was upon its gas-lighting; nice, reliable old
+gas. You could depend upon it. The new system was still erratic. So
+figured the mind of the 'eighties.
+
+Soon after the first electric lamps, the store's first telephone was
+installed. It, too, was a great novelty, and the customers of the
+establishment developed a habit of calling up their friends, just so
+that they could say they had used it. Eventually the convenience of the
+device became so apparent that folk stood in queues awaiting their turn
+to use it, and the telephone company requested Macy's to take it out or
+at least to discontinue the practice of using it so freely.
+
+In that day there were no elevators nor for a considerable time
+thereafter. All the store's selling was at first, and for a long time
+thereafter, confined to its basement and to its main-floor. Gradually it
+began to encroach upon small portions of the second story. This afforded
+fairly generous selling space; for it must be remembered that the
+establishment not only filled the entire east side of Sixth Avenue from
+Thirteenth Street to Fourteenth Street but extended back upon each of
+them for more than one hundred and fifty feet. Moreover it was beginning
+slowly to acquire disconnected buildings in the surrounding territory;
+generally for the purpose of manufacturing certain lines of
+merchandise--a practice which it has almost entirely discontinued in
+these later years. Then it still made certain things that it wished
+fashioned along the lines which its clientele still demanded. And even
+some of the upper floors of the older buildings that formed the main
+store group were partly given over to the making of clothing; of
+underwear; and men's shirts and collars in particular.
+
+It was after 1882, according to the memory of Mr. James E. Murphy, a
+salesman in the black silk department, who came to the store in that
+memorable year, that the first elevator was installed in the store. Up
+to that time, as we have just seen, there had been no necessity
+whatsoever for such a machine. But the steadily growing business of the
+store--there really seemed to be no way of holding Macy's back--made it
+necessary to use upper floors of the original building for retailing and
+more and more to crowd the manufacturing and other departments into
+outside structures.
+
+So Macy's progressed. It kept its selling methods as well as its stock,
+not only abreast of the times, but a little ahead of them. Miss Fallon,
+who was in the shoe department of those days of the 'eighties, recalls
+that up to that time the shoes had been kept in large chiffoniers--the
+sizes "21/2" to "31/2" in one drawer, "4" to "5" in the next, and so on.
+This meant that if a clerk was looking for a certain specified
+width--say "D" or "Double A"--she must rummage through the entire drawer
+until she came to a pair which had the required size neatly marked upon
+its lining. The mating of the shoes was accomplished by boring small awl
+holes in their backs and tying them neatly together. There was no repair
+shop in the shoe department of that day--merely an aged shoemaker who
+lived in a basement across Thirteenth Street and to whom shoes for
+repair were despatched almost as rapidly as they came into the store.
+
+These methods seem crude today. But, even in 1883, they were in full
+keeping with the times. Merchandising was still in its swaddling
+clothes; the real science of salesmanship, a thing unknown. Yet men were
+groping through; and some of these men were in Macy's. You might take as
+such a man C. B. Webster, who came to the forefront of the business,
+soon after the deaths of Macy, LaForge and Valentine at the end of its
+second decade. In fact, his actual admission to the partnership preceded
+Mr. Valentine's death by a few months. A while later he married Mr.
+Valentine's widow. And when the last of the old partners was gone his
+was the steering hand upon the brisk and busy ship.
+
+To help him in his work he brought to his right hand Jerome B. Wheeler,
+who was admitted as a full partner April 1, 1879, and who so continued
+until his complete retirement from business, December 31, 1887. Mr.
+Webster continued with the house for a considerably longer time,
+maintaining his active partnership until 1896 when he sold his interest
+in the business to his partners. He continued, however, to retain his
+private office in the Macy store, coming north with it from Fourteenth
+Street to Thirty-fourth in 1902, and, until his death four or five years
+ago, staying close beside the enterprise in which he had been so large a
+creative factor.
+
+Webster and Wheeler are, then, the names most prominently connected with
+the second era of the store's growth and activity. They were bound to
+the founder of the house by blood-ties and by marriage. Mr. Webster's
+father--Josiah Locke Webster, a merchant of Providence, R. I.--and Mr.
+Macy were first cousins, their mothers having been sisters. The elder
+Webster and Rowland H. Macy were, in fact, the warmest of friends and so
+the proffer by the original proprietor of the store of an opening to his
+friend's son, came almost as a matter of course. Its educational value
+alone was enormous. Young Webster accepted. He joined the organization
+in 1876 and a year later was made one of its buyers. His worth quickly
+began to assert itself. And within another twelvemonth he had abandoned
+all idea of returning to his father's store in Providence and entered
+upon a partnership in the Macy business.
+
+Many of the older employees of the store still remember him distinctly.
+He was a tall man, stately, conservative in speech and in manner--your
+typical successful man of business of that time and generation. Yet
+these very Macy people will tell you today that while his dignity awed,
+it did not repress. For with it went a kindliness of manner and of
+purpose. Nor was he--as some of them were then inclined to
+believe--devoid of any sense of humor. Mr. James Woods, who is assistant
+superintendent of delivery in the store today and who has been with it
+for forty-eight years, recalls many and many a battle royal with "C. B.
+W." as he still calls his old associate and chief, which they had
+together as they worked in the delivery rooms of the old Fourteenth
+Street store, hurling packages at one another and then following up with
+smart fisticuffs.
+
+"In those early days," adds George L. Hammond, who came to the store in
+1886 and who is now in its woolen dress-goods department, "I found Mr.
+Webster a most kindly man, even though taciturn. For instance, one day
+Mr. Isidor Straus came up to the counter with a man whom he had met upon
+the floor. They stood talking together. Mr. Straus told the other
+gentleman that he had recently met a Mr. Cebalos, known at that time as
+the Cuban Sugar King, and that Mr. Cebalos had spoken to him of having
+met such a fine gentleman, an American, in France; that this gentleman
+was evidently a man of education and large means and had said that he
+was in business in New York. Mr. Cebalos asked Mr. Straus if he had ever
+known his chance acquaintance in Paris--he was a Mr. Webster, Mr. C. B.
+Webster. To which Mr. Straus instantly replied: 'Of course I know him.
+He is the senior member of our firm.' Mr. Cebalos answered: 'What, the
+senior member of the firm of R. H. Macy & Co.? Why, he never told me
+that!'"
+
+So much for old-fashioned modesty and conservatism.
+
+
+The habit of reticence enclosed many of these older executives of
+Macy's. They were silent oft-times because they could not forget their
+vast responsibilities--even when they were away from the store. It is
+told of one of them that once in the middle of the performance in an
+uptown theater the thought flashed over him that he had neglected to
+close his safe--a duty which was never relegated to any subordinate. He
+arose at once from his seat and hurried down to the Store, brought the
+night watchman to the doors and strode quickly to the private office:
+only to find the stout doors of its great strong-box firmly fastened.
+The idea that he had neglected his duty was a nervous obsession. His was
+not the training nor the mentality that ever neglected duty.
+
+Upon another occasion another partner (Mr. Wheeler) worried himself
+almost into a nervous breakdown for fear that there would not be enough
+pennies for the cashier's cage during the forthcoming holiday season.
+Mr. Macy's odd-price plan was something of a drain upon the copper coin
+market of New York. And at this particular time, the local shortage
+being acute, Mr. Wheeler took a night train and hurried to Washington,
+to see the Secretary of the Treasury. Late the next evening he returned
+to New York and went to the house of Miss Abbie Golden, his head
+cashier, at midnight, just to tell her that he had succeeded in getting
+an order upon the director of the Philadelphia Mint for $10,000 in
+brand-new copper pennies. After which he went home, to a well-earned
+rest.
+
+
+Although Mr. Wheeler's connection with the store was for a much shorter
+period, he left upon it, at the end of its second era, much of the
+impress of his own personality. Like both Webster and Valentine, he also
+was indirectly related to R. H. Macy, having married Mr. Macy's niece,
+Miss Valentine. In appearance and in manner he was the direct antithesis
+of his partner, Webster. In the language of today he was a "mixer."
+Affable, direct, approachable, men liked him and came to him freely.
+The employees of the store poured their woes into his ears; and never in
+vain. He stood ready to help them, in every possible way. And they,
+knowing this, came frequently to him.
+
+Mr. Wheeler left the store and organization in 1887, selling his
+interest in the enterprise to Messrs. Isidor and Nathan Straus--of whom
+much more in a very few moments. He became tremendously interested in
+the development of Colorado and, upon going out there in 1888, built up
+a chain of stores, banks and mines. He still lives in the land of his
+adoption.
+
+
+One of Mr. Wheeler's keenest interests in the store was in its toy
+department. In this he followed closely Macy's own trend of thought and
+desire. For Macy's had already become, beyond a doubt, _the_ toy-store
+of New York City. Starting eleven years after the foundation of the
+original store, this one department had so grown and expanded as
+annually to demand and receive the entire selling-space of the main
+floor. Each year, about the fifteenth of December, all other stocks
+would be cleared from shelves and counters, the willow-feathers, the
+fans and the fine laces would disappear from the little glass cases
+beside the main Fourteenth Street doors and in their places would come
+the toys--a goodly company in all, but strange--dolls, engines, blocks,
+mechanical devices, books.
+
+And then, to the doors of the great red-brick emporium in Sixth Avenue
+would come New York Jr. He and she came afoot and in carriages, upon
+horse-cars of the surface railways and upon the steam-cars of the
+elevated, and before they entered stood for a moment at the great glass
+windows that completely surrounded the place. For there was spread to
+view a pantomime of the most enchanting sort. No theater might equal the
+annual Christmas window display of Macy's. No theater might even dream
+of creating such a vast and overwhelming spectacle. The Hippodrome of
+today was still nearly thirty years into the future.
+
+The responsibilities of this vast undertaking alone were all but
+overwhelming. The twenty-fifth of December was barely passed, the store
+hardly cleaned of all the debris and confusion that it had brought,
+before plans for another Christmas were actively under way; Miss Bowyer,
+who specialized in the window display, taking Mr. Wheeler up to the
+wax-figure experts of Eden Musee in Twenty-third Street to order the
+saints and sinners and famous folk generally who came to the window
+annually at the end of December. One of the present executives of Macy's
+can remember being privileged, as a small boy, to go behind the scenes
+of the window pantomime. There he saw it, not in its beauty of form and
+color and light, but as a bewildering perplexity of mechanisms--belts
+and pulleys and levers and cams--an enterprise of no little magnitude.
+
+While Miss Bowyer and her assistants were busy laying the first of the
+plans for another window display, Mr. Macy was off for Europe seeking a
+fresh supply of toys and novelties for New York Jr.'s own annual
+festival. Once in a while he touched a high level of novelty, such as
+the securing of the mechanical bird--which a moment ago we saw Margaret
+Getchell taking all to pieces and then placing the pieces together
+again, with all the celerity and precision of a Yankee mechanic. The
+mechanical bird appealed particularly to Mr. Macy's friend, Mr. Phineas
+T. Barnum. Mr. Barnum came often to the store in Fourteenth Street to
+gaze upon it and to listen to it. Perhaps he regretted that he had let
+so valuable an advertising feature slip out of the hands of his museum.
+
+For Mr. Macy's chief reason in importing a toy so rare and so expensive
+as to bring it far beyond the hands of any ordinary child was to create
+sensation--and so to gain advertising thereby. The merchant from out of
+New England was nothing if not a born advertiser. While his competitors
+were quite content with small and stilted announcements in the public
+prints as to the extent and variety of their wares, Macy splurged. He
+took "big space"--big at least for that day and generation. And he did
+not hesitate to let printer's ink carry the fame of his emporium far and
+wide--a sound business principle which has prevailed in it from that day
+to this.
+
+But the toy season was never passed without its doubts and worries. An
+older employee of the store can still remember a most memorable year
+when it rained for a solid week after the toy season had opened and the
+bombazines and the muslins had been put away for the building-blocks and
+the hobby-horse. No one came to the store for seven long days. Mr. Macy
+was greatly distressed. He walked up one aisle and down another,
+stroking his long silky beard and saying that he was utterly ruined, and
+would have to close his store forthwith. But on the eighth day the sun
+came out, a season of fine crisp December weather arrived and the store
+was thronged with holiday shoppers. A fortnight's buying was
+accomplished in the passing of a single week and the situation
+completely saved.
+
+
+
+
+IV. The Coming of Isidor and Nathan Straus
+
+
+During the era in which Webster and Wheeler controlled it, the Macy
+store may be fairly said to have been in a state of hiatus. The driving
+force of its founders--Rowland Macy, LaForge and his wife and
+Valentine--was somewhat spent. And nothing had come to replace it. The
+store went ahead, of course--Webster and Wheeler were both hard workers
+and well-schooled--but keen observers noticed that it traveled quite
+largely upon the impetus and momentum which it had derived from its
+founders. New minds and hands to direct, new arms to strike and to
+strike strongly were needed and greatly needed. These new minds and
+hands and arms it was about to receive. But before we come to their
+consideration we shall turn back the calendar--for nearly forty years.
+
+
+It was in 1848 that the German Revolution drove out from the Fatherland
+and into other countries great numbers of men and women. The United
+States received its fair share of these; the most of them young men,
+impetuous, enterprising, idealistic. The late Carl Schurz was a fair
+representative of this type. About him were grouped in turn a small
+group of men, who might be regarded fairly as the most energetic and
+successful of the expatriates. In this group one of the most distinctive
+was one Lazarus Straus, who had been a sizable farmer in the Rhine
+Palatinate--at that time under the French flag--and who brought with him
+his three small sons, Isidor, Nathan and Oscar. In their veins was an
+admixture of French and German blood.
+
+In 1919 when Oscar S. Straus attended the Paris Peace Conference as the
+Chairman of the League to Enforce Peace, a dinner was given to him in
+Paris at which Leon Bourgeois, the former Premier of France and the
+present Chairman of the Council of the League of Nations, presided. In
+his address he referred to the fact that the father of the guest of
+honor, Oscar S. Straus, was born a French subject.
+
+
+To America, then, came Lazarus Straus and later his little family, as
+many and many an immigrant has come, before and since--seeking his
+fortune and asking no odds save a fair opportunity and a freedom from
+persecution. They landed in Philadelphia, where a little inquiry, among
+old friends who had come to the United States a few years before,
+developed the fact that the best business opportunities of the moment
+seemed to center in the South. Oglethorpe, Ga., was regarded by them as
+a particularly good town. With this fact established, Lazarus Straus
+started South and did not end his travels until he had reached Georgia,
+then popularly regarded as its "empire state." Through Georgia he found
+his way slowly, a small stock of goods with him and selling as he went
+in order to make his meagre living expenses, until he was come to
+Talbot County, which proudly announced itself as "the empire county of
+the empire state."
+
+It was in court-week that Lazarus Straus first marched into Talboton,
+its shire-town, and took a good long look at his surroundings. At first
+glance he liked it. It was brisk and busy; if you have been in an
+old-fashioned county-seat in court-week you will quickly recall what a
+lot of enterprise and bustle that annual or semi-annual event arouses.
+But that was not all. Talboton did not have the slovenly look of so many
+of the small Southern towns of that period. It was trim and neat; its
+houses and lawns and flower-pots alike were well-kept. It must have
+brought back to the lonely heart of the man from the Palatinate the neat
+small towns of his Fatherland. Moreover it possessed an excellent school
+system.
+
+No longer would Lazarus Straus tramp across the land. He had accumulated
+enough to start his store on a moderate basis at least. For three or
+four days he skirmished about the town looking for a location, until he
+found a tailor who was willing to rent one-half of his store to him.
+Even upon a yearly basis the rental of his part of the shop would cost
+less than the annual license which the state of Georgia required
+itinerants to buy. The opportunity was opened. A resident of Talboton he
+became. There in its friendliness and culture he brought his family and
+set up his little home.
+
+The business prospered so rapidly that within a few weeks he was obliged
+to seek larger quarters. A whole store he found this time, so roomy that
+he needs must go back again to Philadelphia to find sufficient stock to
+fill its shelves. His original stock he had purchased at Oglethorpe,
+which, although much larger than Talboton, had apparently not appealed
+to him the half as much.
+
+"Aren't you going to buy your new stock at Oglethorpe?" his fellow
+merchants of the little county-seat asked him. He shook his head. And
+they shook theirs.
+
+"The merchants of Oglethorpe will not like it if you pass them by and go
+on to Philadelphia."
+
+But the founder of the house of Straus in America kept his own counsel
+and followed his own good judgment. He went to Philadelphia, found his
+friends again, who had known his family in the Rhine, either personally
+or by reputation, obtained their credit assistance and with it bought
+and carried south such wares as Talbot County had not before known, with
+the result that the business, now fairly launched, was carried to new
+reaches of success.
+
+
+If there had been no Civil War it is entirely probable that this record
+would never have been written--that there would be in 1922 no Macy store
+in New York to come into printed history. It was in fact that great
+conflict that brought disaster to so many hundreds and thousands of
+businesses--big and little--that ended the career of L. Straus of
+Talboton, Georgia, U. S. A. But not at first. At first, you will recall,
+the South marched quite gaily into the conflict. She was rich,
+prosperous, well-populated. Impending conflict looked like little else
+than a great adventure. Lazarus Straus' oldest son, Isidor, who had been
+destined for military training--having already been entered at the
+Southern Military College, at Collingsworth, to prepare for West
+Point--could not restrain himself as he helped organize a company of
+half-grown boys in the village, of which he was immediately elected
+first-lieutenant. This company asked the Governor of Georgia for arms,
+but was refused.
+
+"There are not enough guns for the men, let alone the boys," came the
+words from the ancient capitol at Macon.
+
+At that time Lazarus Straus' partner, the man who was his right hand and
+aid, did succeed in getting a gun and getting into the war. This made a
+natural opening for Isidor in the store, in which he progressed rapidly,
+for a full eighteen months. Then, the partner having been invalided home
+from the front, the boy was free to engage once again in the service of
+the newly created nation to which the family, as well as all their
+friends roundabout them, had already given their fealty. He went to
+enter himself in the Georgia Military Academy, at Marietta--a few miles
+north of the growing young railroad town of Atlanta.
+
+Then came one of those slight incidents, seemingly trifling at the
+moment of the occurrence but sometimes changing the entire trend of men
+and their affairs. A young man, already a student at the Academy,
+volunteered to introduce Isidor Straus to his future fellow students.
+When they were come to one of the dormitories and at the door of a
+living-room, the kindly young man swung the door open and bade Isidor
+enter. He entered, a pail of water, nicely balanced atop the door,
+tumbled and its contents were poured over the novitiate's head and
+shoulders.
+
+That single hazing trick disgusted Isidor Straus immeasurably. He was a
+serious-minded young man, who realized that Georgia at that moment was
+passing through a particularly serious crisis in her affairs. For such
+tomfoolery and at such a time he had no use whatsoever. It settled his
+mind. He did not enter the school, but returned to his hotel, and on the
+following day, going to a nearby mill, bought a stock of grain and began
+merchandising it, on his own behalf.
+
+This was not to last long, however. The struggling Confederacy needed
+his services and needed them badly. The fame of the Straus family--its
+great ingenuity and ability--had long since passed outside of the
+boundaries of Talbot County. Tongues wagged and said that Isidor had
+inherited all of his father's vision and acumen. That settled it. Lloyd
+G. Bowers, a prominent Georgian, was being designated to head a mission
+to Europe, to sell, if he could, both Confederate bonds and cotton
+acceptances. He chose for his secretary and assistant Isidor Straus. And
+early in 1863 the two men embarked upon a small ship, The May, in
+Charleston harbor, which, in the course of a single evening,
+successfully performed the difficult task of running the blockade that
+guarded that port. Two days later they were at Nassau in the Bahamas,
+from which the voyage to England was a secondary and fairly easy matter.
+
+Despite the seeming hopelessness of his task--for already the tide had
+turned and was flowing against the Confederacy--Isidor Straus had a
+remarkable degree of success in England. In his later years he was fond
+of relating how, in 1890, while sojourning abroad, in turning over a
+telephone book in London he came to a name which brought back memories
+and, acting upon impulse, called that name to the telephone.
+
+"Can you tell me the price of Confederate bonds this morning?" he asked
+quietly.
+
+"Isidor Straus!" came the astonished reply. A few hours later a real
+reunion was in progress.
+
+
+Long before Appomattox came the utter failure of the once brisk little
+store at Talboton. In fact, the family had left that small village--very
+nearly in Sherman's path--and had moved to Columbus. There it sat in
+debt and desperation, as the Confederacy sank to its inevitable death.
+The only ray of hope in its existence was the vague possibility of
+success in Isidor's trip to England. And when the son came back to New
+York, soon after Lee's surrender, Lazarus Straus went north to meet him.
+Isidor had prospered. Cotton acceptances were not the bonds of a defunct
+young nation. England needed cotton--the mills of Manchester had stood
+idle for weeks and months at a time. Isidor Straus knew when and how to
+sell his cotton-bills--he was, in every sense of the word, a born
+merchant. He sold shrewdly, lived frugally, and returned to the United
+States with $12,000 in gold upon his person!
+
+This was the nugget upon which a new family beginning was made. There
+was to be no more South for the family of Straus. Business opportunity
+down there was dead--for a quarter of a century at the very least. But
+business opportunity in New York had never seemed as great as in the
+flush days of success and prosperity which followed the ending of the
+war. Lazarus Straus had brought north in his carpet-bag more cotton
+acceptances. But he had not been as fortunate as his son in having the
+time and the place to sell them at best advantage. Cotton within a few
+months had fallen in the United States to but one-half of its price of
+the preceding autumn.
+
+It was fortunate, indeed, that Isidor Straus had his little bag of
+golden coin at that moment. It was that gold that enabled him to start
+with his father, under the name of L. Straus & Son, a rather humble
+crockery business in a top-floor loft at 161 Chambers Street. The specie
+went toward the establishment of the new business. The debts of the old
+were already being paid. Lazarus Straus was, I believe, one of the few
+Southern merchants who paid their debts in the North in full, and
+thereby secured a great personal credit. This last came without great
+difficulty--in after years it was to be said that Isidor Straus could
+raise more money upon his word alone than any other man in New York. It
+was Mr. Bliss--of Bliss & Co., long time wholesalers of the city and
+predecessors of the well-known Tofft, Weller & Co.--who, upon being
+applied to by Isidor Straus for financial assistance, asked what he and
+his father proposed to do to regain their fortune.
+
+"Start in the china business," was the simple reply.
+
+"You have your courage," was Mr. Bliss's reply, "your father at the age
+of fifty-seven--and yourself--to embark upon a brand new business, in
+which neither of you have had the slightest experience."
+
+But such was the old New Yorker's faith in these men that he sold them
+the huge bill of merchandise, some $45,000, under which they embarked
+their business, saying that they could pay him, one-third in cash, and
+that he could well afford to wait two or even three years for the
+balance.
+
+He did not have to wait that long. Again the business--in the hands of
+hard-working born merchandisers--prospered, from the very instant of its
+beginning. It opened for selling and made its first sale, June 1, 1866.
+And again within a few short weeks, L. Straus & Son was demanding more
+room for expansion, and getting it--this time in the form of a ground
+floor and basement of that same building in Chambers Street. It was
+still both new and young, however. Its hired employees were but three: a
+packer, his helper and a selector, or stock-room man. Isidor Straus ran
+all the details of the store, opening it and closing it each day and
+acting as its book-keeper, until a year later when Nathan Straus came
+into the organization, becoming its first salesman. The business was
+getting ahead. Despite the difficulties and the humbleness of its start
+it had sold more than $60,000 worth of goods, in the first twelve months
+of its existence.
+
+"That they were hard months, I could not deny," said Isidor Straus of
+them in after years. "We had bought our house in West Forty-ninth
+Street, so that we might have our family life together, just as we had
+had in those pleasant Georgia days of before the war. More than once we
+contemplated selling the house so that we might put the proceeds in the
+business, but always at the last moment we were able to avoid that great
+catastrophe."
+
+And soon the necessity of ever selling the house was past. Prosperity
+multiplied. The firm went beyond selling the ordinary grades of
+crockery, which America had only known up to that time--serviceable
+stuff, but thick and clumsy and heavy--and began the importation upon a
+huge and increasing scale, of the more delicate and beautiful porcelains
+of Europe. It added manufacturing to its importations. It became an
+authority upon fine China. And Nathan Straus, its salesman, had to
+scurry to keep apace with its growth--already he was becoming known as a
+super-salesman. He extended his territory to the West and in 1869--the
+year of the completion of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific
+Railroads--was going to the West Coast in search for customers. Two
+years later--a few weeks after the great fire--he opened a
+selling-office for the firm in Chicago.
+
+"Yet I do not like this travel," he said a little later to his brother.
+"Not only is it very hard, physically, but I find that as soon as I get
+away from it the orders fall off. We have to work too hard for the
+volume of profit in hand."
+
+With this idea firmly in his mind he began a more intensive cultivation
+of the fields closer at hand. Some of the establishments of New York
+that later were to develop already were in their beginnings. There was
+that smart New Englander up at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue--that
+man Macy, whose store already was beginning to be the talk of the town.
+Nathan Straus thought that he would go up and see Rowland H. Macy. And
+one of the oldest employees of the store still recalls seeing him come
+into the place, for the first time in his life, on a Saint Patrick's
+Day--it probably was March 17, 1874--with a paper package under his arm
+which contained a couple of fine porcelain plates.
+
+Macy was a good prospect. For one thing, remember that he bought as well
+as sold for cash, and for cash alone. Credit played little or no part in
+his fortunes. New York had refused him credit when first he came to her
+and he had learned to do without it. Macy was not alone a good prospect
+from that point of view but he was, as we have already seen--a man
+constantly seeking novelty. Straus and his porcelain plates interested
+him immensely. And the upshot of that first call was the assignment of a
+space in the basement of the store, about twenty-five by one hundred
+feet in all, which L. Straus & Sons rented and owned. That was not a
+common custom at that time, although a little later it became a very
+popular one, and, I think, prevails to a slight extent even in these
+days. The Straus experiment in the basement of the Macy store paved the
+way. It having succeeded remarkably well within a short time after its
+inception, other and similar departments were established elsewhere; at
+R. H. White's, in Boston, at John Wanamaker's, in Philadelphia, at
+Wechsler & Abraham's, in Brooklyn, and in a Chicago store which long
+since passed from existence.
+
+
+Here, after all, was perhaps the real incarnation of the
+department-store in America, as we know it today, and as it is
+distinguished from the dry-goods store of other days which, as natural
+auxiliaries and corollaries to its business, had long since added to the
+mere selling of dress-goods that of hosiery, boots and shoes,
+underclothing, ribbons, hats and other _finesse_, both of women's and of
+men's apparel. We have seen long since the versatile Miss Getchell
+adding groceries to Macy's departments--and then for a time withdrawing
+them--afterwards toys, which were never withdrawn. Even then the
+department-store idea was gradually being born; with the establishment
+of the Straus crockery store in the basement of the downtown Macy's it
+came into the fine flower of its youth.
+
+For fourteen years this arrangement prospered and progressed--grew
+greatly in public favor. The store, as we have seen, had passed out of
+the hands of its original proprietors. Death had claimed four of
+them--within a short period of barely thirty months. And a new
+generation had come in. But within a decade of the time that he had
+entered the organization, one of the partners of this second generation,
+Mr. Wheeler, was considering leaving it. Colorado had fascinated him. To
+Colorado he must go. To Colorado he did go. He sold his interest to his
+partner, Mr. Webster, who in turn sold it to Isidor and Nathan Straus.
+The crockery counter had absorbed the great store which it had entered
+so humbly but fourteen years before, as a mere tenant of one of its tiny
+corners.
+
+Now were there indeed real guiding hands upon the enterprise. Force and
+energy and ability had come to direct the fortunes of what was already
+probably the largest merchandising establishment within the entire land.
+A family which had not known failure, save as a spur to repeated
+efforts, had come into control. It had everything to gain by the venture
+and it did not propose to lose.
+
+The actual consolidation and transfer of interests took place on January
+1, 1888. Mr. Webster, as has already been recorded, retained his actual
+interest in the store until 1896, when he retired, disposing of it to
+his partners but maintaining an office in their building until his
+death, in 1916. He gave way deferentially, however, to the Straus energy
+and Straus experience. The effects of these were visible from the
+beginning.
+
+The personality of the Straus family had, of course, become well
+identified with the store long before the accomplishment of its
+reorganization. The crockery department had grown to one of its really
+huge features. In it Nathan Straus was perhaps more often seen than
+Isidor, who always was of a quieter and more retiring nature. Many of
+the employees remember how Nathan Straus came to the store on the
+morning of the first day of the blizzard of March, 1888. By some strange
+fatality that morning had been appointed weeks in advance as the
+store's annual Spring Millinery Opening--a vernal festival of more than
+passing interest to a considerable proportion of New York's population.
+The actual morning found the city far more interested in getting its
+milk and bread than its straw-hats for oncoming summer. A large number
+of the employees of the millinery department who had remained in the
+store late the preceding evening in order to complete the preparations
+of the great event were compelled to remain there the entire night,
+being both fed and housed by the firm. They were there when Nathan
+Straus arrived. Even the elevated railroad which he and many others had
+looked upon as a reliance after the complete and early collapse of the
+surface lines, had finally broken under the unparalleled fierceness of
+the storm. And Nathan Straus, after arriving on a train within a
+comparatively few blocks of the store, was long delayed there, between
+the stations, and finally came to the street on a ladder and made his
+way to the store through the very teeth of the gale.
+
+That was dramatic. It was not so dramatic when, time and time again,
+both he and his brother, Isidor, would insist upon bundling themselves
+in all sorts of disagreeable weather and going downtown or up, because
+an old employee of L. Straus & Son was to be buried or a new one of the
+retail store was ill. The fidelity and the inherent affection of these
+men was marked more than once by those who work with and for them. And
+what it gave to the store in _esprit-de-corps_--in the thing which we
+have very recently come to know as morale--cannot easily be estimated.
+
+In this, its fourth decade, many distinguished New Yorkers still came
+to the store. One remembers a President of the United States who came
+often and who brought his Secretary of the Treasury with him more than
+once. The President was Grover Cleveland and his Secretary of the
+Treasury was John G. Carlisle and they were both intimate friends of the
+brothers Straus. And there came often among customers and friends the
+late Russell Sage. Macy's sold an unlaundered shirt, linen bosom and
+cuffs with white cotton back and at a fixed price of sixty-eight cents,
+which seemed to have a vast appeal to Mr. Sage. Yet he never purchased
+many at a time--never more than two or three. He was a financier and did
+not believe in tying up unnecessary capital.
+
+To the store from time to time came Mrs. Paran Stevens. And one day
+while waiting for Mr. Hibbon of the housefurnishing department, she told
+Miss Julia Neville, one of the women on the floor there, that while upon
+an extended trip abroad she had written instructions to her agents in
+this country to sell certain of her personal belongings and that upon
+her return she was astounded to find that a glass toilet set, which she
+had purchased at Macy's for but ninety-nine cents and from which the
+price-mark had long since been removed had been sold by them at auction
+for one hundred dollars!
+
+
+
+
+V. The Store Treks Uptown
+
+
+With the beginning of a new century New York was once again in turmoil.
+Always a restless city, the year 1900 found her suffering severe growing
+pains. Manhattan Island seemingly was not large enough for the city that
+demanded elbow room upon it. Moreover, a distinct factor in the growth
+of New York was not only planned but under construction. Its final
+completion--in 1904--was already being anticipated. I am referring to
+the subway. After a quarter of a century of talk and even one or two
+rather futile actual experiments, a real rapid-transit railroad up and
+down the backbone of Manhattan finally was under way. As originally
+planned it extended from the City Hall up Lafayette Street and Fourth
+Avenue to the Grand Central Station, at which point it turned an abrupt
+right angle and proceeded through Forty-second Street to Times Square,
+where it again turned abruptly--north this time--into Broadway, which it
+followed almost to the city line; first to the Harlem River at
+Kingsbridge and eventually to its present terminus at Van Cortlandt
+Park. A branch line, thrusting itself toward the east from Ninety-sixth
+Street, emerged upon an elevated structure which it followed to the
+Bronx Park and Zoological Gardens.
+
+Before this original section of the subway was completed it already was
+in process of extension toward the south; from the City Hall to and
+under the South Ferry to Brooklyn which it reached in two successive
+leaps; the first to the Borough Hall (the old Brooklyn City Hall) and
+the second to the Atlantic Avenue station of the Long Island Railroad,
+which has remained its terminus until within the past twelvemonth. More
+recently the original subway system of Greater New York has been so
+changed and enlarged as to all but lose sight of the original plan.
+Instead of a single main-stem up the backbone of New York, there are now
+two parallel trunks--the one on the east side of the town and the other
+upon the west--and the now isolated link of the original main line in
+Forty-second Street has become a shuttle service from the Grand Central
+Station to Times Square and the crossbar of the letter "H" which forms
+the rough plan of the entire system. Still other underground railroads
+have come to supplement the vast task of this original system. It is
+more than a decade since the energy of William G. McAdoo completed the
+Hudson River Tubes, which an earlier generation had had the vision but
+not the ability to build, and brought their upper stem through and under
+Sixth Avenue and to a terminal at Herald Square; while even more
+recently the huge and far-reaching Brooklyn Rapid Transit system has
+appropriated Broadway, Manhattan, for a vastly elongated terminal; which
+takes the concrete form of a four-tracked underground railroad beneath
+that world-famed street all the way from the City Hall to Times Square
+and above that point through Seventh Avenue to Fifty-ninth Street and
+Central Park; and thence across the Queensborough Bridge.
+
+It was the original subway, however, that brought the great real-estate
+upheaval to New York. Many years before it was completed New York had
+been moving steadily uptown--shrewd observers used to say at the rate of
+ten of the short city blocks each ten years. But its progress had been
+slow and dignified--relatively at least. With the coming of the new
+subway, dignity in this movement was thrown to the four winds. A mad
+rush uptown. Wholesale firms abandoned the structures that had housed
+them for years in the business districts south of Fourteenth Street and
+began to look for newer and larger quarters north of that important
+cross-town thoroughfare. The retail world of New York was far slower to
+be influenced by the change. For one thing, its investment in permanent
+structures was relatively much higher than that of the wholesale. Folk
+who came from afar and who marveled at the elegance of Sixth Avenue as a
+shopping street, all the way from Thirteenth to Twenty-third, could
+hardly have conceived that within two decades it would become dusty,
+forlorn, practically deserted. No matter that the hotel life of New York
+had ascended well to the north of Twenty-third, that the theaters were
+beginning to gather even north of Thirty-fourth, that a few small,
+smart, exclusive shops were showing signs of joining the trek--there
+remained the realty investment in the department stores at Sixth Avenue.
+It seemed incredible that such a huge investment should be thrown to
+the winds. Yet this was the very thing that actually was accomplished.
+
+Macy's stood to lose less in an economic sense from a move uptown than
+any of its competitors. True it was that the firm had builded for its
+own account in Fourteenth Street, just east of the original store, a
+very handsome, steel-constructed, stone-fronted building which it had
+thrown into the older building in order to relieve the pressure upon it.
+Across the way, on the north side of Fourteenth Street, it had put up at
+an even earlier date a substantial seven-story store for the use of its
+greatly expanded furniture department. The original store, however,
+stood upon leased land--the property of the Rhinelander Estate. One of
+the earliest of the stories about Mr. Macy concerns the coming of George
+Rogers, the agent of the estate and his warm personal friend as well,
+each Monday morning; not for his rent; but to cash a check for thirty
+dollars. It was not hard to guess at his compensation.
+
+The increase in land rentals in the neighborhood and the fact that the
+firm could hardly hope ever to acquire an actual title to the valuable
+site of its main store, coupled with the steadily increasing trek
+uptown, caused the Macy management to consider seriously whether it
+would join in the northward movement. It soon would have to do one thing
+or the other. The old store was growing very old and very overcrowded.
+Moreover, it was, at the best, a makeshift, a jumbling together of one
+separate store after another in order to accommodate a business which
+forever refused to stay put. Under such conditions a scientific or
+efficient planning of the building had been quite out of the question.
+The real wonder was that the business had been conducted so well,
+against such a handicap.
+
+[Illustration: THE HERALD SQUARE OF ANTE-MACY DAYS
+
+In 1900, before the coming of the present store, Broadway at 34th Street
+gave but faint promise of its present importance]
+
+
+The move once considered was quickly determined upon. No other course
+seemingly would have been possible. To have erected a new store building
+upon a leasehold in a quarter of the town which presently might begin to
+slide backward--would have been a precarious experiment, to put it
+mildly. It must go uptown. The only question that really confronted the
+store was just where to go uptown. A site large enough for a huge
+department-store is not usually acquired overnight. Moreover, the
+necessity for secrecy in so important a step was obvious--the dangers of
+the mere suggestion of its becoming known were multifold.
+
+With these things clearly understood, the search for a new site was
+begun. Various ones were considered, but were finally rejected. For a
+time the firm considered buying the famous old Gilsey House and the
+property immediately adjoining it. Another site which appealed to it
+even more was the former site of the Broadway Tabernacle on the east
+side of Broadway, just north of Thirty-fourth Street--the site of the
+present Marbridge Building. The commanding prescience of this corner
+forced itself upon them. Sixth Avenue, an artery street north and south,
+threaded by electric surface-cars and the elevated railroad--the McAdoo
+Tubes had not then come into even a paper being--was crossed at acute
+angles by an even more important street--New York's incomparable
+Broadway--and at right angles by Thirty-fourth Street, which even then
+was giving promise of its coming importance. The original planners of
+the uptown city of New York made many serious mistakes in their
+far-seeing scheme. But they made no mistake when they took each half
+mile or so and made one of their cross streets into a thoroughfare as
+bold and as wide as one of their north and south avenues. Thirty-fourth
+was one of the streets picked out for such importance. And from the
+beginning it realized the judgment of its planners. The completion of
+the huge Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1897 (the earlier or Waldorf side in
+Thirty-third Street had been finished in 1893) had fixed the importance
+of the street. Thirteen years later the opening of the Pennsylvania
+Station was to confirm it--for all time.
+
+In 1900 the vast plan of the Pennsylvania Railroad for the invasion of
+Manhattan was as yet unknown. Even in the main offices of that railroad,
+in Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, it still was most inchoate and
+fragmentary. In the language of the moment, Macy's was "acting on its
+own." The store was using its own powers of foreseeing--and using them
+very well indeed.
+
+But the site on the east side of Herald Square was not to be. In free
+titles it was not nearly large enough. But the west side of the square!
+There was a possibility. If the new store could be builded there it not
+only could possess an actual Broadway frontage but it would be set so
+far back from the elevated railroad as not to be bothered by its noise
+or smoke, even in the slightest degree. As a matter of fact the last
+already was disappearing. The electric third-rail system was being
+installed everywhere upon the Manhattan system, and the pertinacious,
+puffy little locomotives, which so long had been a feature of New York
+town, were doomed to an early disappearance.
+
+The west side of Herald Square appealed to Macy's. Long and exacting
+searches into its land-titles were made. Some three hundred feet back of
+Broadway the magnificent new theater of Koster & Bial's, extending all
+the way from Thirty-fourth Street to Thirty-fifth, backed up a tract
+which in the main was occupied by comparatively low buildings, the most
+of them brown-stone residences, which already were in the course of
+transformation into small business places. This tract seemingly was
+quite large enough for the new Macy's--with the possible exception,
+perhaps, of its engine-room and mechanical departments. The firm decided
+to take it, and with a policy of magnificent secrecy began negotiations
+for its lease. In order to accommodate the engine and machinery rooms it
+purchased a tract upon the north side of Thirty-fifth Street just back
+of the former Herald Square Theater. On this last land stood two of New
+York's most notorious resorts of twenty years ago--the Pekin and the
+Tivoli. The development of the Macy plan drove them out of the street
+and, for the time being at least, out of business.
+
+
+The Macy plan did not go through to a final culmination, however, quite
+as it had been laid out. So huge a scheme and one involving so many
+separate real-estate transactions is hard to keep a secret for any great
+length of time. Gradually the news of Macy's contemplated step became
+public property. It caused public astonishment and public acclaim. For,
+remember, if you will, that in 1900, none of the department stores had
+moved uptown north of Twenty-third Street. Bloomingdale's was at Third
+Avenue and Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth Streets, but it was a gradual
+upgrowth, from a modest beginning upon that original important corner.
+The last move had been in 1862, when A. T. Stewart had moved his store
+from Chambers Street north to Ninth. The cost of the lot and structure
+to Mr. Stewart was $2,750,000--a stupendous figure in that day.
+
+
+The publicity surrounding the proposed move of Macy's found the Straus
+family still without one of the plots necessary to the complete
+acquisition of all the land in the block east of Koster & Bial's. It was
+the small but important northwest corner of Broadway and Thirty-fourth
+Street--a mere thirty by fifty feet, a remnant of an ancient farm whose
+zig-zag boundaries antedated the coming of the city plan and showed a
+seeming fine contempt for it. This tiny parcel was the property of an
+old-time New Yorker, the Rev. Duane Pell. Dr. Pell was on an extended
+trip in Europe in 1901, when Macy's began the active acquisition of its
+new store-site. It was given to understand that his asking price for the
+small corner was $250,000; an astonishing figure for such a tiny bit of
+land, even today, but Dr. Pell felt that he held the key to the entire
+important Herald Square corner and that he was justified in asking any
+price for it that he saw fit to ask.
+
+While the plot was so small as to afford very little to it in the way of
+actual floor space the Macy management felt that it was so essential to
+the appearance of the store that it agreed to come to Dr. Pell's
+price--and so cabled him; in Spain. Word came back that he was about to
+embark for New York and that he would take up the entire matter
+immediately upon his arrival.
+
+
+A few years before the Macy organization planned to be the initial
+department-store to move uptown, Henry Siegel, a Chicago merchant, who
+had achieved a somewhat spectacular and ephemeral success in that city,
+decided upon the invasion of New York. He came to Manhattan and in Sixth
+Avenue, midway between Fourteenth and Twenty-third Streets, erected a
+store which for a time duplicated the success of its Chicago
+predecessor. The proposed move of the Macy store apparently filled him
+with consternation. With a good deal of prophetic vision he foresaw that
+other Sixth Avenue stores would go uptown in its wake. His own
+investment in that street was too great and too recent to be
+jeopardized.
+
+Siegel hit upon the idea of stepping into the old site and building at
+Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue as soon as the Macy organization
+should vacate. But to desire that valuable location and to secure it
+were two vastly different things. The Strauses were not asleep to the
+possibility of some one attempting such a move. It would not be the
+first time in merchandising history. They arranged carefully therefore
+that their old corner at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue should
+remain entirely empty for two years after they had moved out from it.
+The moral and educational effect of such a hiatus was not to be
+underestimated.
+
+In the meantime the Chicago man was busy on his own behalf. Through his
+realty agents he had quickly discovered Dr. Duane Pell's ownership of
+the corner point of the new Macy plot. He also found that the dominie
+was already on his return to the United States. He entrusted to a
+faithful representative the task of meeting him at the steamer-pier. The
+agent was there, bright and early, to meet the boat, and within a
+half-hour of its docking Siegel had acquired the north-west corner of
+Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street.
+
+Now was the Chicagoan in a strategic position to do business with the
+Macy concern. At least so he felt. The concern felt differently. As far
+as it was concerned the corner point had sentimental value; nothing
+else. We already have seen how slight was its floor-space. Without
+hesitation it turned its back upon the tiny corner, and with the money
+that it had intended investing in it, purchased the leasehold of the
+huge theater of Koster & Bial--about twenty thousand square feet of
+ground space--which enabled it to place its mechanical departments
+(engine-rooms and the like) in its main building, and so to leave the
+former Tivoli and Pekin sites for the moment unimproved. This done, it
+turned its attention to the gentleman from Chicago. It leased him the
+premises at Fourteenth Street at a much higher figure than it would have
+been glad to rent them to another concern, and under the provisions that
+they should not be occupied until at least two years after the removal
+of the parent concern from them and that the name "Macy" should never
+again appear on the buildings of that site.
+
+With the site difficulties cleared up, the actual construction problems
+of the enterprise were entered upon. Nineteen hundred and one was born
+before Macy's was enabled to begin the wholesale destruction of the many
+buildings upon its new site. The job of clearing the site and erecting
+the new building was entrusted to the George A. Fuller Company, which
+had just completed the sensational Flatiron Building at the apex of
+Fifth Avenue and Broadway at Twenty-third Street, and it was one of the
+first, if not the very first of the building contracts in New York where
+the estimates were based upon the cubic feet contents. DeLomas and
+Cordes, who had had a considerable success in the planning of one or two
+of the more recent department stores in the lower Sixth Avenue district,
+were chosen as the architects of the new building. Before they entered
+upon the actual drawing of the plans they made an extended study of such
+structures, both in the United States and abroad. The new building
+represented the last word in department store design and construction.
+Nine stories in height and with 1,012,500 square feet of floor-space, it
+was designed not only to handle great throngs of shoppers each day but
+the multifold working details of service to them, with the greatest
+expedition, and economy. To do this it was estimated that there would
+be required fourteen passenger elevators, ten freight elevators and
+seven sidewalk elevators of the most recent type. Four escalators were
+installed running from the main floor to the fifth. It is to be noted,
+too, that these escalators were the very first to be installed in which
+the step upon which the passenger rides is held continuously horizontal.
+In the older types the ascending floor is held at an awkward angle of
+ascension and foothold is maintained only by the attaching of steel
+cleats at right angles to it.
+
+Lighting, ventilation, plumbing, all these received in turn the most
+careful consideration and planning. For instance, it was determined
+quite early in the progress of the planning for the new Macy store that
+it should be ventilated entirely by great fans, which, sucking the air
+in ducts down from the roof, would heat it or cool it, as the
+necessities of the season might demand, before distributing it through
+another duct to the working floors of the building. In this way the
+close and stuffy atmosphere somewhat common to old-time department
+stores when filled with patrons was entirely obviated in this new one.
+
+When we come to the consideration of the everyday workings of the Macy
+store today we shall see how well these architects of twenty years ago
+planned its details. We shall not see, however, one of the most
+interesting of them. When it was originally builded, by far the greater
+part of its ninth floor was devoted to a huge exhibition hall. Within a
+short time this room was in a fair way to become as famous as the
+larger auditorium of Madison Square Garden. In it were held
+poultry-shows, flower shows, even one of the very first automobile
+shows. Within a few years after its opening, however, the business of
+the store had grown to such proportions that it was found necessary to
+give its great space to the more mundane business of direct selling.
+
+The problem of the corner tip there at Thirty-fourth and Broadway was
+quickly overcome. If the new owner of that point had counted upon the
+new store which completely encircled him turning tens of thousands of
+folk past it each day he was doomed to disappointment. For Macy's made
+its own corner by means of a broad arcade entirely within the cover of
+its own huge roof; an inside street, lined with show-windows upon either
+side and giving, in wet weather as well as fine, a dry and handsome
+passageway direct from Broadway into Thirty-fourth Street.
+
+The original suggestion for such an arcade came in an anonymous letter
+to the original architects of the building. Only within the past year or
+two has this passageway been abandoned. The demands of the business for
+more elbow-room are voracious and apparently unceasing. And the space
+that the arcade consumed became entirely too great to be used any longer
+for such a purpose.
+
+
+In that summer of 1901, while the architects and contractors were busy
+at their plans and specifications, there was wholesale and systematic
+devastation upon such a scale as New York has rarely ever seen. Such
+pullings down and tearings away! The scene was not without its drama at
+any time. The writer well remembers strolling into the Koster & Bial
+Music Hall on an evening during that season of destruction. There was no
+one to bar his passage into what, at the time of its opening, but eight
+short years before, had been New York's most elaborate playhouse. If his
+glance had not been turned downward there was nothing to indicate that
+the evening performance might not easily begin within the hour. Upwards
+the great auditorium of red and gold was immaculate. The proscenium, the
+tier upon tier of balcony and of gallery, the dozens of upholstered
+boxes, the exquisitely decorated ceiling had not been touched.
+
+But if the eye glanced downward--what a difference! The main floor and
+its row upon row of heavy plush chairs was entirely gone. In their place
+was a mucky black sea of mud; a knee-high morass, if you please, in
+which a dozen contractor's wagons, hauled and tugged unevenly by squads
+of lunging mules and horses in their traces, circled in and circled
+out--inbound empty and outbound laden deep with their muddy burden. On
+the stage, back of what had once been the footlights and in the same
+place where the darling Carmencita had once been wont to make her bow,
+stood a shirt-sleeved gang-boss. On either side of him,
+spotlights--things theatrical yanked from the memories of
+yesteryear--threw their radiance down into the auditorium and the motley
+audience it held.
+
+So went Koster & Bial's, the pet plaything of joyous New York in its
+Golden Age. In a short time the scaffolding was to rise in that mighty
+amphitheater and the decorations to come tumbling down. Gang upon gang
+to the roof; more gangs still to the stout sidewalls, brick by brick;
+down they came until Koster & Bial's was no more. Its site was marked by
+a huge and gaping hole in the subsoil of Manhattan.
+
+There were other phases of that tearing-down that were less dramatic and
+more comic. A restaurant-keeper who had a small eating place on the
+Broadway side of the site sought obdurately to hold out in his
+location--seeking an advantageous cash settlement from the store owners.
+His lease, perfectly good, still had from sixty to ninety days to run.
+He felt that the store could not wait that length of time upon
+him--that, in the language of the street, it would be forced to "come
+across." But it did not "come across." It was not built that way. It was
+built on either side of the restaurant. Its steel girders were far above
+its tiny walls and spanning one another across its ceiling before its
+disappointed proprietor moved out--at the end of his perfectly good
+lease--and without one cent of bonus money in his pocket; after which it
+was almost a matter of mere hours to tear the flimsy structure away and
+remove a small segment of earth that held it up to street level. A
+barber around the corner in Thirty-fourth street caught his cue from the
+restaurant. He, too, was going to stand pat. But he was not in the same
+strategic position as the _restaurateur_. He had no lease. He merely was
+going to stay and defy the wreckers. They would not dare to touch his
+neat, immaculate shop.
+
+They did dare. On the very night that his lease expired something
+happened to the business enterprise of the razor-wielder. A cyclone must
+have struck it. At least that was the way it looked. The barber, coming
+down to business on the morrow, found his movables upon the sidewalk,
+neatly piled together and covered by tarpaulins against the weather. But
+the shop was gone. Where it had stood on the close of the preceding day
+was a deep hole in the ground; and three Italian workmen were whistling
+the Anvil Chorus.
+
+
+About the tenth of October, 1901, actual construction began on the new
+building. On the first day of November of the following year it was
+complete--or practically so. It was a record for building, even in New
+York, which is fairly used to records of that sort. A steel-framed
+nine-story building, approximately four hundred feet on Thirty-fourth
+and Thirty-fifth Streets, by one hundred and eighty feet on Broadway
+(widening to two hundred feet at the west end of the store), with
+1,012,500 square feet of floor-space, and 13,500,000 cubic feet in all,
+had been erected in a trifle over six months. In the meanwhile the
+wisdom of the Macy choice of location was already being made evident. A
+Washington concern--Saks and Company--was on its way toward Herald
+Square. It took the west side of Broadway for the block just south of
+Thirty-fourth Street, and by dint of great effort and because its
+building was considerably smaller in area, succeeded in getting into it
+ahead of Macy's.
+
+Herald Square! There was, and still is, a site well worth rushing
+toward. We have seen already the strategic advantages of the new site,
+even as far back as 1902, long before the coming of the great
+Pennsylvania Station just back of it at Seventh Avenue. Ever since 1890,
+when the remarkable vision of the late James Gordon Bennett had seen the
+crossing of Broadway and Sixth Avenue as the finest possible location
+for his beloved _Herald_ and had torn down the little old armory in the
+gorge between these two thoroughfares, Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth
+Streets, to build a Venetian palace for it there, the square had been a
+veritable hub for the vast activities of New York. Hotels, shops and
+theaters sprang up roundabout it. And the coming of what is one of the
+finest, if not the very largest, of the great railroad terminals of the
+land but multiplied its real importance.
+
+
+The actual moving from the old store to the new was a herculean task.
+Yet it was accomplished within three days--which means that large
+enterprise was reduced through the perfection of system to a rather
+ordinary one. This could not have been if all its details and its
+possibilities had not been anticipated long in advance and planned
+against.
+
+The job was undertaken by the store itself; through its delivery
+department, in charge of Mr. James Price, with Mr. James Woods as his
+very active assistant. Both of these men are veteran employees of
+Macy's. The service record of the one of them reaches to forty-one years
+and the other to forty-eight. They knew full well the size of the
+moving-day task that confronted them. To pick up a huge New York
+department-store and carry it twenty uptown blocks--almost an even
+mile--was a deal of a contract. Yet neither of them flinched at it. But
+both put on their thinking-caps and evolved a definite plan for it--a
+plan which in all its details worked without a hitch.
+
+The old store closed its doors for the final time at six o'clock in the
+evening of Monday, November 3, 1902. The following day was Election Day.
+The movers voted early. They came to the Fourteenth Street store not
+long after daybreak and there began the great trek uptown--stock and
+fixtures. For three days they kept a steady procession; west through
+Fourteenth Street, then north through Seventh Avenue--to
+Thirty-fourth--from the old store to the new--and the empty wagons
+returning down through Sixth Avenue to Fourteenth Street once again. The
+entire route was carefully patrolled by special guards and policemen,
+and the entire task finally accomplished late on Thursday evening, the
+6th, at which Mr. Isidor Straus was called on the telephone and told
+quietly:
+
+"We shall be able to open tomorrow if you wish it."
+
+But the head of the house advised that the opening be set for Saturday,
+as had been advertised; it would give a final valuable day for setting
+things to rights, which meant that at eight o'clock on the morning of
+Saturday, November 8, the new store opened its doors to the public that
+was anxiously awaiting the much heralded event; with as much simplicity
+and seeming ease as if it had been situated at Thirty-fourth Street for
+the entire forty-four years of its life, instead of but a mere
+twenty-four hours. A great task had been accomplished, a long step
+forward safely taken--and Macy's was ready to enter upon a new decade of
+its existence.
+
+
+In its wake there came uptown the other department-stores of New York;
+one by one until, with but three exceptions, every one of these
+establishments which had been situated south of Twenty-third Street and
+which are still in business today, had joined in the trek. Lord &
+Taylor's left its comfortable home at Broadway and Twentieth Street, in
+which it had been housed for nearly half a century since coming north
+from its original location in Grand Street, and moved to Fifth Avenue
+and Thirty-ninth; its ancient neighbor in Broadway, Arnold Constable &
+Company, stood again almost cheek by jowl in Fifth Avenue. McCreery's,
+first establishing an uptown branch in Thirty-fourth Street, eventually
+abandoned its older store in Twenty-third Street and consolidated its
+energies in the upper one. Mr. Altman moved his business to its new
+marble palace at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth, and Stern's went as far
+north as Forty-second. Lower Sixth Avenue began to look like a deserted
+village. Simpson-Crawford's, Greenhut's, Adam's, O'Neill's--one by one
+these closed their doors for the final time. Once, and that was but two
+decades ago, they had been household words among the women of New York.
+Now their buildings were emptied, stood empty and deserted for months
+and for years--in most cases until the coming of the Great War and our
+participation in it, when the Government was very glad to make use of
+their spacious floors for war manufacturing and for hospitalization. Of
+Macy's old-time competitors downtown who failed to join in the uptown
+movement, but three remained--Wanamaker's, Daniell's and Hearn's, who
+stood and still stand pat and prosperous in the locations which they
+have occupied for almost half a century.
+
+The rest are all gone. Twenty-third Street, which of a Saturday
+afternoon used to be filled from Fifth Avenue to Sixth with smart folk
+of every sort, is as dull as the deserted lower Sixth Avenue. Memories
+walk its spacious pavements. The Eden Musee, that paradise for youth of
+an earlier generation, is vanished. So is the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which
+for forty years played so large a part in the political history of the
+town. That part of New York today is all but dead--inside of twenty
+years. Some day hence it may be reborn. Such things have come to pass in
+the big town ere now.
+
+In the meantime the newest New York has come into its being. The
+construction of the two modern railroad terminals--the one in
+Thirty-third Street and the other in Forty-second--has created in the
+district that lies between them what today would seem to be the
+permanent retail shopping center of the city. The one station brings
+nearly 60,000 folk--transients and commuters--the other almost 100,000,
+into New York each business day. They anchor and anchor firmly, its new
+business heart. Its sidewalks are daily thronged. As was Twenty-third
+Street two decades ago, so has Thirty-fourth become today. Not only the
+railroad stations but four great subways running north and south, four
+elevated railways, too, a dozen surface-car lines, and innumerable taxis
+and private motor-cars pour their passengers into it. It is a
+thoroughfare of surpassing importance.
+
+[Illustration: THE MACY'S OF TODAY
+
+By 1903 the new Macy's in Herald Square was finished and the business
+going forward in great strides]
+
+
+Fifty years ago, as Rowland H. Macy walked home one evening with his
+daughter--as was his frequent wont--from the simple little old red-brick
+store in Fourteenth Street to their new house in Forty-ninth, he paused
+for a moment with her in front of the old Broadway Tabernacle.
+
+"I want you to notice this corner, very carefully, Florence," said he.
+"A half-century hence and the business of New York is to be centered
+between Thirty-fourth Street and Forty-second. Here is to be the future
+business heart of this wonderful city."
+
+It is upon the vision of men quite as much as upon their prudence that
+the success of their enterprises depends.
+
+
+
+
+_Today_
+
+
+
+
+I. A Day in a Great Store
+
+
+The subtle hour which in summer comes just before the break of day is
+the only hour in which New York ever sleeps; if indeed the modern Bagdad
+ever sleeps at all. There is an hour, however--from three of the morning
+until four--when the city is all but stilled; when its heart-beats are
+at the lowest ebb of the twenty-four. In that hour even Broadway is
+nearly deserted and Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street equally
+emptied. The swinging lights of a white-fronted lunch-room or two; the
+echoing racket of an extremely occasional surface-car or elevated train;
+the rush of a "night-hawk" taxi; the clatter of the milk-wagon; the
+measured walk of a policeman and the hurried one of some much belated
+suburbanite hurrying toward the great railroad station over in Seventh
+Avenue; these sounds, occasional and unrelated seemingly, are not New
+York; not at least the New York that you and I are accustomed to
+knowing. Yet, after all, they are New York; even, if you please, the New
+York of that throbbing heart, Herald Square.
+
+Soon after four in the morning the city begins to rise. New York's
+heart-beat is quickening, distinctly, even though ever and ever so
+slightly at the beginning. Yet the activity is distinguishable. The
+policemen and the cabbies in the square realize it, so do the waiter
+and the cook in the _Firefly_ lunch wagon which has stood in the busy
+Herald Square these thirty years or more now. The morning papers are
+out. The newspaper wagons, as well as those that bring milk and other
+comestibles, begin to multiply. The earliest workers in the heart of
+Manhattan now bestir themselves. By six there is real animation in the
+broad streets in and roundabout Macy's. By seven the traffic there
+begins to be a matter of reckoning. A traffic policeman makes his
+appearance. The current of vehicles and humans in those thoroughfares
+come under regulation. At eight, the city is in full sway.
+
+
+All this while Macy's has stood dark--save for the few yellow and red
+lights which police and fire protection demand. It fronts toward
+Broadway and the side streets alike are cold, impassive, unanimated.
+Inside the great dark building the watchmen are on ceaseless patrol.
+There are miles of corridors to be paced--the night walking of the Macy
+watchmen would reach from Dan to Beersheba or possibly from New York to
+Erie--millions of dollars worth of stock and fixtures to be guarded. A
+diamond ring would be missed; and so would a spool of thread. Nothing
+must be disturbed. And in order that the owners of the store may sleep
+in the sound assurance that nothing is being disturbed, the night patrol
+is made a matter of system and of record. Watchmen's clocks, here and
+there and everywhere, proclaim the regularity of the system. And an
+occasional surprise test now and then acclaims its thoroughness.
+
+Hours before, the store was thoroughly cleaned; from cellar to roof.
+The last of yesterday's belated shoppers was hardly out of this
+market-place, before the men of the cleaning squads were in upon their
+heels. What a mess to be tidied up! Eight and one-half hours of hard
+endeavor can make daily a mighty dirty store and a huge housekeeping
+job. There is at the best a vast litter--and yet a litter that cannot be
+carelessly thrust away. In all that debris there may be some one tiny
+article of great value--a ring or a purse, dropped by some hasty or
+careless shopper or salesgirl. It all must be carefully gone through and
+in the morning sent to the Lost and Found Department where the chances
+are that it will not remain very long before having a claimant.
+
+Such is the ordinary routine of the cleaning squads. On rainy or snowy
+days its job is increased, measurably. It is astonishing the amount of
+filth the sidewalks of New York can give up on a wet day. Yet rain, or
+no rain, filth or no filth, the cleansing must be thorough. The store at
+eight o'clock of the next morning must be as clean as the proverbial
+pin. An earnest of which you can obtain for yourself any day by pressing
+your nose, among the first of the impatient early shoppers, against the
+panes of the public entrance doors. Through the night these toilers
+work; silently, unseen, save by others of their own kind. Far below
+them, in the cellars of the great structure at Thirty-fourth Street and
+Broadway, there are other squads who stand to unending tricks at the
+boilers, the engines, the dynamos and the other mechanical appliances of
+the organism. The fires may never die; the lights never go out--not
+even from one year's end to the other. And so that the very heart and
+blood and nerve-force of Macy's shall in truth be unending there are
+engines and boilers and dynamos in the mechanical plant under the
+Thirty-fourth Street sidewalks. As many as five hundred tons of coal can
+be housed in the bunkers hard at hand. The entire plant could easily
+light and supply the other necessary electric current for the needs of
+any brisk American town of five or six thousand people.
+
+
+Eight o'clock, and the night superintendent of the store unlocks the
+first of its outer doors. But not to the public. Mr. Public's hours do
+not begin until a full sixty minutes later. First the store must be made
+ready for his coming. It is not enough that it shall be thoroughly
+cleaned in every fashion. The stock must be displayed anew; the long
+miles of dust coverings lifted off, folded and put away until the coming
+of another evening. Which means, of course, that the store folk must
+come well in advance of its patrons.
+
+In the half-hour which elapses between eight and eight-thirty, many of
+the minor executives--particularly those of the selling floors--make
+their appearance at the designated doors upon the side streets. In the
+parlance of the organization these are known as "specials" and are
+divided into several classes, denoting chiefly their connection with its
+selling or non-selling forces. They "sign in" their arrival upon a
+sheet. For while Macy's is known as the department-store without a
+time-clock, there is none which is more punctilious about keeping an
+exact record of the comings and goings of its workers, from the lowest
+to the highest. In the entire permanent organization of more than five
+thousand folk, there are not more than ten or a dozen who are exempted
+from this necessity. A man may draw a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year
+salary at Macy's and still be compelled to sign his time. It is part of
+the inherent democracy of the organization which holds as a high
+principle that what is fair for one man is fair for another. A better
+bed-rock principle can hardly be imagined.
+
+
+Half after eight!
+
+A bell rings somewhere. The time-lists of the minor executives--perhaps
+it is better to remember them as the specials--are closed, and new ones
+substituted. These are duplicates of the earlier ones. When the section
+manager (a modern and much better name for the "floor-walker" of the
+earlier days) signs one of these, he does not merely put down an "X" as
+before eight-thirty, but specifically writes down his arriving time.
+
+But from eight-thirty to eight-forty-five is known to the rank and file
+of the organization as its hour for arrival. Three doors--one in
+Thirty-fourth Street (for the women, as well as for men executives) and
+two others, in Thirty-fifth Street (for the other men workers and the
+junior girls respectively) open on the precise moment of the half-hour.
+Even before they swing backward upon their hinges the earliest risers of
+the Macy family are beginning to group themselves in front of them.
+They go tramping up the broad stairs together; dropping into the slender
+receptacles the individual brass checks (of which much more a little
+later) at the first barrier-gateway; after which they go scurrying off
+to the locker-rooms, before descending or ascending to their various
+posts in the store.
+
+For fifteen minutes this rank and file--a miniature army it is--comes
+trooping in. There is no time to be lost; and yet no unseemly haste or
+confusion. And no noise. Noise, particularly surplus noise, is quite
+unnecessary in a machine which is functioning well.
+
+At eight-forty-five the barrier at the head of the main employees' stair
+at Thirty-fourth Street closes. And in order that there may not be even
+the slightest particle of unfairness--one gains an increasing admiration
+for the absolute impartiality of an organization such as this--the
+pressing of a button at that stairhead automatically orders closed the
+two auxiliary entrances in Thirty-fifth. And yet, in order perhaps that
+perfectly automatic and impartial systems may, after all, be tinged by a
+bit of human sympathy and understanding, eight-forty-five is forever
+translated at the employees' doors as eighty-forty-seven. And in cases
+of bad weather, hard rain or snow or extreme cold, eight-forty-seven
+becomes the stroke of nine by the clock--in very extreme cases even
+later, with a special allowance being made from time to time for the
+occasional breakdown of New York's rather temperamental transportation
+system.
+
+From eight-forty-five (eight-forty-seven) to nine o'clock, the
+late-comers--out of breath as a rule and extremely embarrassed into the
+bargain--are herded into a special group and given special "late"
+passes, without which they may not even enter the locker rooms, to say
+nothing of their posts in the store. Sometimes--when the tardiness
+percentages of the store have been running to unwonted heights--the
+group is admonished; always gently, always considerately. It is made to
+them a point of fairness, between the store and themselves. And almost
+invariably the admonition is received in the spirit in which it is
+given. In other days it was quite customary for the store manager or one
+of his several assistants to receive these late-comers personally and
+individually and talk to them, heart-to-heart. This method has now been
+entirely abolished. It led to controversy. It led to argument. And both
+of these led to ill-feeling. Macy's will not tolerate ill-feeling
+between its executives and its rank and file. Therefore, anything that
+might even tend to such an end was abolished--completely and
+permanently.
+
+
+In due time, and when we are studying in greater detail the Macy family,
+we shall come again to the consideration of the methods of checking the
+force in in the morning and out again at night--as well as in and out at
+different intervals throughout the day. Consider now that it is still
+lacking a few brief minutes of nine o'clock on a workday morning. The
+sales force are through the lockers and getting to their day's work upon
+the floor. The non-selling forces as well--elevator-men, cashiers, all
+the rest of them, are at their posts. A doorman is told off to each of
+the public street entrances to the main floor. It is the regular post
+for each of these. He goes to it a minute or two before the coming of
+nine.
+
+After a brief period of busy activity the store aisles are for the
+moment practically deserted once again. There is a group of buyers
+"signing in"--once again the inevitable time-list--at the
+superintendent's office just beneath the main stair, where five or ten
+minutes ago the "big chief" of the whole main floor was giving his
+section managers their special instructions for the day. The rest of the
+aisles are all but empty. The clerks are behind the desks, the cashiers
+at their posts, the section managers at attention, the elevators banked
+and waiting at the ground floor-- Then--
+
+Nine o'clock!
+
+The echo of Madison Square Mary telling the hour comes rolling up
+Broadway. The street doors swing open; almost as if working upon a
+single mechanism. The first of the shoppers come tumbling in. The great
+main aisle of the store--one thinks of it almost as the Broadway of this
+city within a city--is populated once again. The chief stream of the
+store's patrons pours down through it. Other streams from the doors in
+the side streets join it; still others diverge down the side aisles, up
+the stair and escalators, into the elevators which presently go packing
+off, one by one, toward the mysterious and fascinating regions of the
+upper floors. In three or four brief minutes the picture that one has of
+that mighty first floor from the mezzanine balcony that runs roundabout
+it is of a great mass of hurrying, scurrying humanity; no longer any
+well-defined currents, but little eddies and pools of human beings
+constantly and forever changing.
+
+And this but hardly past nine o'clock in the morning. In another hour
+there will be still more folk within the great building. Most of them
+have come to shop, a few of them to take a tardy breakfast in the
+comfortable restaurant upon its eighth floor. One might not think that
+it would pay to open a restaurant for breakfast at as late an hour as
+nine in the morning, but such a one would not know his New York.
+Breakfast in our big town is rarely over until the setting of the sun.
+
+
+For an hour at the beginning of the day the Macy family may shop in its
+own interest. The saleswomen--the men as well--may obtain permits from
+their division managers which in turn entitle them to large and
+conspicuous shopping cards which serve two pretty definite purposes--the
+identification of the saleswoman as an actual and authorized shopper
+(she is not supposed to go nosing around other departments merely in her
+own interest or curiosity) and the obtaining for her of the discount to
+which she is entitled. Macy's is known pretty generally as a store of no
+special privileges or discounts. Teachers, clergymen, professional
+shoppers, dressmakers are recognized and welcomed in the big store, but
+only upon the same terms as every other sort of customer. But the rule
+bends, ever and ever so gently, for the man or woman who is employed
+within it. After all, he or she _is_ a part of the family and so
+entitled to be recognized. This recognition takes the form of a sizable
+reduction upon the wearing apparel necessary for his or her personal
+use. This difference goes upon the books of the store as a business
+expense.
+
+By ten the store has finished shopping in its own behalf. Its maximum
+force for the day is on the job and the wise shopper comes close to this
+hour. For by eleven the force is reduced. Luncheon is a very simple
+human necessity; but a necessity, nevertheless. And New York has never
+countenanced the Parisian habit of locking up practically all shops and
+stores and offices for an hour and a half or two hours in the middle of
+the day. But then New York has never taken its meal-times quite so
+seriously as Paris. Upon this one thing alone a considerable essay might
+be written.
+
+But New York must lunch, just as Paris or London or any other community
+must lunch. And so for three valuable hours out of the middle of the day
+the Macy force is reduced nearly one-third its size. Forty-five minutes
+is the ordinary allotment for lunch and the house prefers that its folk
+shall take this mid-day meal underneath its roof. Toward this end it has
+made, as we shall see, elaborate and expensive preparations in the form
+of elaborate lunch-rooms and the like. However, it recognizes that there
+are many workers who prefer to go out at the middle of the day. And
+proper arrangements are made for the accommodation of these folk.
+
+
+By two o'clock, however, practically the entire selling force at least
+is back again. The hardest portion of the day begins. For, no matter
+how hard the store may advertise, no matter how it may strive to educate
+its patrons in every other way to the use of its facilities in the less
+crowded and hence more comfortable morning hours, the hard and solemn
+fact remains that it suits the comfort and convenience of the average
+New York woman to shop in the afternoon. And shop in the afternoon she
+does. She comes into Macy's right after luncheon--although a single
+glance at the big and crowded restaurant would easily convince you that
+she often lunches as well as shops in the big red-brick institution of
+Herald Square--and then gets right down to the serious business of
+shopping.
+
+And at Macy's it _is_ business; always business. The big store at
+Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, in recent years at least, has not
+gone in for shows--for organ and orchestral concerts or recitals or
+anything of that sort. It has considered that its best shows are always
+upon its counters. It has had no quarrel with the successful stores that
+have added entertainment features to the other routine of their
+operations. It merely has contended that its own method was completely
+satisfactory to itself. Which, after all, is a position of infinite
+strength.
+
+"Macy's attractions are its prices!" is an advertising slogan of the
+house so long sounded now that it has become almost a household phrase
+to its hundreds of thousands of regular patrons. It is a phrase up to
+which it has lived, steadily and consistently. And not only has it
+steadfastly refused to give shows of any sort--save, of course, those
+wonderful window pageants of other years, which were horses of quite a
+different color indeed--but it has also refused up to the present time
+to install such non-merchandise enterprises as manicuring parlors,
+hair-dressing rooms, barber shops and the like. And this despite the
+fact that in selling such things as groceries and automobile
+sundries--to take two specific instances out of several--it has gone
+considerably beyond the merchandise scope of some of the very largest of
+its New York competitors.
+
+"Hundreds of thousands of regular patrons?" you interrupt and repeat. "A
+hundred thousand people is a whole lot. Until very recently, at least,
+the population of what would be considered a pretty good-sized American
+city."
+
+Not long ago, I asked how many people came into Macy's in the passing of
+an average business day. I was promptly told that several times the firm
+had endeavored to make an actual and systematic count of the folk who
+passed through each of its many entrances, but had never entirely
+succeeded. Once, of a busy October day, the count up to two o'clock in
+the afternoon had reached and passed the one hundred and twenty thousand
+mark. At that time each of the great escalators which ascend from the
+main floor was handling its maximum capacity of 7,400 persons an hour;
+each of the fourteen public elevators was carrying the full number of
+passengers permitted it by law and the store management; while a host of
+other folk were doing business upon the ground floor without ever
+ascending to the fascinating mysteries of the land of Up-Above.
+
+And that was October. If a man who had seen the throng of that pleasant
+autumn day and thought it well-nigh impossible only had returned to the
+big store on a December day--say the Saturday before Christmas last--he
+would have thought that three hundred thousand would have been far
+nearer the mark of the eight and one-half hours. Could more folk have
+been squeezed through those wide doors and into those broad aisles? It
+would have seemed not. Even with the aid of a whole corps of special
+policemen and traffic rules as scientific and as ingenious as those
+which regulate the vehicular traffic of nearby Fifth Avenue, it was a
+task of a good half-hour to get within the huge mart; another half-hour
+to get out again. Certain departments--notably toys--possessed
+navigation problems of their very own, and other departments, such as
+refrigerators and other household goods, were comparatively deserted.
+The Christmas trade is nothing if not oddly balanced.
+
+Through a store such as this one may wander, _ad libitum_, and find a
+new surprise at nearly every corner of it. Certainly upon each of its
+floors. Nor are these to be limited, in any way, to the floors to which
+the public is ordinarily admitted. Once I remember coming through the
+eighth floor and suddenly emerging upon a clean, crisply lighted little
+workshop. At a long bench underneath an atelier-like window three men,
+fairly well-advanced in years, were working. One was engraving upon
+silver--the other two upon glass. The chief of the shop explained to me
+that in the beginning they were Germans but they had been in Macy's so
+many, many years that they were today to be classed as pretty thoroughly
+Americanized. One of them had sat at that bench--and the one down in
+Fourteenth Street that had preceded it before the northward trek to
+Thirty-fourth Street--for over thirty-two years. The three men were
+artisans--of the old school and of a sort that seemingly is not bred
+these days.
+
+"When they are gone I do not know where we shall go to replace them,"
+said the superintendent.
+
+"You will have to quit doing this sort of work?" I ventured.
+
+He answered quickly:
+
+"Oh no," said he, "Macy's never quits. We shall have to find
+others--even if we train them ourselves. It is only the material for
+training that worries me. American young men of today are not overfond
+of painstaking work of this sort."
+
+I knew instantly what he meant. As a nation we are made up of "shortcut"
+experts. Perseverance, patience, a tedious attention to uninteresting
+detail, have seemingly but little appeal to the average young man who is
+looking forward to a real career for himself. To be an executive--no
+matter by what name or title--and in as short a time as is humanly
+possible is apparently the only object that he sees ahead of him. A
+laudable ambition to be sure. But one shudders at the mere thought of a
+land which should be composed entirely of executives and wishes that we
+might develop more definitely a class of artisan workers, such as came
+to us forty, thirty, even twenty-five years ago.
+
+The oldest of these men--the man with thirty Macy years to his
+credit--was chasing a hunting scene upon a great glass bowl as I bent
+over his desk. It was more than artisanship, that task; it was artistry.
+A real work of real art even though at the moment these elaborate
+cut-glass designs have lost a little in public favor. In their own time
+and order they will come back again, however. And the workmanship that
+made them possible will be restored to its own former high favor.
+
+But even today there are large demands in Macy's for precisely this sort
+of thing. And glass grinding and engraving--which runs all the way from
+the making of prescription lenses for spectacles or for milady's
+_lorgnons_ up to the cutting of an entire dinner service of the most
+exquisitely patterned glass or repairs to the bowl or pitcher that
+Bridget or Selma has so carelessly broken--is the chief factor of a shop
+that handles, as other parts of its day's job, jewelry and watch
+repairs, electro-plating of gold, copper, silver, nickel, the printing
+or engraving or stamping of stationery of every sort, to say nothing of
+leather goods of every kind and description and a thousand lesser and
+highly individual jobs, such as the regilding of a mirror or the
+transformation of an ancient whale-oil lamp into a modern incandescent
+one. It is small wonder that as a minimum seventy-five men are
+constantly employed in this shop; more, as the exigencies of this season
+or of that may demand them.
+
+Yet this is but one of Macy's shops under that giant roof of Herald
+Square. There are others in close proximity--like those for the making
+of mattresses and bedding of every sort and variety and the
+establishment which brings broken toys back into life again. To my own
+Peter Pannish soul this last forever has the greatest fascination. Once,
+long years ago, I went into a great store in a distant city and found up
+under its roof a man whose sole task from one year's end to the other
+was the making of repairs upon toy locomotives. How I envied that man
+his job! And how the other day I envied the job of the Macy man who was
+repainting dolls' houses, one fascinating suburban villa after another.
+The doctor in the far corner of the room, whose patients ran all the way
+from lovely dolls of the most delicate china and porcelain to Teddy
+Bears who apparently had been badly worsted in some terrific nursery
+struggle, was a man with a position in which he might have genuine
+pride; but for the painting and re-arranging of those small houses a
+man, with an imagination in his soul, might almost afford to pay for the
+privilege of doing the work!
+
+
+Five-thirty!
+
+Again the doormen to their posts, two or three minutes in advance of the
+exact hour set. The minute hand upon the face of the clock no sooner
+reaches the exact bottom of its course, before a bell rings within the
+store and the great doors shut--simultaneously, as in the morning they
+had opened. But not permanently, of course. Dozens, hundreds, perhaps a
+thousand or more shoppers still are left within the store. Each is to be
+accorded a full opportunity to finish his or her transactions. There is
+no hurry; no ostensible hurry, at any rate. It would not be
+good-breeding to hasten the customer upon his way. And a canon of good
+merchandising is good breeding.
+
+Gradually, however, the late-stayers eliminate themselves. The big doors
+open to let them out, but never again this day to let newcomers in. No
+rule of the house is observed more inexorably. And so gradually the
+store empties itself.
+
+In the meantime certain departments have already ceased to function. The
+salesfolk are dismissed for the night and go scurrying off. A few bring
+out the dust-covers and these go out upon the stock. Counters are
+emptied. The stock, wherever possible, is put away, and when not put
+away is carefully covered. Nothing is left to chance nor to dust. System
+reigns. And the section manager, the last to leave his department for
+the night, makes sure that everything there is ship-shape against the
+coming of another day.
+
+Before he is gone--and he, in Macy's, is multiplied into ninety or a
+hundred human units--the cleaning squads are out upon the floor, rolling
+out their bin-like carts in orderly formation and proceeding upon the
+debris like a miniature army. Four, five, six hours of hard work await
+them. It will be midnight, perhaps later, before the store is absolutely
+clean again and settled down to the monotonous presence of the watchman,
+to await the arrival of another dawn.
+
+In the meantime the Macy family is pouring forth into the side streets
+through the doorways through which they entered before nine of the
+morning. There is little restriction, no red-tape about their leaving.
+Their brass discs--each individual and bearing the employee's
+designating number--which they dropped in the morning have been returned
+to them in the course of the day for use again upon the morrow.
+
+The only formality about their leaving--if indeed it might be called a
+formality--is the quick-fire inspection made by two store detectives who
+stand either side of the descending file at the main employees' stair,
+to see if any packages which are being carried out are lacking the
+check-room stamp and vise.
+
+These last are the store's protection against possible theft through its
+inner walls. The workers who bring packages in, either in the morning or
+at any later time in the progress of the day, are asked to take them to
+a well-equipped check and storage room close by the lockers, where they
+may regain them at night, stamped and vised, to go out into the open
+once again. Any purchases that they may make during the day follow a
+similar course. It is a definite and an orderly procedure. Any other
+would be indefinite and to an extent disorderly.
+
+This is the reason why an occasional package--lacking the official stamp
+and vise of the check-room--is picked up by the keen-eyed detectives
+while its transporter is asked to tarry for a moment in an ante-room. In
+the course of an average evening there may be a half dozen of such
+outlaw packages detected. Their holders are not thieves. There is not
+even the implication that they are thieves. They are simply trying to
+ignore a fair and open-minded rule which the store has made, not alone
+for its own protection but for the protection of every man and woman in
+its employ. Such is the explanation which the assistant store manager
+makes to them before he dismisses them, at just a few minutes before
+six.
+
+"We believe in explaining things," he will tell you afterwards. "For we
+believe that we gain the very best service from the Macy people by not
+asking them to work in the dark. If we make a rule and its rulings
+sometimes puzzle them--sometimes even seem a little arbitrary,
+perhaps--we tell them why we have had to make the rule and almost
+invariably find them satisfied and quite content."
+
+The packages, themselves, are detained overnight. The store reserves the
+right to make an inspection of them. Such inspection, even when it is
+made, rarely ever shows the package to be illicit. It merely is
+carelessness. And the thoughtless worker to whom it is returned in the
+morning is merely asked not to be careless again, but to make a full and
+co-operative use of the facilities which are provided for the comfort,
+and the protection, of him and his fellows; which generally is all that
+is necessary to be said.
+
+
+By six the store is practically emptied of its workers. After that hour
+any one leaving it must have a pass and be interviewed by the night
+superintendent at the single door left open for exit. Night work in the
+Macy store is little and far between these days--save possibly in the
+Christmas season and even then it is held at a minimum; an astonishing
+minimum when one comes to compare it with the Christmas seasons of, say,
+a mere twenty years ago. The state law says that aside from that
+fortnight of holiday turmoil, the women workers of the store, who are
+considerably in the majority, shall not work more than fifty-four hours
+or oftener than one night a week and then not later than nine o'clock.
+In turn, the store, following the workings of the statute, designates
+Thursday as its late employment night. If, because of some emergency, it
+wishes to deviate from this, it must have a special permit.
+
+As a matter of fact, however, Macy's anticipates the law; goes far ahead
+of it. It finds its women workers not only willing to work the
+occasional Thursday night shifts, but, with the practical advantages of
+a full dinner furnished without cost and overpay to come into the
+reckoning, for the most part extremely anxious. And it reminds the
+solicitous legislators up at Albany that it was not a statute that
+abolished the pernicious habit of keeping the stores open for business
+evenings and late in the evening, but the progressive thought of the
+store managers of New York, themselves. These last have yielded little
+to the sentimentalists in real looking forward. Theirs have been the
+practical problems--not the least of these that of the education of a
+shopping public which seemingly had demanded that the big
+department-stores of New York should be kept open evenings--some
+evenings throughout the entire year--and all evenings in a certain
+small and terrible season; and without consideration of the task this
+custom imposed upon the patient folk who were serving them. Out of such
+lack of consideration, out of such selfishness, if you please, was a
+great practical and moral reform in merchandising evolved. Which was, in
+itself, no little triumph.
+
+
+
+
+II. Organization in a Modern Store
+
+
+I like to think of modern business as a huge, great single machine; or
+better still, a group of little machines gathered together and
+functioning as one. It is a simile that I have used time and time again.
+To feel that some single achievement of industry--of manufacturing or of
+merchandising--is as well organized and as well balanced as the many
+mechanisms that are laboring in its behalf, seems to bring the most
+single complete picture of modern business of the sort that our press
+has ofttimes been pleased to term "big business".
+
+And sometimes I like to think of these "big businesses"--with their
+hundreds and thousands of human units--as armies. At no time is this
+last comparison more apt than when one comes to apply it to the modern
+department-store, as we today know it in America. For, even if you wish
+to grant an entire dissimilarity of purpose, one of these huge
+institutions has more than one point of similarity with an army. Not
+alone in numbers can this parallel be made, but quite as quickly in
+organization. While, to return to our first simile, it, too, is a big
+machine--humanized. Its parts are carefully co-ordinated so that the
+whole will function with the least possible friction. Like an army it
+is officered with its generalissimo, its under generals, its colonels,
+its captains, its lieutenants, its sergeants and its corporals. The
+difference is only in nomenclature. The structure is quite the same.
+For, when you come to analyze, you will find the divisions of labor and
+of authority quite corresponding to similar divisions in the army.
+Officer, "non-com" and private--each contributes his more or less
+important part; each is a necessary factor in the success of the
+enterprise.
+
+Like an army, the department-store of modern America is designed to move
+constantly forward. The "big-chief" scans his balance sheets, the rise
+and fall of the curves of his outgo and income averages, the
+tremendously meaningful jagged red lines of his graphic charts, quite as
+carefully as the army general keeps track of the movement of his forces
+upon the maps which his topographists send him. He gathers his officers
+roundabout him and plans the strategy of business with the same shrewd
+foresight that must be observed by the successful military leader. He
+must be a promoter of morale throughout his forces, even down to the
+newest and the lowest-paid clerk. There must be constant liaison between
+the general and the private in the ranks.
+
+
+In considerable detail this parallel can be carried out. Soon, however,
+it must come to an end. That is, it ends in so far as Macy's is
+concerned. For the army at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street is neither
+an army of offense nor of defense. Its sole position always is upon the
+front line of service.
+
+At the head of the organization there are the three brother partners who
+inherited their original interest in the great business from their
+father, the late Isidor Straus, who, with their mother, lost his life in
+the supreme catastrophe of the sinking of the _Titanic_. In 1914 they
+acquired Nathan Straus' interest by purchase. These men, Jesse Isidor,
+the president, Percy S., the vice-president, and Herbert N., the
+secretary and treasurer, are its triple head and front. While each has
+trained himself to be a merchandise specialist of the highest order,
+there is none that knows the details of Macy's better than his
+brothers--they share equally in the supreme authority that directs the
+business. Directly responsible to them, in turn, is its general manager,
+its merchandise council and its advertising and financial departments.
+
+As I write these paragraphs, the great chart of the Macy organization
+lies upon my desk. It is a vast and fascinating thing. With the lines
+extending upon it here and there and everywhere from the box which holds
+the triple-head, branching and rebranching here and there and again, it
+looks not unlike a giant map; a chart, if you prefer to have it so. And
+so it is, a chart upon which the steersmen of so vast and so responsible
+an enterprise safely pick their course upon a seemingly unending
+journey.
+
+"Government by draughting-board," sniffed an old-time business man to me
+once, when I was trying to explain to him in some detail how a great
+steel manufacturing plant of the Middle West attempted to accomplish
+its huge job, economically and efficiently, by the use of graphic
+charts. And he added: "I'd like to see _myself_ held down by blue-print
+authority."
+
+To which, after all this while, I should like to reply:
+
+"I should like to see a concern, as big and as successful as Macy's,
+operated without a careful charting of its always difficult path."
+
+Yet, as a matter of hard fact, Macy's, any more than any other big and
+well-planned business organism of today, never binds itself to go
+blindly and unthinkingly upon the lines of the charts--and nowhere else.
+The real trick of executive direction seems to be to know when to follow
+these lines and when more or less to completely disregard them.
+Rule-of-thumb can never again overcome the rules of averages, of
+percentages or of economic laws. But the rule of wit and of human
+understanding can ofttimes be used to temper this first group and
+sometimes with astonishingly successful results.
+
+
+A glance or two at this imposing organization chart lying before me
+begins to show the many, many ramifications of the huge Macy business
+tree. It shows, for instance, how, under the direction of the
+merchandise council, are four large branches of store activity more or
+less inter-related: the handling of Macy's own merchandise (meaning
+particularly that which is either made in the store's own factories or
+at least made under its direct supervision); the work of the large force
+of buyers; the comparison department (an important phase of the
+business to which we shall come in our own good time); and the foreign
+offices.
+
+In the financial department, the controller is the quite logical chief.
+His general duties are fairly obvious. To help him in them, he has,
+under his direction, the chief cashier, the salary office, the auditing
+department, the depositors' account department--this last a most
+distinctive Macy feature--and a statistical department.
+
+Obvious, too, is the greater part of the work of the publicity
+department. It includes in addition to the advertising manager--always
+an important factor in the modern department-store and particularly so
+in the case of Macy's--a display manager. It is the job of the first of
+these men to tell the public of the merchandise being offered for sale
+at the sign of the red star; the job of his compeer to see that it is
+properly displayed to them.
+
+And, finally, there is the general manager--last but not least.
+Connected by an exceedingly direct and much-traveled line with the
+general offices upon the seventh floor of the store are Mr. W. J. Wells,
+the store's general manager, and his advisory council. For the G. M.,
+big as he is always, has need of much advice. Upon his broad and
+efficient shoulders are placed such a tremendous array of
+responsibilities that one cannot but marvel at the sheer efficiency of
+the man--to say nothing of his reserves of physical and mental
+strength--who can hold down such a job. Yet, at Macy's, the man himself
+disclaims any superhuman powers.
+
+"I am merely the automatic governor to this big machine," he will tell
+you, in his own simple, direct way. "In fact, if the machine always
+functioned one hundred per cent. efficient, there really would be no
+need either of me or of my job. It is because no machine that is built
+of human cogs and cams and levers and pulleys may ever work at one
+hundred per cent. efficiency that I, or some other man, must sit in this
+office. It is our job to meet the unusual and the unforeseen. We take up
+slack here and loosen there."
+
+The translation of this is unmistakable. If the three men upon the high
+seventh floor of the institution are its steersmen, this man, who has
+his office at the rear of its broad mezzanine balcony, is at least its
+chief engineer. And to assist him he has five assistant
+engineers--assistant general managers, in reality. The habit of simile
+leads one into odd designations of title. Each of these five assistant
+general managers--we shall stand by the nomenclature of the store--in
+turn has a large number of departments reporting to him. While in
+addition to them and ranking as virtual assistant managers are the
+superintendent of the detective bureau and that of the building, itself.
+
+The general manager, himself, is charged with the general duty of
+engaging, training and educating employees. He regulates salaries. He
+controls the transfer and discharge of employees. He is charged with the
+enforcement of all rules and regulations. He is the final authority to
+decide whether or not merchandise is returnable, for refund, exchange or
+credit. He also is the authority who adjusts all claims or
+controversies with customers. And he is the one to whom employees may
+appeal if they feel they are being treated unfairly by their superiors.
+A man-sized job truly! And because no one man, short of a superhuman at
+any rate, could ever perform all of its various and perplexing
+functions, Mr. Wells has his five assistants. In the event of his
+absence as well as that of any one of them the man below rises
+temporarily into his immediate superior's job.
+
+[Illustration: WHERE MILADY OF MANHATTAN SHOPS
+
+The vast ground floor of Macy's is, in itself, a mark of much interest
+and variety]
+
+It is the major task of the first of these assistants to direct the work
+of the floor superintendents--eight of these--and through them that of
+the section managers and the actual sales forces; nearly two thousand
+people all told. In other words, his job is the selling. To this great
+force and to the countless problems that must arise in its day-by-day
+direction there is added the oversight of the personal shoppers'
+service. Which means in turn the furnishing of guides throughout the
+departments to shoppers who ask for them; finding translators for folk
+to whom the intricacies of our tongue are unsolved mysteries and, in
+certain specific and necessary cases, the sending of merchandise with a
+member of the sales force into the homes of Macy's patrons.
+
+The second and the third assistant managers are the heads of non-selling
+organizations within the store, the fourth and the fifth handle the
+training and the educational departments, respectively. The second
+assistant has, as his especial responsibility, the merchandise checkers,
+the collectors, the stock clerks, the cashiers and the interior mail and
+messenger service. The other non-selling assistant general manager
+supervises the receiving department, the department of money orders and
+adjustments, the supply department, the delivery, the receiving, the
+time office, the manufacturing, and sundry other smaller specialties of
+the store; small, however, only in a comparative sense. Taken by
+themselves they quickly would be seen to be sizable indeed.
+
+The tasks of most of these departments are fairly obvious from their
+names. Some of the others we shall see in a bit of detail as we go
+further into the store and its workings. In other chapters we shall
+describe what the great delivery department is supposed to accomplish,
+and actually does accomplish, the scope and plan and reach of the
+departments of training and of employment, and some others, too. It
+takes no great strain upon the imagination to conceive of the importance
+of the detective bureau's work, nor that of the superintendent of
+buildings.
+
+So much, then, for a preliminary bird's-eye view of a mammoth machine,
+not a machine for turning out shoes or typewriters or paper, but for
+buying and selling all these things and many, many more. And as you read
+in the earlier part of this book, the huge mechanism did not spring into
+its being in a year, or in a decade, or even in a generation. It
+represents slow, hard, steady growth; and slow, hard, steady growth it
+is still having.
+
+There are now one hundred and eighteen departments in Macy's and yet,
+out of many thousands of separate and distinct items, there are some
+things that the store does not sell. Some of these commodities are
+handled by other great department-stores. But while Macy's may and does
+follow a charted path, it is its own chart and its own path. It never
+follows blindly the pathways of others. So, for instance, it does not
+sell pianos. In this particular case, at least, the reason is not hard
+to discover. Remember, all the while, that Macy's sells for cash and for
+cash alone--always and forever; and then consider that in ninety-nine
+cases out of a hundred, pianos are sold upon the installment plan. The
+installment plan is entirely outside of the Macy scheme of salesmanship.
+It may or may not be a good plan. But to adopt it Macy's would either
+have to change its selling policy or else dispose of so few pianos that
+it would not be profitable to maintain a department for them. This is
+the alpha and the omega of the piano, as far as Macy's is concerned. It
+has no intention either of changing its deep-rooted and well-founded
+selling policy, nor, on the other hand, of establishing a little-used
+and possibly unprofitable department. Upon this decision it stands quite
+content.
+
+Yet assuredly Macy's is organized to sell nearly all of the necessities
+of life--and an unusually large number of the luxuries in addition. From
+hosiery to ice cream, from women's suits to artists' materials, from
+eye-glasses to sausages, and from petticoats to ukeleles, the list of
+the store's wares is almost without limit. Other furniture is not hedged
+about by the same merchandising traditions and restrictions as are
+pianos; there are in the upper floor of this great market-place pieces
+of household furnishings whose prices run well into the hundreds and
+even thousands of dollars, to say nothing of rare Oriental rugs, fine
+paintings and other works of art.
+
+These one hundred and eighteen departments have been arranged after long
+study and experience and well thought out plans. In fact, so many
+conflicting and intricate features have entered into their planning that
+it is hardly possible within the space of these pages to give more than
+the broad general policy of the department organizations of the store.
+Yet it is another of these fairly obvious principles that upon its main
+floor--where its space, square foot by square foot, is by far at its
+highest value, and where there is a maximum of accessibility--should be
+displayed the items that sell the most quickly and the most readily.
+This follows the very reasonable theory that goods for which there is
+the most popular demand should at all times be the most accessible.
+Varying slightly in specific cases and conditions, as one ascends into
+the five upper selling floors of the store, the merchandise falls more
+and more into classifications that call for care and deliberation in the
+purchasing. Thus, upon the main floor, one will find such articles as
+umbrellas, books, candy, notions, and the like--to make but a few
+instances out of many--while upon the second, there will be yardage
+goods, linens, shoes and so forth.
+
+Parenthetically, it may be set down that in older days, yardage
+goods--meaning cloths and weaves of almost every sort--never used to be
+found above the ground floor of any department-store. Retail
+merchandising tradition in New York suffered a body blow some years ago
+when Macy's sent them upstairs. Even the men who worked in the
+department protested against the change. A sizable proportion of their
+income was and is in their commissions upon their total volume of sales.
+They could not see the sales upstairs.
+
+"For two cents I'd resign," said one of the veterans, just as the change
+was announced.
+
+No one offered him the two cents, however, and he remained. And the
+following year saw the department reach a new high level for total sales
+in its yard goods.
+
+One large reason for this in Macy's is the unusual accessibility of the
+upper floors from the street level. It required little or no effort for
+the customer to get to the second floor, or, for that matter, to the
+sixth. The store's unusual and fairly marvelous system of escalators,
+well-placed, smooth running, always available, and to be safely used by
+even a rheumatic or a cripple, bring these self-same upper floors at all
+times within easy reach of the street, and without the use of the firm's
+generous plant of elevators. With the exception of the abnormal stress
+and strain of the holiday season, the vertical system of Macy's
+transportation is never very seriously taxed.
+
+To those upper floors, also, go the folk whose purchases necessitate the
+fitting of something or other to the human frame. As we have just seen,
+shoes are upon the second floor. On the third is the women's wearing
+apparel, with special dressing-room facilities for trying on and
+fitting. Similar conveniences are to be found in the men's clothing
+department upon the fifth floor.
+
+Rugs, upholstery and art objects generally require more time for
+selection than do shoes and socks, more room for display as well. They
+go, then, quite naturally to the broad spaces of the fourth floor. The
+same qualities, only somewhat emphasized, apply to furniture, which is
+shown and sold upon the sixth. That the restaurant is relegated to the
+eighth floor is due in large part to the necessity for having cooking
+odors where they can be carried away without reaching other parts of the
+store; as well as to considerations in regard to the economy of floor
+space for an enterprise that is active during only a part of the day.
+
+Minor changes in the arrangement of all these departments are constantly
+and forever under way. A great market-place like Macy's never stays
+entirely put. Special considerations, special problems, unforeseen
+merchandising plans may at any moment make it not only advisable but
+necessary to change the location or the relative space of any or all the
+departments. At Christmas-time the unusual pressure upon some of them,
+accompanied by a slacking in others--unfortunately (or fortunately?)
+shoppers cannot be everywhere and at the same moment--means many
+temporary changes--so one department must give some of its space for a
+time to its neighbor--a debt possibly to be repaid at some other season
+of the year, when thoughts are not on toys, or candies or jewelry, but
+upon such serious things as carpets or refrigerators.
+
+An interesting sidelight upon the intensive study that Macy's gives the
+psychology of its interior arrangements is furnished in the fact that,
+on the theory that the less deadly of the species has an inherent
+aversion to department-stores, men's furnishing goods in these emporiums
+should generally be displayed upon the main floor, and just as close to
+a street entrance as is possible. Macy's has been no exception to this
+rule. A man, even when he is in a mood for spending, wants it over with
+as soon as possible. He is impatient of the slightest delay. On the
+other hand, his wife or daughter will make of shopping a kind of ritual.
+And, perhaps, because of that, she is often the more intelligent and
+discriminating buyer.
+
+Today, however, space on the main floor of the larger stores in New York
+is proving so valuable for goods that appeal to women shoppers, that
+some of them are trying to find a new method of appealing to the
+man-in-a-hurry. And so there has come to be a distinct trend toward
+putting men's goods upon a high upper floor, but with special express
+elevator service, so that their purchasers can get in and out with a
+minimum use of their valuable time.
+
+
+That part of the organization of Macy's which always has, always has
+had, and always will have the chief visual appeal to the public, is the
+staff of sales people with whom it comes in constant contact. Again and
+again, as we come to consider the minute workings of this great machine
+of modern business, we shall find its human factor looming larger before
+our very noses. We can not dodge it. We have no desire to dodge it. In
+fact, we find it at all times the most fascinating feature of our study.
+It is no part of this narrative to decide which part of the whole corps
+of workers in the store is the most important to it--it would be similar
+and quite as easy to try to give an opinion as to the relative
+importance of the mainspring and the balance-wheel of a watch--but it is
+enough to say here, as we shall say again and again, that the girl
+behind the counter--to say nothing of the man--is an absolutely
+indispensable feature. By her it rises; by her it might easily come
+tumbling down.
+
+Let me illustrate by the testimony of a young woman who recently was a
+girl behind the counter at Macy's:
+
+"It surely is true," she says, "that we salespeople can do a great deal
+to increase the business and the number of customers. Some of these last
+are, of course, nearly hopeless--they would try the patience of Job,
+himself--and then again there are the others who are most appreciative
+of your services. It was interesting to me, when first I went behind the
+counter, to see how many of my customers would say 'thank you.' I found
+that nearly all of them will, if only you make a real effort to please
+them. And the majority of the Macy salesforce does try to help a
+customer in any way that she needs help. One day I observed this
+incident, which is almost typical: A customer approached our counter and
+put her bag down upon it. A saleswoman went to her at once, saying:
+
+"'May I help you, madam?'
+
+"The customer shook her head, a negative; she was merely trying to
+adjust her veil, she explained. But our saleswoman was resourceful in
+her tact.
+
+"'Well, maybe, I can assist you with that,' she insisted, and
+straightway proceeded to do so. That was her notion of the service of
+our store."
+
+It is incidents just like this--seemingly small when you take them apart
+and place them out by themselves--but in the aggregate very real and
+very important, that make for a store its lifelong customers. Let the
+young woman continue. Like a good many other young women in the store
+she is a college graduate and also possessed of a power for shrewd
+observation.
+
+" ... One woman bought some gloves from me and while she waited for her
+change showed me her shopping-list. It was miles long, seemingly, and
+appeared to include everything from a safety-pin to a toy submarine. As
+she conned it, she said that she had shopped in Macy's for years, and
+nowhere else. In fact, I remember that she said that she would be
+completely lost in any other store.... Others came back, bringing a
+single glove that they had purchased a year or more before and wanting
+another pair just like them, they had been so satisfactory....
+
+"Not all of them are quite so cheery, however. Occasionally some
+unreasonable and irate customer would appear, storming at having to wait
+a few precious moments for her change, or at not being able to find the
+same glove that her friend purchased the week before--the chances being
+quite good that her friend might have bought the glove in another store.
+These are the times that test the wit and diplomacy and resource of the
+girl behind the counter.
+
+"A day behind a counter is filled to the brim with experiences--you have
+your finger on the pulse of a part of the life of New York--you are a
+part of a huge and important organization, and you come into contact
+with the world in general. Even customers coming to our glove counter
+furnished us with interesting moments. One in particular came to me to
+get some of our children's woolen gloves. He was a robust old man--about
+fifty-five, I'd have said--but he told me he was sixty-nine. He said he
+had just bought the same gloves elsewhere for over twice as much. (I
+said I didn't doubt that in the least.) And then he went on to say his
+wife and daughters shopped in stores where the name meant a great deal,
+but that he always came to Macy's because he came for the merchandise he
+got. He ended by saying he was a happy man, with three romping
+grandchildren, that he daily handled over two thousand men, but couldn't
+handle one woman. I should like to see him try to run Macy's and have to
+handle some six thousand men and women."
+
+
+The personnel of each of the selling floors of the store is under the
+direction of an organization captain, whose precise title is floor
+superintendent. He has an understudy--or, as he is known in the parlance
+of the place, a relief--so that the floor is never, even for a minute,
+without an executive head.
+
+This floor superintendent is a man of considerable discretionary powers.
+He must be. These powers are being constantly brought into play as he is
+called upon to decide the merits of this or that customer's claim. He is
+a man of tact and judgment, both of which qualities are kept in
+constant operation. Upon his floor he is the direct representative of
+the management and so looks out for its interests. From his desk upon
+the floor headquarters he directs and supervises, yet he constantly
+circulates throughout his various departments and sees to it himself
+that the matters for which he is responsible are thoroughly carried out.
+The orderliness of the floor is his special concern, and when, from time
+to time, it becomes necessary to shift salesclerks from one department
+to another--as in the case of the numberless special sales requiring
+extra help--it is he who engineers the details of the transfer.
+
+Acting as lieutenants to the floor superintendents are the section
+managers, who, as we have already seen, were in the store of yesterday
+known as "floorwalkers." But in the Macy's of today something
+considerably different is meant from the superannuated and somewhat
+pompous gentleman who used to condescend, when we asked for the location
+of silverware, to wave us away with a cryptic
+"second-aisle-to-the-right-rear-of-the-store." It now means a live,
+up-to-date, agreeable gentleman, with a man's-size job to fill.
+
+Not only must he ascertain the customers' needs and direct all of them,
+plainly and courteously, but he has direct supervision over all of the
+employees within his section. He is held responsible for their
+deportment and it is his duty to observe, as far as possible, their
+mental, moral and physical condition. He must be able to detect errors
+in the methods used by his salesclerks, and in order that he may be in a
+position to teach them correct methods, he must, himself, be master of
+the store system. Parts of this constantly are being changed, so that in
+addition to all of these other qualities, the successful section manager
+must possess an alert mind. The importance of his work may be visualized
+to some slight extent at least by the manual which is prepared for his
+guidance. This is a loose-leaf book of some fifty closely printed pages;
+the number varying according to the changes in the store system which
+are made from time to time. Just to give you a slight idea of what this
+captain of a merchandising army has upon his mind, consider that under
+the division entitled "Section Managers' Daily Duties" there are
+forty-six different items, and under "Miscellaneous Duties" thirteen.
+Moreover, he must have at his instant command all the technical
+procedure regarding transactions and forms, refunds, complaints,
+transfers, employees' shopping, the Internal Revenue Law, accidents, and
+then some more. I submit this as a job requiring all that a man has of
+fortitude and delicacy!
+
+
+Salesmanship is the thing that really made R. H. Macy & Company and it
+therefore is patent that they should consider the actual sellers of
+their goods as the very backbone of their organization. In another place
+it is related how, in the department of training, employees are taught
+to sell, and in another something of the working out of the psychology
+of the customer and the salesclerk. Education counts. It helps to make
+the salesclerk a vital factor of the store organization.
+
+Macy policy sees to it that the clerk is, in so far as it is possible,
+kept interested in his or her work. There are, as we have already begun
+to understand, as few rules governing their conduct, dress and liberties
+as are consistent with the smooth, economical operation of the business.
+On the other hand, there is all possible encouragement for them to
+become familiar and even expert with the things that they sell. In many
+of the departments special booklets have been prepared as aids in
+selling the particular line of merchandise carried. That for the
+stationery department, for instance, covers: Paper, with its history
+from the earliest times, its manufacture, sizes and characteristics;
+engraving, with a full description of the processes connected therewith;
+fountain-pens and their manufacture; desk accessories, commercial
+stationery and the like. Ambition to excel in salesmanship is further
+stimulated by taking clerks through factories where their lines are
+made, and by exhibiting motion pictures of the manufacturing of these
+goods.
+
+Here, then, is the store's most direct contact with its patrons. There
+are others, however, to be classed as at least fairly direct. Take that
+big and comfortable restaurant up on the eighth floor. It is one of the
+real landmark's among eating-places of New York, a world city of good
+eating.
+
+Its own magnitude may easily be guessed from the fact that in a single
+business day it feeds more people than almost if not any other in the
+town. Translated into cold figures this means that there is an average
+of twenty-five hundred lunches bought by customers each day that the
+store is open; with a maximum on extremely busy days reaching as high
+as five thousand. Figures are impressive. Yet these do not include
+either afternoon teas or late breakfasts for both of which there is a
+considerable clientele.
+
+To serve these hungry folk who come to Macy's there are two hundred
+waitresses, buss-boys and other employees upon the floor, besides fifty
+in the general kitchen, twenty in the bakery and eight in the ice cream
+factory. And if you still try to doubt that this restaurant is not of
+itself a real business and one to be reckoned with, consider that in the
+course of an average year its patrons consume--among other things--two
+thousand barrels of flour, fifty-two tons of sugar, seven hundred and
+fifty thousand eggs, ninety-three thousand six hundred pounds of butter,
+two thousand bags of potatoes, and nearly half a million quarts of ice
+cream. This latter item, however, covers the ice cream used at the soda
+fountain and in the employees' and men's club restaurants.
+
+The employees' lunchroom--conducted on the cafeteria plan--serves four
+thousand men and women each working day. It provides tasty and wholesome
+food at a cost that makes it entirely possible to eat to repletion for
+twenty cents or less. Soups, for instance, are three cents a portion,
+and meat dishes six, while other items, such as sandwiches, vegetables,
+desserts and the like are correspondingly low.
+
+Nor is this luncheon the sole restaurant resource of the employees
+within this institution. In the men's club nearly a thousand more of the
+Macy family eat their midday meal each day; and eat very well indeed.
+Here the meal is served at a flat rate: at the uniform and moderate cost
+of thirty cents.
+
+Under the same general management direction (the third assistant general
+manager) as the restaurant is the store's supply department--not
+different very much from the supply department of a big railroad or
+manufacturing unit--which supplies everything for its consumption, from
+coal to string; the manufacturing departments in which are produced
+glass, mattresses, printing, engraving, custom-made shirts, millinery,
+picture frames and paper novelties; the candy factory over near Tenth
+Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street, which completely fills a big modern
+six-story building; the telephone service; and the so-called public
+service department.
+
+These last facilities command our attention for a passing moment. The
+telephone is, of course, the nerve-system of the Macy organization;
+nothing else. Its chief ganglion is a far-reaching switchboard on which
+little lights twinkle on and off and at which at a single relay sit nine
+competent operators in addition to a corps of inspectors and
+supervisors. The big board, from which run fifty-nine trunk-wires to the
+neighboring Fitzroy exchange, is none too large. Year in and year out it
+handles an average of nine thousand calls a day. And in the Christmas
+season this number easily is doubled and trebled.
+
+The public service department means exactly what it is called. It is at
+the service of the public. In concrete form it is a free information
+bureau, where theater seats and railroad and Pullman tickets may be
+purchased at face value--and not one cent beyond, not even the usual
+moderate fifty-cent advance of the hotel agencies--where astute and
+marvelously informed young men and women, with a miniature library of
+reference books at their immediate command, stand ready and willing to
+answer all the reasonable questions that may be thrust at them. To it is
+added a postal office, a telegraph office and public telephones for both
+local and long distance service.
+
+
+The third assistant general manager of the store also has within his
+bailiwick the important department of mail orders and adjustments.
+Although in the technical sense of the word Macy's today has no mail
+order department--having been forced to abandon its once promising
+beginning along this line because of a sheer lack of room in which to
+handle it--the store each year actually receives thousands of orders for
+its goods by mail, from folk who, for one reason or another, find it
+inconvenient to visit it. These are received and systematically handled
+in this very department. Under its adjustment division comes the
+extremely interesting bureau of investigation, which concerns itself
+with all complaints, and the correspondence bureau, which handles more
+than ninety-five per cent. of the mail of the house.
+
+It requires no particular keenness of imagination to see that, even with
+complaints reduced to a minimum and letter-writing and handling to a
+fine science, there is an infinite amount of detail in these two
+departments alone--detail that reaches into every part of the store and
+that necessitates a clever combination of system and diplomacy.
+
+The exposition of the workings of the Macy organization is yet to lead
+us into other chapters in which various separate subjects of interest
+will be treated at greater length than here; but now is the time and
+place to focus our attention upon one of the small, but extremely
+important, departments that works unseen--but not unfelt--behind the
+scenes. It is known as the comparison department and the work that it
+does is of vast importance in the operation of the store. Its functions
+are unending--and continuous. Macy's policy of underselling its
+competitors is an unhalting one.
+
+I have before me a Macy advertisement from a New York newspaper of
+recent date. In a conspicuous place in it there is a card which says:
+"For sixty-two years we have sold dependable merchandise at lowest in
+the city prices. We are doing so now and shall continue to do so." This
+was published at a time when the recent reaction from the extremely high
+prices of the war period already had begun to set in; and yet this was
+the big store's sole acknowledgment of the deflation sentiment--to say
+nothing of hysteria--which was sweeping the town. Its competitors had
+been offering their wares at reductions of from twenty to fifty per
+cent. from their topmost prices, but, serene and secure in the knowledge
+that its policy in selling had been consistently adhered to, Macy's only
+reiterated that its prices would continue to be the lowest in the
+city--quality for quality.
+
+To hold fast to this policy, through thick and thin, has not always
+been easy. Macy's has fought some royal battles in its behalf--yet not
+so much because it was a policy as because with the big store in Herald
+Square it has become a principle of the most fundamental sort.
+
+More than twenty years ago the principle became extremely difficult to
+maintain, because of the growing tendency of the proprietors of
+articles, so patented or copyrighted as to make their imitation
+practically impossible, to attempt to fix their final retail sales
+price. It no longer became the mere question of whether Macy's or any
+other store would have the right to undersell its competitors; it became
+the fundamental question of whether the great centuries-old open market
+of the world could continue to remain an open market, in the interest of
+the consumer; and not a closed market, in the interest of the producer.
+To maintain the first of these positions, in behalf of its patrons,
+Macy's entered upon and won, almost single-handed, one of the notable
+legal battles in the history of this country.
+
+As far back as 1901--if you are a stickler for exact dates--this whole
+question of price maintenance became an acute issue with Macy's. It came
+to pass that when the prominent publishers of America formed an
+association, one prime purpose of which was to fix the prices at which
+their books would sell at retail, the store quickly saw that if this
+trust agreement was permitted to stand unchallenged, its cardinal
+principle of underselling its competitors, would have to be sacrificed.
+Macy's did not propose to make such a sacrifice--to permit its customers
+to be sacrificed--without a protest. And such a protest it prepared to
+make.
+
+Isidor Straus, then the head of the business, sat in the office of his
+friend and counsel, Edmond E. Wise, in a downtown office. Mr. Wise put
+the thing frankly and without equivocation before his client. He said
+that it would be a hard legal fight, no doubt of that, but that a great
+principle was at stake; the keen mind of the lawyer was convinced of the
+economic fallacy of the position of the publishers' association.
+
+Quietly Mr. Straus told his attorney to go ahead. He said that he would
+fight the fight, to the last ditch. No expense was to be spared. The
+case would be carried, if necessary, in every instance to the highest
+court of appeal.
+
+Accordingly, Mr. Wise prepared a suit against the American Publishers'
+Association which holds the record for appeal in the history of
+jurisprudence in this country. Three times it went up to the Court of
+Appeals of the State of New York; finally, after nine years of legal
+battle, it was carried to the United States Supreme Court, which, after
+due deliberation, decided every point in favor of R. H. Macy & Company.
+
+That was in December, 1913. Early in the following May the firm had the
+satisfaction of having the publishers hand over a check on the Park
+National Bank for $140,000. This sum represented a settlement for the
+difficulties that Macy's had had to undergo for more than a dozen years
+past in getting stock for its book department. Ofttimes it was
+necessary to follow devious paths indeed to gain this end--and still
+hold fast to the fundamental underselling policy of the store. Sometimes
+the store had to go so far as to send to other retail stores to buy a
+certain volume, at the full retail price, and then resell it to its
+patrons, at its customary ten per cent. off the price of the store at
+which it had just purchased it. So much if you please for the expense of
+standing by a principle!
+
+
+A short time after this signal victory of Macy's, certain large
+manufacturers of patented articles, who for a time had sustained in the
+lower courts their claim to a fixed retail price standard, sought
+definitely to control Macy retail prices upon their products. Macy's,
+however, defied them, and the Victor Talking Machine Company, one of the
+leading adherents of price maintenance, brought an action in the United
+States courts to compel Macy's adherence to the rules for resale at a
+certain price. Again there was a royal battle and again Macy's triumphed
+signally, for on final appeal, the United States Supreme Court again
+decided in favor of the store in Herald Square, on every one of its
+contentions. Macy's then retaliated and brought suit against the Victor
+Company, under the Sherman Law. In a bitterly contested action, which
+culminated in one of the longest trials before a jury on
+record--consuming more than ten weeks--Macy's recovered a judgment of
+$150,000, and a counsel fee of $35,000; after which no paths apparently
+were left open to the manufacturers who sought to maintain the retail
+prices that suited them best. Court decisions seemingly blocked all
+possible pathways.
+
+One path did remain, however--legislation. Effort was made to pass a
+measure down at Washington to permit and sustain retail price
+maintenance, which in reality meant the emasculation of the Supreme
+Court's decisions. When that measure came to a hearing before the
+Interstate Commerce Committee of the House one of the Macy partners,
+accompanied by Mr. Wise, the store's counsel, and Mr. E. A. Filene, the
+well-known Boston merchant, came before it in opposition. Up almost to
+that hour, Macy's had gone it alone. Now the attention of the country
+was focussed upon its fight and the National Retail Dry Goods
+Association came in with both its sympathy and its active
+co-operation--hence the appearance of Mr. Filene, who made a most
+excellent argument in support of the Macy contention.
+
+It was shown definitely to the members of this House committee that
+many, if not all, branded and patented articles took a retail profit of
+from fifty to seventy-five per cent. The member of the Macy firm took a
+watch nationally advertised at $2.50 and duplicated it with a watch
+which his store sold at sixty-five cents, going so far as to take the
+two watches apart so as to show conclusively that the one was quite as
+good as the other. Certain other commodities went under similarly
+critical analyses. When the hearing was completed, the committee laughed
+the bill out of court. Since then the question of price maintenance by
+the original producer has been permitted to drop. Macy's had won its
+hard-fought fight; won it cleanly and honestly. By performance it had
+made good its statements that it proposed wherever it was humanly
+possible to undersell its competitors. That was no idle phrase.
+
+
+It is indeed one thing to make a statement--whether in print or by word
+of mouth--and another and ofttimes a far more difficult thing to make
+good that statement by performance. No one knows this better than
+Macy's. Having set down such a definite and distinct statement it must
+be prepared to make good. It must be so covered and protected at every
+possible point that if challenged it can give a good account of itself.
+In fact, challenges come in every day--they have been coming in every
+day for a good many years now--and the house continues to make good its
+statement willingly--even joyfully. Here it is, then, that the
+comparison department functions; here it is that the original
+fundamental policy of Rowland H. Macy--to buy and sell only for
+cash--strictly adhered to during the sixty-four years' life of the
+business--makes it possible for the house to make good.
+
+How, then, is it done?
+
+The answer is easy.
+
+Suppose, if you will, that Smith, Brown & Jones are having a special
+sale of Mother Hubbard wrappers. There are advertised as their regular
+$4.97 stock, marked down (at a heartbreaking sacrifice) to $3.79.
+Manifestly, it is up to R. H. Macy & Company to sell the same quality of
+Mother Hubbard for less than $3.79, if they are to live up to their
+oft-stated policy. It is quite as patent that Macy's must know just
+what kind of wrappers Smith, Brown & Jones are selling, if it is to
+compete on an exact basis. Nothing simpler. One of the Macy staff of
+shoppers is hurried forthwith to the scene of the bargain and,
+purchasing one of the garments, brings it back post-haste to the Macy
+comparison department. Furthermore, it is in this department by ten
+o'clock of the morning of the sale. It is then matched as closely as
+possible with a Mother Hubbard from the Macy stock, and the two garments
+compared, point by point. If, after careful examination, it is found
+that Macy's is charging more, or even the same price, for equal quality,
+then its prices are immediately marked down to a figure at least six per
+cent. lower than that advertised by the other store. And this, mind you,
+is not an exceptional performance but a daily procedure in the carrying
+out of which an exceptionally alert woman manager and twenty expert
+shoppers are constantly kept busy.
+
+If you make inquiry regarding the ins and outs of this remarkable policy
+you will find that it is far broader than you may have imagined. Here,
+again, is proof of the pudding. It is a typical letter, received from a
+customer and copied verbatim, with only the name left out:
+
+
+     November 12, 1920.
+
+     R. H. Macy & Co.,
+     New York City.
+
+     Dear Sirs:
+
+     I purchased a banjo clock at $13.89 from you on Tuesday. Yesterday
+     I saw the same clock, with same works, etc., identical in every
+     way, at ----'s, for $11.25. Now, inasmuch as you claim that you
+     sell goods at the very lowest figure, I think that is too much
+     difference in price to overlook. I trust that I shall receive your
+     check for the difference in the amount, otherwise please call for
+     the clock at once. I purchased clock in the basement.
+
+     Yours very truly,
+
+     ----------------
+
+
+This letter was received by the store and acknowledged that very day. It
+then was turned over to the comparison department, from which a shopper
+was despatched to the store at which the customer claimed to have seen
+the clock for less money. The shopper reported that the claim was
+correct, and a check was immediately forwarded to the customer for the
+difference between the price which she paid for the clock and six per
+cent. less than the other store's price for it. Nor did the matter end
+there. All this kind of clocks in the basement were at once repriced to
+conform to the adjustment made with the customer.
+
+There are, too, the occasional tests made by customers who, while they
+are not dissatisfied, cannot believe that the low-price policy can be
+consistently carried out. As an example, this half-jocular letter:
+
+
+     November 15, 1920.
+
+     R. H. Macy & Company,
+     Broadway & 34th Street,
+     New York.
+
+     Gentlemen:
+
+     Lest you regard this as a complaint from an ordinary .22 calibre
+     chronic kicker let me say in the first place that I merely want to
+     see to what extent you will make good on your brazen claim to sell
+     goods at a lower price than other stores. Now then:
+
+     On November 10th, I purchased a toy "cash register" bank in your
+     toy department for $1.98. (I want the kid to learn frugality better
+     than I did.) On November 14th my wife saw the same toy at Hahne's
+     in Newark, N. J., for exactly the same price. So far, so good. It
+     was worth it. But, Mr. Macy, you said your prices were _less_.
+
+     Besides, I have an account at Hahne's. By the time I would have
+     needed to pay for that bank there would have been enough in it to
+     settle the bill.
+
+     Here is your chance, but I'm from Missouri.
+
+     Yours,
+
+     ------------
+
+
+The answer to this complaint was prompt and to the point. It reads:
+
+
+     R. H. MACY & CO.
+     HERALD SQUARE, NEW YORK
+
+     December 4, 1920.
+
+     Mr. ------
+     ------
+     ------
+
+     Dear Sir:
+
+     We acknowledge your letter of November 24th, with regard to a
+     toy-bank, which you purchased from us for $1.98. We have
+     investigated your complaint and find, as you state, Hahne & Co. in
+     Newark are selling this article at the same price at which you
+     purchased it from us. Our price on these banks is now $1.89, in
+     keeping with our claim that we sell dependable merchandise for
+     "lowest-in-the-city" prices.
+
+     We appreciate your courtesy in calling this matter to our attention
+     and also for the opportunity to demonstrate the upholding of our
+     policy. A refund of nine cents in stamps is enclosed.
+
+     Yours very truly,
+     (Signed) R. H. MACY & CO.
+
+     ------ Mgr.
+     Bureau of Mail Order and Adjustment.
+
+
+Of course this complaint was trivial, the sum involved small, and Macy's
+must quickly have realized that the man who wrote the letter was not
+particularly serious. Yet that made no difference. The matter was
+adjusted; even though the process of adjustment involved a shopper's
+trip to Newark and considerable clerical work--in all several times the
+cost of the tiny bank. Yet the matter _was_ adjusted and all the
+toy-banks of that kind were at once reduced in price, to say nothing of
+a satisfied patron made for the store.
+
+
+There is another sort of complaint that, at times, keeps the comparison
+department pretty busy. Women frequently will stop at a counter in the
+store, examine an article and then exclaim:
+
+"Hm-m--$6.74 for that! Why, I saw the same thing today at Jinx, Bobb &
+Company's for $5.90."
+
+A mere passing comment which, in the old days of merchandising, might
+easily have been ignored. In Macy's it is not ignored. The clerk who
+hears this remark makes a note of it and sends through to the comparison
+department what is technically known as a customer's complaint.
+Immediate investigation is made, the prices checked up, and, if the
+casual shopper is right, Macy's prices are at once readjusted to the six
+per cent. below the competitor's charges. It has been found, however,
+that nearly ninety per cent. of this sort of complaints are incorrect.
+Two articles, in separate stores, may look so nearly alike that a casual
+inspection will not reveal any difference, and, therefore, competing
+goods must often be subjected to expert examination and even to
+analysis. A magnifying glass is used to count the threads in a fabric;
+woolens are boiled in chemical solutions to determine whether there is
+any adulteration; and cotton goods, such as sheets and pillow cases, are
+weighed, washed and weighed again to ascertain to what extent they are
+loaded. For Macy's is just to itself, as well as to the public.
+
+
+As has been indicated already, there are some things that the store as a
+matter of policy does not sell--pianos, chief of all. But that does not
+mean that there is, in the minds of its managers, the slightest excuse
+for its shelves not holding the things that it ought to sell. A large
+difference, this, and one which is constantly being checked by members
+of the shopping staff of the comparison department--going through its
+floors and inquiring in the various departments for goods for which
+there is little ordinary demand, and so a considerable likelihood of
+their not being found in stock. If an article requested is not found in
+stock, the shopper immediately buys something else--so as to get the
+number of the salesclerk. Then a report is made to the department buyer
+in order that he may see whether or not the clerk has followed up the
+inquiry.
+
+Incidentally, the shopper's report upon this entire transaction takes
+into account all the details regarding the manner in which the sales are
+handled and even notes the speed with which the parcel is wrapped and
+the change returned. It is not a spying system, but part of the store's
+honest effort to keep its efficiency at the highest notch. Naturally the
+shoppers of its comparison department are not known as such to its
+salesforce--for this reason the personnel of the corps must be under
+constant change--and it is equally evident that their anonymity is
+carefully preserved in their dealings with other stores. They are all
+well-bred young women, ranging in type from the flapper to the matron,
+and each is so carefully trained to act her part that it is quite
+impossible to distinguish them from the store's bona fide shoppers.
+
+Another of their duties is to report upon the speed of Macy deliveries.
+Once a month, at a certain prearranged time of day, a similar purchase
+is made at each of the largest stores in the city, including Macy's.
+These are all ordered sent to the same address and a record is made of
+the length of time it takes each to arrive. In the report that is
+finally made of the test details are included showing the manner in
+which all the packages are wrapped in order that Macy service may at all
+times be held up at least to the standard of its competitors.
+
+In the highly scientific machine of modern business, the test is as
+valuable as in other machines. I have stood in a great sugar refinery
+and watched the workmen from time to time draw off tiny phials of the
+sweetish fluid in order that they might show under laboratory
+examination that the machine was functioning at its highest point. And
+so are the tiny phials of Macy service drawn from the machine. If they
+show that, even in the slightest degree, the great machine of retail
+merchandising is functioning below its highest efficiency, it becomes
+the immediate business of the management to correct the loss.
+
+"I tell my people not to come to me with reports that everything is
+going well," says its general manager, "I only want to know when things
+begin to slip. Then it is my job to set them straight once again."
+
+One thing more, before we are quite done with this sketch of the
+organization of a great merchandising institution. It is, in this case,
+a most important thing:
+
+With the credit system in force in nearly, if not quite, every other
+large store in the New York metropolitan district, Macy's for years has
+had to encounter a considerable sentiment against its policy of doing a
+cash business only. For there always has been a desirable class of trade
+represented by customers who, for one reason or another, find it most
+inconvenient to pay their bills monthly--people whose means and credit
+are unimpeachable. At one time it looked as if R. H. Macy & Company
+would either have to forego their custom or else make exceptions to
+their long established rule. The former they could do; the latter they
+would not. But--
+
+Out of this very need for furnishing customers with the convenience of
+some sort of a charge account grew a great Macy specialty--the
+depositors' account department which, while making no concessions to the
+store's rock-ribbed principle of selling for cash, solved a very great
+problem in its touch with its public. It turned the costly credit
+privilege into an asset both for the customer and for the store. The
+very thought was revolutionary! What, ask a customer to pay in advance;
+to have money on deposit with R. H. Macy & Company, private bankers, to
+pay for normal purchases for a whole thirty days to come! It couldn't be
+done. New York would never, never stand for it. Every one outside of the
+store was sure that it never could be done. And a good many inside, as
+well. Yet the thing deemed impossible has come to pass. The idea was
+sound. The plan today is successful, even beyond the dreams of its
+promoters. With fifteen thousand depositors, its total deposits--money
+placed into the store to be drawn against solely for merchandise
+purchases--have reached as high as $2,750,000 at a single time.
+
+Interest at four per cent. annually is paid upon these deposits, so that
+the customer's money does not lie idle in the Macy till. Moreover, the
+money may be withdrawn at any time, and without previous notice being
+given. Further than this, it has been a custom--not, however, to be
+considered invariable--to pay a bonus of two per cent. on net sales
+charged to the depositors' account department throughout the year.
+Compare the thrill of receiving a bonus check from your
+department-store, instead of a bill for dead horses!
+
+It has been estimated that in some of New York's most representative and
+most elegant department-stores something like eighty-five per cent. of
+all retail transactions are upon the credit accounts. Assuming even that
+all of these accounts are promptly collectible--or collectible at
+all--the expense of the machinery of their collection becomes no small
+item in store management cost. This item Macy's saves--entirely and
+completely. And so, to no small extent, the store justifies itself in
+that other rigid rule--the pricing of its merchandise at a uniform
+rating of six per cent. less than that of its competitors. Upon this
+thought, alone, a whole book might be written.
+
+
+
+
+III. Buying to Sell
+
+
+Up the broad valley of the Euphrates a caravan comes toiling upon its
+way. It is fearfully hot; frightfully dusty. For it has come to
+mid-September; the rains are long weeks gone; and with the crops
+harvested, even the sails of the great mills that pump the irrigation
+canals full are stilled. The time of great heat and of little work. But
+still the caravan--the long, attenuated file of horses and camels must
+press on.
+
+Ahead is Bagdad, that self-same ancient Bagdad which three thousand
+years ago was the commercial capital of the world. Through the heat
+waves and the blinding dust, the trained eyes of the Moslem can see the
+sun touching the gilded minarets and towers of her great mosques. Bagdad
+ahead. And at Bagdad the market-places which have stood unchanged for
+tens of centuries. Save that in recent years there have come to them
+these Americans--these shrewd agents of a little known folk, these
+rug-buyers of a far-away land of which they spin such fascinating tales.
+Tales far too fascinating ever to be believable. Yet Allah keeps his own
+accounting.
+
+
+In the foyer of a lovely new home in newest New York a Persian rug is
+being spread for the first time. Its owner dilates with pride upon his
+purchase; shows those roundabout him the symbolism of its rarely
+delicate design; even to the tiny fault purposely woven into the
+creation by its maker to show in his humble fashion that only Allah may
+be faultless.
+
+
+A great French city; this Lyons, by the bank of the lovely Rhone. For
+two centuries or even more its tireless looms have spun the rarest silk
+fabrics of the world. Nearby there is a little French village. Were I to
+put its name upon these pages, it would mean nothing to you. Yet out
+from it there comes a lace, so rare, so delicate, that one well may
+marvel at the human patience and the human ingenuity that conceived it.
+The silk comes to America, straight to the chief city of the Americas;
+so do the laces; and so in a short time will come once again the
+wondrous cotton weaves of Lille and of Cambrai--and will come as a
+tragic reminder of the five fearful years that were.
+
+
+In the hot depths of a South African mine, negroes, stripped to their
+very waists, are toiling to bring forth the rarest precious stones that
+the world has ever known. In the fearfully cold blasts of the far North,
+facing monotonous glaring miles of lonely ice and snow, trappers are
+after the seal and the mink. Why? In order that milady, of New York, may
+sweep into her red-lined box at the Opera, a queen in dress, as well as
+in looks and in poise.
+
+From the mine and from the ice-floes to her neck and back a mighty
+process has been undergone. The great multiplex machine of
+merchandising has accomplished the process. A thousand other ones as
+well. Herald Square sits not alone between the East River and the North,
+between the Battery and the Harlem, between five populous boroughs of
+the great New York, not alone between the four million other folk who
+dwell within fifty miles of her ancient City Hall, but between the shoe
+factories of Lynn, the cotton mills of Lowell and of the Carolinas, the
+woolen factories of the Scots and the nearer ones of Lawrence, the paper
+mills of the Berkshires, the porcelain kilns of Pennsylvania, between a
+thousand other manufacturing industries, both very great and very small,
+as well. Into Herald Square--into the red-brick edifice upon the
+westerly side of Herald Square and reaching all the way on Broadway from
+Thirty-fourth to Thirty-fifth Streets--all of these pour a goodly
+portion of their products. In turn, these are poured by the big
+red-brick store into the pockets and the homes of its tens of thousands
+of patrons.
+
+A mighty business this; and, as we shall presently see, a business made
+up of many little businesses. Merchandising, financing, transportation;
+each has played its own great part in the bringing of that silk sock
+upon your foot or the felt that you wear upon your head. Each has
+co-operated; each has correlated its effort. There are few accidents in
+modern business. Rule-o'-thumb has stepped out of its back-door. In its
+place have come cool calculation, steady planning, scientific
+investigation. If modern merchandising has tricks, these are they. And
+they are the tricks that win.
+
+In our last chapter we pictured R. H. Macy & Company as a machine of
+salesmanship. Now I should like to change the film upon the screen. I
+should like to show you Macy's as a machine of buying. Obviously one
+cannot sell, without first buying. Buying must at all times precede
+selling, while to meet competition and still sell goods at a profit, the
+keenest sort of shrewd merchandising must be used in purchasing. Your
+buyer must be no less a salesman than he who stands behind the retail
+counters and, what is more to the point, he must constantly keep his
+finger upon the pulse of the market. Which means, in turn, that he must
+not for a day or an hour lose his touch with manufacturing and financial
+conditions--to say nothing of the changeable public taste.
+
+For the one hundred and eighteen different departments of the Macy's of
+today there are now sixty-nine buyers; the majority of them women. This
+last is not surprising when one comes to consider that by far the larger
+percentage of the department-store's customers are of the gentler sex.
+Women know how to buy for women--or should know. How foolish indeed
+would be the merchant prince of the New York of this day who would not
+instantly say "yes" to the assertion that feminine taste in buying is
+the one thing with which his store absolutely could not dispense. So the
+woman buyer in our city stores is so much an accepted fact as to call
+today for little special comment, save possibly to add that in no store
+outside of Macy's has she come more completely into her own. The buyer's
+job covets her. And she covets the buyer's job. Well she may. For it is
+a job well worth coveting--in independence, in opportunity and in
+salary.
+
+In almost every case a buyer comes to the job from retail
+experience--although occasionally a knowledge of wholesale selling
+develops the required skill. In nine cases out of ten, however, he or
+she rises to the important little office on the seventh floor from the
+salesforce upon the retail floors beneath. From salesclerk he--or as we
+have just learned, usually she--is promoted to "head of stock," which is
+the title of the head clerk in a department having three or four or more
+clerks. This promotion comes from a superior knowledge of the stock, yet
+not from that alone: the clerk must have executive ability. An agreeable
+temperament is also a necessary ingredient to the potion of promotion.
+
+To the position of assistant buyer is the next and logical promotion for
+the ambitious and successful "head of stock." After this should come the
+step to the big job--which steadily grows bigger--of buyer, or as the
+Macy store prefers to call it, department manager.
+
+Department managers do no actual selling. They now have graduated from
+that. Yet none the less are they salesmen--in more than a little truth,
+super-salesmen. For not only must they know what to buy--and how to buy
+it at the most favorable price--but they are equally responsible for
+knowing what to do with their purchases, once made. They are the
+merchants of the departments; accountable for the saleability of their
+stock. It is very much their concern whether those departments show a
+profit or a loss. Little stores within a big store. A big store made up
+of more than a hundred little stores.
+
+As we have seen, it is not an uncommon custom for some department-stores
+to rent out or even to sell the privilege of many, if not all of its
+little stores. Macy's--in recent years at least--has not followed this
+policy. It has found that its own best organization comes from keeping
+the department as a unit; a pretty distinct and important unit, right up
+close to the very top of the business, where its three partners are
+specialists in merchandising; and passing proud of that.
+
+
+The foundation of all successful buying is built of the bricks of sales
+knowledge laid in the mortar of good judgment. It is squared up by a
+sixth sense that has no name--yet a qualification which, by its presence
+or its absence, makes or unmakes a buyer's value. In its various
+branches, however, this unnamed sense is required, to a varying degree,
+perhaps, least of all in the purchasing of staple goods.
+
+For the sake of a more convenient understanding, let us begin by
+classifying the various needs of the insatiable Macy's into three major
+divisions: We shall put down staples, as the first of these; luxuries,
+as the second; and novelties, as the third. Under staples we shall
+include notions, cotton goods (such as sheets, pillow-cases and muslins)
+and, in general, the absolute necessities of life, including wearing
+apparel of the commoner varieties, household articles and the like.
+These are in constant purchase almost every day of the year. Take, for
+instance, that heterogeneous collection of articles, grouped under the
+generic and whimsical head of notions. There is thread of all kinds,
+there are hooks-and-eyes, snap-fasteners, hair-nets, darners,
+button-hooks, tape-measures and what all not more--far be it from me
+even to attempt to mention the more than four thousand separate items
+that must be constantly carried in the notion departments.
+
+For all of these there is a huge daily demand, while a month's supply of
+any of them is all that can, as a rule, be conveniently handled in the
+store. It must be patent that, as there is never an equal demand for
+these small but essential articles, the buyers must be placing constant
+orders for them. So it is with everything else that people must
+have--irrespective of tastes, wealth or the season of the year--and the
+number of the list is legion.
+
+Therefore, the buyer of staples does not depend so much upon the sixth
+sense as upon common sense. He must have plenty for the latter, however,
+and it is sure to be kept working on a fairly even basis throughout the
+entire year.
+
+In the category of the luxuries are included such articles as jewelry,
+musical instruments, Oriental rugs, paintings, fine bric-a-brac and the
+like. Clearly the buyer in this branch must possess real taste and
+discrimination in addition to commercial ability, in order to be able to
+purvey these properly to the public. He handles goods which have to be
+bought by people who have already purchased the necessities of life--the
+buying of luxuries involves the spending of the public's surplus and so
+this division of the work is at all times attended with great or less
+hazard.
+
+But the real hazards, the real necessity for that sixth sense, which I
+just mentioned, the hardest and most nerve-racking buyer's job, comes in
+the purchase of those goods grouped under the common title of novelties.
+As one of the members of the Macy's merchandise council once observed,
+the departments devoted to staples sell what the people want, while
+those devoted to novelties make the people want what they have to sell.
+And this last is quite true of the luxuries, as well.
+
+Here, incidentally, is a very curious fact about merchandise: A staple
+is not a constant thing. In one department it is what everybody wants
+and in another it becomes a novelty. For instance, a cotton pillow-case
+selling for, let us say, a dollar, is a staple; while another
+pillow-case, of linen this time, embroidered with an old English
+initial, hand hemstitched and edged with lace--we hesitate to guess at
+its cost--is a decided novelty, in the understanding of the store, at
+any rate. It also may be classed as a luxury.
+
+Styles, fads, exclusive designs and seasons determine the work of the
+buyer of novelties. The job is one that requires quick decisions. The
+staple buyer can "play safe," but the buyer of novelties who pursued the
+policy soon would find himself in the rear of the procession. Nor can he
+afford to make mistakes, for they may be costly indeed to the house that
+he represents. There is, in consequence, a greater demand on his nerve,
+his ingenuity and his imagination than you find in other classes of
+buyers. He must circulate where there are people--at the theaters,
+country clubs, restaurants, churches, in Fifth Avenue--and he must keep
+his ear to the ground and both eyes wide open. Consequently, when it is
+reported in the Sunday paper that the women of Paris have taken up the
+fad of wearing jeweled nose-rings, he must see that New York's women of
+fashion may have the same opportunity of expressing their individuality,
+by visiting Macy's jewelry department.
+
+This, of course, is rank exaggeration, but it indicates what the novelty
+buyer aims at. And surprisingly often he hits the mark.
+
+
+In such a huge establishment it is but natural that the reception hall
+outside the buying offices should be crowded most of the time. Mahomet
+oftimes goes to the mountain--or sends a representative to it to buy
+some of its goods--yet more often the mountain comes to Mahomet. And so,
+I am told, for five days a week--Saturdays being generally recognized as
+a closed day for buying--an average of from four hundred to six hundred
+and fifty salesmen a day visit the buying headquarters on the seventh
+floor of the store. Taking into consideration the fact that the goods
+purchased are paid for in cash within ten days of their delivery, these
+headquarters are most popular with the emissaries of manufacturers and
+wholesale houses. Added to this is the uniform policy of courtesy to
+salesmen, which has been stated by the company in its precise fashion:
+
+"We have held, as far as within our power, the precept of which our
+late head, Isidor Straus, was a living personification--that business
+may be conducted between merchants who are gentlemen, in a manner
+profitable to both."
+
+It is one thing to write a thing of this sort. It is another to live
+strictly up to it, day in and day out. But that Macy's does live up to
+this high-set principle of its behind-the-scenes conduct is evidenced by
+the unsought testimony of a manufacturer who sought for the first time
+to do business with it.
+
+This man had made one of the mistakes into which all manufacturers are
+apt to fall, sooner or later. He had overproduced. And while,
+heretofore, his product had been chiefly, if not solely, sold in
+high-priced novelty shops he now needed an establishment of great
+turnover to help him out in his dilemma. Macy's came at once into his
+mind. The old house is indeed advertised by its loving friends. He went
+to it at once; by means of the special elevator, found his way, along
+with several hundred other salesmen, to the sample and buying rooms upon
+the seventh floor.
+
+A young woman at the door received his card and, without delay, told him
+that he could see the buyer of the department which would naturally
+handle his product, upon the morrow; at any time before eleven, but
+under no circumstances later than noon. Better still, she would make a
+definite appointment for him for the next morning. Mr. Manufacturer
+chose this last course. And at the very moment of the appointed time was
+ushered into the buyer's little individual room. Contact was
+established quickly. The buyer already knew of Mr. Manufacturer's line,
+regretted that they had not done business together a long time before.
+He inspected the proffered samples, quickly and with a shrewd and
+practiced eye; finally called into the little room two members of the
+salesforce from the department down upon the ground floor. They agreed
+with him as to the salability of the product. He turned toward the
+manufacturer.
+
+"Please bring your stock to No. -- Madison Avenue next Tuesday
+afternoon, at half-past two."
+
+Why Madison Avenue? The manufacturer was perplexed as he descended to
+the street once again. The curiosity was relieved on Tuesday, however,
+when he and his abundant goods were ushered into a big and sunlit room.
+
+"We shall not be subject to any interruption here," said Macy's buyer.
+
+And so they were not. For two hours the buyer and two of his assistants
+went carefully over the stock, then withdrew for a short conference
+amongst themselves. When they returned they handed Mr. Manufacturer a
+card. It read after this fashion:
+
+
+             CASH
+
+     The entire lot $____
+
+
+"The figure on that card, with the word 'cash' heavily underscored was
+just one hundred dollars in excess of my minimum," said the manufacturer
+afterwards, in discussing the incident. "I paused a moment and then
+said: 'Gentlemen, I mean to accept your offer. You have figured well, as
+your offer is just sufficient to buy the goods. R. H. Macy & Company
+have secured this merchandise of unusual quality and I congratulate
+you.'"
+
+
+At the beginning of this chapter we mentioned another form of the
+store's buying--where Mahomet goes to the mountain. This, being
+translated into plain English, means that Macy's must and does maintain
+elaborate permanent office organizations in Paris, in London, in Belfast
+and in Berlin. These in turn are but centers for other shopping
+work--shopping that may lead, as we have already seen, as far as the
+distant Bagdad.
+
+For instance, from his office in the Cite Paradis in Paris, the head of
+the French-buying organization of the store controls the purchase of all
+goods for it, not only in France, but in Belgium and Switzerland as
+well. He virtually combs these busy and ingenious manufacturing nations
+for their latest specialties; from France, _les derniers cris_ in
+fashionable gowns, millinery, perfumes and novelties of every
+description; from Belgium, fine laces and gloves; and from Switzerland,
+watches. These items, however, are merely typical; there are hundreds of
+others.
+
+A young American woman, of remarkable taste and gifted with a genuine
+genius for buying, is upon the Paris staff and is engaged practically
+the entire year round in visiting exhibitions of every sort and variety,
+in hunting the retail shops, great and small, of the French capital and
+at all times acting upon her own initiative as a free-lance buyer. A job
+surely to be coveted by any ambitious young woman who feels that she
+understands and can translate the constantly changing tastes of her
+countrywomen into the merchandise needs of a store whose chief task is
+always to serve them.
+
+For reasons that are not necessary to be set down here, the Berlin
+office of Macy's has been in _statu quo_ for some years past, although
+it is just now reopening. The London branch is steadily on the search
+for the clothing, haberdashery and leather specialties which are the
+pride of the British workman, while from right across the Irish sea, at
+13 Donegal Square, North, Belfast, come the fine Irish linens that so
+long have been a distinguished merchandise feature of the store's stock.
+
+So it is, then, that forever and a day, Macy's is engaged in bringing
+the cream of European merchandise to New York--goods of nearly every
+kind that can either be made better abroad or cannot be duplicated at
+all in this country. Importing is indeed a large branch upon the Macy
+tree.
+
+And in this branch romance oftimes dwelleth. The picture of the caravan
+toiling up the banks of the Euphrates is no idle dream at all. Upon the
+world maps of the merchandise executives of Macy's it is an outpost of
+trading as unsentimental as Lawrence, Massachusetts, or Norristown,
+Pennsylvania. Yet the buyer who goes to the old Bagdad from the new has
+a real task set for him. Obviously he must not only have a knowledge of
+his market and a keen sense of values, but he must also be a resourceful
+traveler; a merchant who can adapt himself to the ways of the people
+with whom he trades. His judgment, discretion and integrity must be
+above reproach, for often he is far away and out of touch with
+headquarters for long months at a time.
+
+Take such a buying trip as the Oriental rug-buyer of Macy's recently
+made into the Orient and back again. It lasted eight months. In that
+time he traveled more than thirty thousand miles--by steamship,
+motor-car, railroad, horseback and on foot. The rug region of Persia is
+a long way, indeed, from Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street and to reach
+it he went to London and Paris, then to Venice, where he took a steamer
+for Bombay, upon the west coast of India. Thence he proceeded by another
+steamer up the Persian Gulf to the city of Basra, which is at the
+confluence of those two ancient rivers, the Tigris and the
+Euphrates--between which the earliest Biblical history is supposed to
+have been made. Basra today is one of the world's great rug-shipping
+centers.
+
+Then he went to Bagdad itself--the fabled city of Haroun-el-Raschid and
+the Arabian Nights--from whence he started into the very heart of
+Persia. He was not content, however, to remain idly there and let the
+rugs be brought to him. He went much further. Through Kermanshah, the
+city whose name is given to the rugs which come from Kerman, seven
+hundred miles to the southeast, to Hamadan, one of the main
+marketing-centers of the rug-producing country--that, briefly, was the
+beginning of his itinerary. He went carefully through Persia, picking up
+rugs here and there, having them baled and sent to Bagdad by mules or
+camels and shipped thence to New York; and he established warehouses to
+which rug-dealers brought their wares. The light of the Red Star shone
+in the East.
+
+Roads in Persia leave much indeed to be desired, and as the chief means
+of travel, aside from beasts of burden, is by Ford cars, a buyer who
+covers much of its territory has a rather unenviable job. Gasoline in
+those parts costs four dollars a gallon, while if you hire a jitney you
+pay for it at the rate of a dollar a mile.
+
+On his return trip to New York this buyer went back once again to India
+and north as far as the border of Afghanistan to investigate the
+condition of the rug market in that region. At ancient Siringar, in the
+Vale of Cashmere, he bought marvelous felt rugs made in the mysterious
+land of Thibet. And yet all the way throughout this long journey he was
+buying goods for only one department of the great store that he
+represented.
+
+
+It used to be impressive to me when the hardware dealer of the small
+town in which I was reared would boast of the number of items that he
+held upon the shelves of his own center of merchandising. There were
+more than two thousand of them! He told me that with such an evident
+pride, as a Chicago man speaks of the population of his town, or one
+from Los Angeles, of his climate. And yet such a stock as that wonderful
+one that was told to my youthful imagination, is more than duplicated in
+Macy's--and is but one of one hundred and seventeen others. And the
+responsibility of buying these millions of articles is scarcely less
+great than that of selling them.
+
+
+
+
+IV. Displaying and Selling the Goods
+
+
+With Macy's goods once purchased, the next problem becomes that of their
+transport to the store in Herald Square. Obviously their reception must
+rank second only to their purchase. And when this is accomplished, as we
+have just seen, in every corner of a far-flung world--Pennsylvania and
+Massachusetts and Thibet and Korea and South Africa, to say nothing of a
+thousand other places--their orderly receiving becomes, of itself, a
+mechanism of considerable size. Almost equally obvious it is, too, that
+the store, no matter how carefully and fore-visionedly and
+scientifically its buyers may plan, cannot always dispose of its
+merchandise at precisely the same rate at which it comes underneath its
+roof. It cannot afford to gain a reputation for not carrying in stock
+the items either that it advertises for sale or that it has educated its
+patrons to expect upon its counters. Which means that alongside of and
+intertwined with the orderly business of merchandise reception there
+must be warehousing--reservoir facilities, if you please.
+
+In concrete form, these last of Macy's are not merely rooms upon the
+extreme upper floors on the main store in Herald Square--a space which
+in recent years, however, has shrunk to proportionately small
+dimensions because of the vast growth of the business and the
+increasing demands of the selling departments upon the building--but
+four structures entirely outside of the parent plant: the Tivoli
+Building on the north side of Thirty-fifth Street, just west of Broadway
+(which, as we saw in the historical section of this book was originally
+the notorious music hall of the same name until Macy's purchased it for
+its merchandising plans), the Hussey Building, in the same street, but
+just west of the store, a third also in Thirty-fifth, but close to
+Seventh Avenue and a fourth in Twenty-eighth Street between Seventh and
+Eighth Avenues. So can a great store spread itself, even in its actual
+physical structure, far beyond the bounds that even the most imaginative
+of its customers might ordinarily call to mind.
+
+
+It is in the rear of the selfsame red-brick building at the westerly
+edge of Herald Square--that same main structure that we have already
+begun to study in many of its fascinating details--that we find the core
+of the receiving department of the Macy store. It is a hollow core. A
+tunnel-like roadway, two hundred feet in length bores its way through
+the building, from Thirty-fifth Street to Thirty-fourth. Through this
+cavernous place, lighted at all hours by numerous electric arcs, there
+passes, the entire working-day, a seemingly endless procession of
+motor-trucks, wagons and other carriers. They enter at the north end and
+before they emerge at the south they have discharged their cargoes. A
+corps of men is kept constantly busy, checking off the merchandise as
+it is unloaded. Husky porters, with hand trucks, seize cases, barrels
+and miscellaneous packages of every sort and, presto! they are whirled
+into huge freight elevators which presently depart for upper and unknown
+floors. There are three of these, in practically continuous operation.
+In addition to them packages brought by hand--generally from local
+wholesalers and in response to emergency orders--are carried up into the
+offices of the receiving department upon an endless carrier.
+
+It is a source of wonder to the observer to see the way in which these
+men of Macy's work. The poise. The confidence. The system. It is
+terrifying even to think of the mess that would be the result of a day,
+or even an hour, of inexperience or carelessness. In fact, it would
+hardly take ten minutes so to jam that long receiving platform that
+straightening it out again would be a matter of days. But upon it every
+man knows just what to do; and every man does it, and does it fast. And
+system wins once again. It generally does win.
+
+For these incoming goods receipts are made out in triplicate--one for
+the controller, one as a record for the receiving office and the third
+for the delivery agent; the second of these acts as a sort of herald of
+the actual arrival of the merchandise so that within sixty seconds or
+thereabouts of the actual appearance of the goods under the house's main
+roof the man who is responsible for them may be advised.
+
+Every article purchased anywhere by R. H. Macy & Company, either for
+their own use or for resale, is received through this department,
+although there are a few other points than the tunnel-like interior
+street from Thirty-fourth Street to Thirty-fifth where they are
+received. The four warehouses that we have just seen have their
+individual receiving facilities: the coal that goes to heat and light
+and drive the big main building is poured through chutes under the
+Thirty-fourth Street pavement, while direct to the company's stables and
+garages go the fodder for its vehicles--hay for the horses of flesh and
+blood, and gasoline and oil for those of steel and iron; all the other
+miniature mountains of their incidental materials into the bargain. But
+even these are checked in at the main receiving department; and
+triplicate receipts issued upon their arrival.
+
+
+So, then, come in these goods--by hand, express, by parcel post and
+freight. The most of them have had their transport charges prepaid; a
+certain small proportion of them comes marked "collect." An especial
+provision must be made for the cash payment of these charges. The big
+machine of modern industry must indeed have many odd cams and levers
+adjusted to it. It must be designed not alone for the usual, but for the
+unusual, and in a multitude of ways.
+
+These, then, are the reception chutes of the Macy machine; the porters,
+who even while hastening their trucks toward the elevators are making a
+cursory examination of the arrival condition of the merchandise, are in
+themselves small automatic arms of inspection. For while some of these
+packages have come from nearby--perhaps not half a block
+distant--others will have come from halfway around the wide world. And
+the possibility of damage to the contents of the carrier is lurking
+always in the short-distance package, quite as much as in its brother,
+that has attained the distinction of being a globe-trotter. The crates
+from the Middle West, those stout and honest looking Yankee boxes from
+New England, this group of barrels from the heart of new
+Czecho-Slovakia, and that of zinc-lined cases from France--the
+_Lorraine_ has touched at her North River pier but two or three days
+since--those great bales and bundles from the Orient, with the seemingly
+meaningless (and extremely meaningful) symbols splashed upon their rough
+sides, all look sturdy enough, as if they had survived well the
+vicissitudes of modern travel. Yet one can never tell.
+
+Which means that the personnel of the order checking department up on
+the seventh floor must not only carefully verify the shipment as to
+quality and to price but as to the condition in which it actually is
+received. The hurried cursory examination of the platform porters
+becomes an unhurried and painstaking investigation in this last
+instance. The cases are not necessarily opened within the seventh floor
+headquarters of the order checking department. As in the case of the
+actual physical receipt, the unpacking is carried forward at the point
+of greatest convenience to the merchandise department to be served. But
+the results and records are kept at the one central headquarters.
+
+And the skilled and expert merchandise checkers from the selfsame
+headquarters are the men and women who oversee the
+unpacking--invariably. They pass the responsibility of their stamp and
+signature upon their receipts before the merchandise is turned over to
+the department manager, who himself, or through his responsibility,
+purchased it. Nothing is left to guesswork, or to chance.
+
+
+Now we see the full responsibility settled once again upon the broad
+shoulders--let us hope indeed that they are broad--of the buyer. With a
+full knowledge of the price that he paid for them, of market conditions,
+and of the prices of Macy's competitors he determines the prices at
+which his merchandise is to be sold. Clerks, known as markers, quickly
+attach these prices by small tags to the goods themselves.
+
+From the marking-rooms, where everything to be sold within this
+market-place is plainly and unequivocally priced, the merchandise goes
+without further delay either direct to the counters of the selling
+floors, or into the "reserves"--the warehouses that extend all the way
+from Twenty-eighth Street to north of Thirty-fifth, and from Broadway to
+Eighth Avenue. The stage is set. The show is ready. The performance may
+now begin.
+
+A trip through the hinterland of the Macy store is like a visit behind
+the scenes of a modern theater. You see there just the way in which the
+drama of selling actually is staged, from the settings to the
+properties. You rub shoulders with the actors and actresses, just off
+stage; with the electrician, the stage-manager, the carpenter and the
+stage-hands. And always your ear is waiting to hear outside the
+orchestra and the applause of the audience.
+
+Into that ear there comes the almost rhythmic thud of automatic
+machines; a sort of continuous drone. You turn quickly and find beside
+you a row of ticket-printers, the little electric presses in which are
+made the price-tags that you find pinned or pasted or tied on every
+piece of Macy merchandise you buy. Miles of thin cardboard are fed into
+one side of these machines and come out the other; in proper-sized
+units, with the selling price of the article to be tagged plainly
+printed on them. Where the article is subject to Federal tax, this is
+also included as a separate item and the total given. One of these
+machines combines the operation of printing the price and attaching the
+ticket to the garment. It is detail--necessary detail, detail upon a
+vast scale.
+
+
+Here, then, is the receiving department of this great single retailing
+machine of modern business. It keeps over three hundred human units
+constantly upon the move--and, mind you, all that these people are doing
+is merely making the merchandise ready to sell. The next step is the
+final one before actual sale; the display of proffered goods--upon the
+counters and within the plate-glass windows along the street frontages.
+
+This, in the modern department-store, is considered a feature of the
+utmost importance, and nowhere more so than at Macy's. Sixty-four years
+of salesmanship experience, in the course of which it has been the
+originator of many daring and successful display experiments, has shown
+the house their full value.
+
+Yet, even in Macy's, there are certain reservations to the strong house
+policy of attractive display. Certain fundamentals are stressed. The
+invitation to buy is forever put in the goods themselves rather than in
+the background against which they are shown. It requires no especial
+astuteness to see from this fact alone an enormous expense is saved; the
+benefit of which, according to the now well understood Macy plan, is
+passed on to buyer. Other stores spend many thousands of dollars in
+building and decorating special rooms and sections for merchandising
+which are far out of the ordinary. To give an air of extreme
+exclusiveness, _chic_, Parisian atmosphere--call it what you
+may--elaborate partitions are put up and expensive decorators given
+carte-blanche. The result is beautiful, almost invariably. Shopping in
+such surroundings becomes a peculiar delight--particularly to the woman
+patron. But milady pays. In the expressive, if not elegant, old phrase
+she "pays through the nose."
+
+That some New York shoppers may like to pay this way is not for a moment
+to be doubted, but that the majority do, Macy's stoutly refuses to
+believe. While the house has not hesitated to install certain very
+lovely "special" rooms--_vide_ the _salon_ for the display of its
+imported frocks--the main thought in the construction of its present
+home in Herald Square was to build a retail market-place which would
+afford honest, efficient, comfortable marketing at the lowest possible
+prices. This meant that it would be inadvisable, to say the least, to
+give the store the atmosphere of either a palace or a _boudoir_. This is
+a policy that has continued until this day.
+
+None the less, Macy goods are displayed with the taste that makes them
+most desirable to the customer; psychological forethought, in a word.
+Novelties, of course, take precedence over staples--the articles that
+make the customer stop and investigate. Except under unusual conditions,
+the demand for staples does not have to be stimulated, and ordinarily no
+especial attempt is made to give them more than ordinary display. One
+underlying factor in the successful display of goods is to preserve
+harmonious color relations between them and, so far as possible, this
+harmony pervades the entire floor. The buying public would not tolerate
+a store where they heard profanity among the employees; and at Macy's
+they do not have to endure colors that swear at one another.
+
+Held in high esteem by the public as well as by the store itself are the
+display windows which line the entire ground-floor frontage of the
+building on Broadway and on Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth Streets. Here
+merchandise is arranged by master window dressers under the general
+direction of the advertising department, for if the front windows of a
+house such as this are not advertising, what, then, is? Especially when
+the art of window dressing has come in recent years to be a finely
+developed art of its own. For many years before it left Fourteenth
+Street Macy's had a fame not merely nation-wide but fairly world-wide
+for its window displays--we already have referred to the wondrous
+Christmas pageants that it formerly held as a part of them. In this it
+was again a pioneer, blazing a new commercial path for its competitors
+to follow.
+
+Because window display is recognized as advertising, the ceaseless work
+of the master window dressers upon the outer rim of the Macy store comes
+under the direct supervision of the advertising department which in turn
+reports direct to no less an authority than the triple partnership
+itself. Publicity is the great right-arm of the super-store of the
+America of today. Publicity not in one channel, but in a thousand.
+Macy's not only helps to dominate the advertising pages of the
+newspapers of New York and a good many miles round about it, its red
+star not only gleams in Herald Square, but in these very recent days
+upon the high-set electric hoardings of Times Square that blaze forth
+far into the night; it finds its way into the public thought here and
+there and everywhere. And yet, with due appreciation of every other
+medium of publicity, the street window of the store still remains one of
+the most important phases of its appeal to possible patrons.
+
+Its displays are scheduled long in advance; are devised as carefully as
+the decoration of a home might be, or, better still, as Urban or Pogany
+would plan the stage-settings of a scene in the Metropolitan or at any
+one of the various "Follies" that one finds just north of the Opera
+House. A large staff of men is kept constantly at work dressing the
+windows, and this staff includes the carpenters, paper-hangers, painters
+and electricians who are needed to help prepare the special exhibits.
+Under the floor of the window next the principal entrance on
+Thirty-fourth Street there is a tank, which is used when a pool of water
+is required to carry out some scenic effect. It is capable of floating a
+canoe to suggest the joys of camping and the need of going to Macy's for
+one's vacation requisites--as well as for use in other capacities. Known
+in the store as the "parlor window" it has been made to represent pretty
+nearly everything from milady's bedroom to a glorified carpenter shop.
+
+Window displays are regarded by Macy's as an important auxiliary to
+newspaper announcements. Very recently, during the few weeks before
+Christmas, a sale of overcoats was advertised. All the windows were then
+dressed with Christmas merchandise, but from one of them this was all
+removed and the sale overcoats substituted. For one day only. For upon
+the very next one the Christmas window was returned to its holly and
+mistletoe flavor.
+
+Here is a pretty direct indication of the store's attitude towards its
+immensely valuable windows--if you do not consider them valuable inquire
+the price of the advertising signs in the Herald Square neighborhood. I
+asked its advertising manager if, in his opinion, the window space would
+not bring better returns if it were devoted to direct selling, instead
+of mere indirect selling through display. I had in the back of my mind
+some of the great Paris emporiums who think so little of window- and so
+much of selling-space that on bright warm days they spread some of their
+notions and novelty-counters right out upon the broad sidewalks of the
+Boulevards.
+
+"No," said he, "decidedly no. To be able to show one's goods to the
+multitudes that pass these windows nearly every hour of the day is an
+asset that cannot be overestimated."
+
+
+This is neither the time nor the place to go into the ethics or the fine
+principles of the most recently developed of American
+professions--advertising; the salesmanship of goods and of ideas not so
+much by the merchandise itself as by the representation of it. Neither
+is it the place to review the vast position that the modern department
+store has taken in the development of modern advertising of every sort:
+Newspapers, magazines, bill-boards, electric signs, other forms of
+display as well. There are folk who say that if it were not for the
+department-store advertising we should not have had the fully developed
+metropolitan newspaper of today; while, on the other hand, some of the
+larger merchants are not reluctant in saying that our modern
+metropolitan newspapers are the chief causes that have made the
+department-store as we know it in New York and other large cities of the
+United States possible. Be these things as they may, the fact does
+remain, however, solid and indisputable, that the co-operation between
+these two groups of interests has been more than profitable to their
+patrons, to say nothing of themselves. And not the least of the
+contributing causes to such profits is the fundamental honesty of the
+advertisements.
+
+Not so very many years ago the measure of integrity in advertising was,
+to speak charitably, a variable one. When they talked about them in
+print merchants were very likely to become overenthusiastic about their
+goods. Modesty was flung to the four winds. Printers' ink seemed to be
+taken as an automatic absolution for exaggeration--and oftimes absolute
+mis-statement--and, strangely enough, the public appeared to fall in
+with the idea. More often than not the merchant "got away with it"--or,
+if not, made good with bad grace, in which case the customer was
+satisfied. He had to be.
+
+But not so with Macy's. Early in its history an advertising policy was
+formulated that has endured to the present and will continue to endure.
+It is the house's stoutly expressed belief that there is no possible
+excuse whatsoever for misrepresentation and, following this out, it is
+its invariable rule to stand back of its advertising, to the last ditch.
+To this end it has inculcated such a spirit of conservatism into its
+advertising department that the superlative is eliminated and forbidden
+in describing Macy goods. "We may think that these articles are the
+best, or the most beautiful, or the greatest bargain, but we can't
+absolutely be sure of it." That is its attitude. The only possible
+criticism is the same that one applies to the man who stands so straight
+that he leans backward.
+
+Is the system flawless? Of course not--no system is. Not many weeks ago
+an incident occurred that shows how Macy's may slip up--and then make
+good; it put out a small newspaper advertisement featuring coats for
+small boys at $8.74. These were advertised as "wool chinchilla" and so
+potent was the appeal of the notice that by ten o'clock the entire
+stock of nine hundred coats was gone. Then one of the store executives
+discovered that the coats were not _all wool_ and things began to hum.
+
+"Never said that they were all wool," the responsible sub-executive
+cornered. "People ought to know that they can't buy an all-wool coat for
+that money."
+
+That made no difference with the big boss. Patiently and firmly he
+explained that in a Macy advertisement "wool" means "all-wool" except
+where it is clearly specified that it contains cotton. Another
+advertisement was inserted in the newspapers the following day. It
+explained and apologized for the mis-statement and said, "We would deem
+it a favor if our customers would bring in these coats and accept a
+return of their money." Out of the nine hundred coats sold one was
+brought back for credit, while another was brought in by a customer who
+wanted to keep the coat but thought that she might get a rebate. She
+didn't. Macy's may lean over backward but it doesn't drag on the
+ground--an instance of which is contained in the following:
+
+Christmas candy for Sunday Schools was advertised in a number of New
+York newspapers at the very low price of $7.44 for one hundred pounds.
+In one newspaper three pieces of type fell out of the form with the
+result that the advertisement went to press quoting a hundred-weight of
+candy at forty-four cents! It was patent that it was a typographical
+error, for the decimal point, as well as the dollar mark and the figure
+7 was gone and there was a blank space where the types were missing.
+Three would-be customers tried, however, to hold the store accountable
+for the very obvious error. And Macy's balked!
+
+The lowest-in-the-city-prices policy keeps the advertising department on
+its toes continually. Other stores' prices must be anticipated wherever
+it is humanly possible, which means constant revisions of the copy.
+Occasionally a price duel develops that becomes spectacular in the
+extreme. In a recent memorable one "hard water soap" figured as the
+_casus belli_. Macy patrons know their right now to expect lowest
+prices, so when another store began to cut Macy's advertised prices on
+this commodity, Macy's had to return in suite. Whereupon the other store
+cut under Macy's again; and Macy's in turn went its competitor one
+better. It then became a merry game of parry and thrust until, one fine
+day, Macy's was selling twelve dozen cakes of hard water soap for the
+inconsiderable sum of one copper cent. One came near godliness for a
+small amount that day. The public profited hugely, but Macy's lived up
+to its policy.
+
+
+As a rule advertisements originate with the department managers. Keeping
+in mind that they are the buyers, the merchants responsible for the
+moving of their stock, it can be seen that they know best the goods that
+ought to be featured. The value of the space used is charged against
+their departments, so that their requisitions are governed accordingly.
+The advertising manager is a large factor, however, in the allotment of
+space--not only the clearing-house, but practically the court of last
+resort--concerning the rival claims by the department manager for space
+upon a given day. After all, there is a limit to the size of a newspaper
+page.
+
+When a certain line of goods is about to be advertised, the comparison
+department is notified and the articles are "shopped." That is, one or
+more of the expert shopping staff is given the task of ascertaining what
+other stores are charging for the same things so that it may be made
+sure that the Macy price will be lower. The information then is passed
+on to the copy writing staff and samples of the goods are studied for
+selling points. While the description is being written, one of the art
+staff makes a drawing, either in the nature of a design or illustration,
+and when these are completed the advertisement is set in type. This,
+bear in mind, is only for one item. Macy advertisements, more often than
+not, cover an entire newspaper page and are made up of many separate
+items, each of which goes through practically the same process of
+creation. Their final collection and arrangement on the page are made by
+an advertising expert of skill and taste and from this fact, combined
+with the distinctive type faces that are commonly used, one might be
+reasonably sure of identifying a Macy advertisement even if the store
+name were to be entirely omitted.
+
+In addition to window display, newspaper and magazine announcements, it
+is the concern of the advertising department to provide the store with
+its sign cards and special-price tickets. These are all a part of the
+big problem of letting the public know about Macy goods. Yet above and
+beyond all of these things, the store's supreme advertisement, if you
+please, is the establishment itself, the service that it strives so
+sincerely to give. To use the current phrase of expert publicity men,
+the store, its salespeople and its prices must _sell_ Macy's to the
+outside world. Outside advertising is but supplementary to this; but a
+single horse in a team of four.
+
+
+With this fact firmly fixed in your mind, consider next the unbending
+problem of making the salesforce into a genuine salesforce; one that
+constantly and continually backs up the force of the printed
+advertisement by the skill of its real salesmanship. When we come in
+another chapter to consider the Macy family as a whole we shall see in
+some detail its remarkable educational and training opportunities. These
+have been brought to bear directly upon the creation, not only of
+thoroughness and accuracy on the part of the clerk, but for courtesy and
+persuasiveness and enthusiasm as well--the things that make the
+structure of morale; that quality that we first began to know and to
+understand as such in the days of the Great War.
+
+"If you are playing a game, such as tennis, or bridge, or baseball or
+what-not," said one of the department managers to his sales staff but a
+few mornings ago, "you are out to beat your best friend; if you can, do
+it fairly and squarely, otherwise never. The enjoyment you derive from a
+game depends on the spirit with which you play it. When you begin to
+regard business in a similar light, playing it as a game in a
+sportsmanlike manner, then you will begin to get fun out of it--you
+will begin to make progress."
+
+After the preliminary training which every salesclerk receives, he or
+she is assigned to a department. Thenceforward a good deal depends on
+personal initiative; for in dealing with customers no small part of the
+store's reputation for efficiency and courtesy depends upon the
+individual clerk. A salesperson may become not only a distinct asset to
+the house, but may develop a personal clientele through especially
+intelligent and courteous attention to the customers' wishes. And this,
+owing to the system of allowing a bonus on sales above a certain fixed
+quota, and a commission on sales up to that quota, may make it
+financially very much worth while to him or her.
+
+Salesmanship in a store as large as Macy's must of necessity include the
+knowledge of considerable detail in the making out of sales slips,
+procedure with regard to C. O. D. deliveries, depositors' accounts,
+exchanges and the like. This knowledge is a fundamental part of each
+salesperson's equipment. His or her efficiency must come, however, from
+a far wider development of the possibilities of the salesmanship, from
+the "playing of the game," as the department manager put it but a moment
+ago--the understanding use of courtesy, merchandise knowledge,
+helpfulness. Such efficiency pays. The Macy folk who come to use it
+regularly soon find themselves advancing to responsible and highly-paid
+positions.
+
+
+It is interesting to follow the career of a sales slip from the time it
+is made out--when the sale is made--until the time that it ceases to
+function. Here is one of the most important items in the mechanism of a
+large retail store. It is an essential unit of a carefully developed
+system to keep track of sales, from the minute that they are made until
+they are finally delivered and audited.
+
+The sales slip--the Macy clerk has three different ones of them in
+all--is made in three distinct parts--original, duplicate and
+triplicate. Each of these is divided into several parts; each of which
+in turn is destined for separate hands. The packer of the merchandise
+gets one part, which eventually goes to the customer, a second to the
+cashier, the third the clerk retains. Eventually these last two come
+together once again in the auditing department and are checked, the one
+against the other; after which one goes into the archives of the bureau
+of investigation, in case that there is any further question about the
+details of the transaction. This one example of the infinite detail in
+the conduct of a great store is a slight indication of the
+responsibility upon the shoulders of not only its managers but the rank
+and file of its salesforce as well. A single error in the making out of
+a sales slip may easily result in expensive and harassing complications
+all the way along the line.
+
+A system of transfer books enables the store's customer to make
+purchases in its various departments with the least possible waiting.
+The goods and prices are entered in a small book which is given the
+customer at the time of the first purchase of the day. While the
+customer is making his or her other purchases they are being sent to the
+wrapping room where they are held in a growing group until the customer
+presents the book to the cashier at the transfer desk on the main floor,
+pays the total and, a few minutes later, receives a neat package in
+which all of the items are wrapped together; or else it is sent to any
+designated address.
+
+
+Enough, for the moment, of detail. Some of it is necessary to a proper
+understanding of the workings of this great machine of modern business,
+but too much of it may easily bore you. Instead, quickly turn your
+attention to a Macy feature dear to the heart of the average
+shopper--male or deadlier. Here is the familiar, the time-honored
+"special sale." In holding these Macy does not lay claim to originality,
+except perhaps in the amount of merchandising involved and the
+spectacularly low prices. Sales are in a large measure opportunities for
+the store as well as for the customer. It takes a goodly amount of
+merchandise from a manufacturer who for some reason offers a large
+concession in price and passes on its advantage to its customers. This
+is not generosity. It is good business. It is sound business. It is
+progressive business.
+
+Take a sale of laundry soap that went on within the great store about a
+year ago. The soap was made in this country and contracted for by the
+city of Paris, upon a dollar basis. Exchange slumped, and with francs
+worth only a fraction of their former value, Paris couldn't afford to
+take it. Macy's offer for it was accepted and so marked was the
+reduction at which it was offered to the public that inside of two weeks
+the big store had sold twenty-two carloads of it. Figuring from the fact
+that a carload comprised six hundred cases, the turnover amounted to
+6,862 cases; or, counting a hundred bars to a case, 686,200 pieces of
+soap!
+
+The most successful sale of winter underwear that Macy's ever held took
+place during a very warm week in July, a twelvemonth before the laundry
+soap episode. A large manufacturer wanted to unload his stock and Macy's
+bought it for cash. Add to these facts the consideration that the goods
+were away out of season and you can readily see how it was possible to
+buy the goods at a very low price. Relying upon the public's ability to
+judge values, in and out of season, the store launched the sale--and
+launched it successfully. It was like a scene out of _Alice in
+Wonderland_ to see the crowds of men and women with perspiration rolling
+down their foreheads buying woolen "undies" against the needs of winter.
+Americans do like to be forehanded.
+
+Macy's ability to buy and sell huge quantities of merchandise is
+demonstrated through these sales. Very recently over seven thousand of a
+particular leather traveling bag were sold in less than four weeks, at
+an aggregate price of nearly $75,000. In one day seven hundred vacuum
+cleaners were sold for $29.75 each. This list might be continued
+indefinitely; for not only has Macy's proved that it pays to advertise
+but that it pays to follow the Macy advertisements.
+
+Down in the basement of this great mart of Herald Square there is a
+corner not often shown to the outer world, from which there constantly
+emerge noises which blend and combine to give the effect of a staccato
+rumble. Thud, thud, t-h-u-u-d, thud, thudity, thud, thud. Then a sound
+of air, as in a Gargantuan sigh. Thudity, thud, and so on, _ad
+infinitum_. These sounds seemingly are quite unending. If your curiosity
+draws you toward the door from which these sounds emerge and you finally
+are permitted to open it and go within, you will find a company of young
+women sitting along both sides of three sets of moving belts, quickly
+picking brass cylinders from the belts as they pass them. Except for the
+fact that there is another tube room on the fourth floor (for the upper
+floor selling departments) this basement place might truly be called the
+heart of the store, for it is these brass cylinders that contain the
+life-blood of the business, the cash which the customers pay for their
+purchases. Call the tube room the pulse of the store and the analogy is
+better--certainly their throbbing is a close index of its condition.
+
+Alert cashiers pick up the carriers from the upper belt as they pass,
+deftly make the required change, and drop them to the lower belt, on
+which they are conveyed to other young women who despatch them to the
+departments whence they came. This continues for approximately eight
+hours each working day. The cash carriers do considerable traveling in
+the course of a year. One of them might easily go from the new Bagdad to
+the old. Yes, it might. If you still scoff let us look at the system
+together and do a little figuring upon our own account.
+
+Throughout the store there are two hundred and fifty cash stations--the
+outer terminals of the line at one of whose common hearts we now stand.
+Each of these stations is connected with one or the other of the common
+hearts by two separate lines of tubing, one for sending and the other
+for receiving the carriers. There is a total of 125,000 feet of this
+tubing, or nearly twenty-four miles. Five thousand cash carriers are in
+use and the average number of round-trips made per day by all of them is
+150,000. Each round-trip averages two hundred and fifty feet. The
+average distance traveled each day by this host of travelers then comes
+to the astonishing total of 37,500,000 feet--7,155 miles. Now to your
+atlases and find how far the new Bagdad is from the old. And if that
+distance does not give you pause, consider that the peak-load of the
+system was carried on a day when its mileage ran to 12,120--an
+equivalent of one-half the distance around the world--in a little over
+eight hours.
+
+Truly it would seem that money goes far at Macy's.
+
+
+
+
+V. Distributing the Goods
+
+
+When milady of Manhattan finishes her purchases in Macy's, snaps her
+purse together once again and goes out of the store, the transaction is
+ended, at least as far as she herself is concerned. But not so for
+Macy's. Particularly not so when she has given orders that the goods be
+"sent," either to her own home or to the home of some friend. In such
+cases the largest part of the store's responsibility still is ahead of
+it. It must see to it that the package--or packages--shall be carried to
+the proper destination, quickly, promptly, correctly. Which means that
+the great business machine of Herald Square has another great function
+to perform.
+
+
+There is, in the sub-basement of the Herald Square store, where the
+greatest portion of its own great transportation system is situated, an
+ancient two-wheeled cart, somewhat faded and battered, yet still a red
+delivery wagon and showing clearly the name of the house it served, R.
+H. Macy & Company. It is a treasured relic of other days, which now and
+then again, at great intervals, is shown to the populace in the
+all-too-rare parades of the huge wagon equipment of the store today.
+
+The gentleman who gives the lecture which accompanies any public
+showing of this ancient equipage is Mr. James Woods, who, as we have
+already seen, has been with the store for nearly half a century and who
+has risen in its service to the important post of assistant
+superintendent of the delivery department. Mr. Woods regards the cart
+with tender affection, since it was he who once was the human horse who
+strode between its shafts. That was back in 1873, long years before the
+store had moved north from the once tree-shaded Fourteenth Street. Mr.
+Macy, himself, was still very much in charge of the enterprise and was
+passing proud of his delivery "fleet"--consisting of three horse-drawn
+wagons, and young Jimmie Woods with the cart. A good many prosperous New
+Yorkers then had their residences within a dozen blocks or less of the
+old store, and young Jimmie's legs--and the cart--could and did serve
+them, easily and expeditiously.
+
+That was almost the beginning of the Macy delivery department. In fact
+it had been but five years before that Mr. Macy had acquired the first
+horse-drawn rig for this purpose. From that beginning the growth was
+steady although slow. Ten years after Mr. Woods first came to it--in
+1883--there were but fifteen wagons. In 1902, when the great trek was
+made north to Herald Square, there were a hundred. Today there are more
+than two hundred and fifty, of which by far the larger number are motor
+driven. These last range all the way from the big five-ton motor trucks
+which, as we shall presently see, are used primarily for carrying
+merchandise between the store and its outlying distributing stations,
+down to the small one-ton truck, which is used at its greatest advantage
+in city street distribution. And an astonishing number of horse-drawn
+vehicles remain. That is, astonishing to the uninitiated layman, who
+perhaps has been led to believe that the motor truck in this, its heyday
+of perfection, could hardly be surpassed for any form of carrying. As a
+matter of fact, however, the department-stores as well as the express
+companies, skilled in the multiple distribution of small packages, have,
+after a careful and intensive study of the motor trucks--which has
+resulted in their ordering many, many hundreds of them for certain of
+their necessities--discovered that for certain forms of delivery the
+horse and wagon still remains unsurpassed. The time that a delivery
+wagon remains standing becomes an economic factor in its use. If it
+moved all the time it undoubtedly would be as cheap and certainly more
+efficient to use a small automobile truck. But when there are fairly
+lengthy stops and close together, where perhaps the vehicle is idle for
+four minutes for every one that it is actually in operation, the factor
+of having an expensive machine idle as against an inexpensive one comes
+into play.
+
+Business organizations reckon these things not alone from sentiment, but
+from hard-headed facts. Yet they are not entirely free from sentiment,
+even in such seemingly purely commercial matters as delivery. The very
+condition and upkeep of the vehicles of a high-grade department-store
+show this. "Spic-and-span" is hardly the phrase by which to describe
+them. Fresh paint and gold striping--the smooth sides so cleaned and
+polished, that one might see his face reflected mirror-like upon them,
+the horses to the last state of perfection--this is the Macy standard of
+delivery. A Macy truck and wagon is designed to be one of the store's
+best advertisements.
+
+A skillful trucking contractor from the lower west side of New York went
+to a department-store owner a dozen years or more ago and said:
+
+"Mr. A----, after a little study of your delivery service, I am
+convinced that if you would turn it over to me, I could save you more
+than fifty per cent. in its operation."
+
+Mr. A---- was a pretty hard-headed business man, "hard-boiled" is the
+word that might well be used to describe him. He turned quickly to the
+contractor.
+
+"You interest me," said he. "How would you propose to do it?"
+
+"At the outset, by making the wagon equipment a little less elaborate.
+It could be just as efficient without so much varnish and brass and
+gold-stripe."
+
+Mr. A---- shook his head negatively.
+
+"Oh, no," he said, "we know that much ourselves. If we were to do that,
+we should lose fifty per cent. of our advertisement upon the streets of
+New York."
+
+
+We have left milady's package where she left it, in the hands of the
+salesclerk who sold it to her. The purchaser does not see it thereafter,
+not at least until it has come to her home. With an astonishing celerity
+and according to a carefully set-down program and practice it is wrapped
+right within the floor upon which the selling department is situated,
+and then dropped into a chute which leads with a straight, swift run
+into that nether world of Macy's--the basement headquarters of the
+delivery department. In reality this chute is a carrier, so designed as
+to carry the small individual packages with safety and order, as well as
+with celerity.
+
+There are fourteen of these conveyors, coming down from all the selling
+floors save that of furniture which has its own special delivery
+organization on the ninth floor. Together they pour their almost
+constant stream of merchandise upon the so-called "revolving-ring" in
+the very center of the basement floor. This "revolving-ring," in purpose
+very much like the great and slowly revolving disc-like wooden wheels
+used in the freight stations of the express companies for a similar
+service, is, in reality, much larger than they. It is a
+"square-ring"--if I may use that paradoxical phrase--built of four
+slowly moving conveyor belts upon which a package may travel an
+indefinite number of round-trips. At various points upon the outer edge
+of this moving square the conveyor chutes drop their merchandise. Near
+the center are the wide-open mouths of other conveyors, which lead to
+distant corners of the basement.
+
+The nimble-fingered and nimble-witted young men who stand within the
+"revolving-ring" feed the packages from it into these last conveyors. To
+each individual package is affixed a duplicate portion of the leaf of
+the salesbook. On it the salesclerk has written, or printed, the address
+to which the merchandise is to go, the cost, whether or not it is
+collect on delivery (known hereafter in this telling as C. O. D.) and
+other essential information. It is the addresses, however, which attract
+the eyes of the genii of the "revolving-ring." In their minds these fall
+into four great categories: City, meaning those portions of Manhattan
+Island south of Seventy-second Street on the east side and Ninety-ninth
+Street on the west; Harlem and the Bronx, the incorporated city of New
+York north of those two streets; Brooklyn and New
+Jersey--self-explanatory; and Suburban: all the rest of the territory
+within the far-flung limits of Macy's own generously wide delivery
+service. While for those points that are unfortunate enough to lie just
+outside of it--Boston or Philadelphia or Kamchatka or Manila (There
+hardly is an address to stagger the Macy delivery department)--the
+packages go direct to the shipping room, in its own corner of the
+basement.
+
+Here these last are checked and wrapped for long-distance shipment. They
+are checked against the payment or the non-payment of transportation
+charges; the store has very definite rules of its own. A paid purchase
+of but $2.50 is entitled to free delivery within any of the Eastern
+States, of $5 and over to any of the Middle States as well, of $10 and
+over to any corner of the whole United States. Freight and express
+prepayments are arranged upon a somewhat similar basis. The majority of
+the long-distance shipments go by parcel post, however. Still, in the
+course of a twelvemonth, there are enough to go both by express and
+freight to make a pretty considerable transportation bill in themselves.
+
+Again we have neglected that precious package of milady's. It may be
+only an extra pair of corset-laces--in which case the saleswoman must
+have suggested that madam herself transport it to her habitat--or it may
+be an eight or ten-yard piece of heavy silk for her new evening gown, or
+the evening gown itself. In any case it receives the same care and
+attention. We have already seen how it is packed, sent through the
+conveyor-chute down into the basement and then upon the "revolving-ring"
+before the nimble eyes of the men with nimble hands and wits as well.
+
+Milady lives in West One Hundred and Fourth Street. The sorter's eyes
+catch that much from the address slip, torn originally from the
+salesclerk's book and pasted upon the package's outer wrappings.
+"Harlem" his mind reports back to his eyes. Into the chute-entrance
+labeled "Harlem and The Bronx" goes the package.
+
+"Harlem and The Bronx" is a sizable room for itself. The further end of
+the second conveyor to receive milady's precious package rests upon a
+table in its very center. Roundabout the table are small compartments or
+bins, each about the size of a small packing case; each numbered and
+corresponding to a definite wagon route or run. Run No. 87 (the number
+is purely fictitious) takes in West One Hundred and Fourth Street. Into
+compartment No. 87 goes milady's packages. But not, of course, until the
+clerical young man technically known as the sheet-writer has made a
+record of it. Into his records, also, go all the other packages destined
+that day for that particular room. If there should be, as sometimes
+happens, an overplus of packages for the single run, then it is the
+business of one of the assistant superintendents of delivery to meet the
+emergency either by stretching momentarily the runs of the adjoining
+routes or by sending a special wagon up from the main store. Experience
+and judgment must cut the cloth to fit the case.
+
+Under any ordinary procedure milady's package will go out early in the
+morning of the day following her purchase. That, at least, is the
+store's ordinary guarantee of delivery. As a matter of fact, it does far
+better than this. On ordinary days, when weather and street conditions
+in Manhattan have not gone in conditions of near-impassability, there
+are at least two regular deliveries to every part of the island south of
+One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street, with a single one at least to every
+other part of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, to say nothing of the
+downtown portions of Jersey City and Hoboken. Easily said, this thing.
+But when one comes to realize how tremendously widespread the
+metropolitan district of Greater New York is these days, the performance
+of it becomes a transportation marvel, a masterpiece of organization.
+
+I shall not bore you with a description of the printed forms, the checks
+and counter checks that accompany the delivery of milady's package. It
+is enough to say that they are both complete and necessary. The
+complications of C. O. D. add greatly to their perplexities. For,
+discourage it as they may and do, the department-store owners of New
+York never have been able to wean milady from the joys of this method
+of shopping. When she says "C. O. D." in Macy's the salesclerk
+immediately and courteously replies: "Have you tried having a
+depositor's account, madam?" A good many of them have, and all who have
+have liked the method. Yet the C. O. D. still has its great appeal. And
+out of all the deliveries from the big store in Herald Square more than
+half of them are collect-on-delivery. This means, in turn, a good deal
+of complication for the delivery department. Its drivers have to be
+cashiers, in miniature. When they report at the main store at half-past
+seven in the morning, each is furnished with five dollars in change; a
+sum which is doubled in the case of the suburban drivers. Moreover, for
+the correct handling of the forms, a double amount of care and
+understanding is required. One does not wonder that the department-store
+proprietors discourage the C. O. D.
+
+Yet it all requires a high type of wagon representative. Hardly less
+than the salesclerk does the wagon driver of the store have it in his
+power to make or lose friends for his house. His is no small opportunity
+for real salesmanship. The big stores realize this, and select these men
+with great care and discernment. They know that the man who shouts
+"Macy's" up the areaway or elevator-shaft once or twice a week is apt to
+become the same sort of good family friend and ally as the iceman or the
+butcher's boy. The man knows that, too: particularly in the vicinity of
+Christmas week. His own trials are many and varied. Apartment house
+superintendents and janitors, with prejudices of their own, are rarely
+co-operative, generally obstructive, in fact. Some people--even store
+patrons--are naturally mean. They take out all their meanness upon the
+department-store man who, because of his very position, is unable to
+strike back.
+
+Yet the job has its compensations, aside from the warm remembrances of
+the holiday season. People, in the main, are decent after all. If Mrs.
+Jinks, who lives in Albemarle Road, Flatbush, is out at the matinee or
+the movies for the afternoon, Mrs. Blinks, who lives next door, will
+take in her packages. The Macy man has been long enough on the route to
+know that by this time. Such knowledge is a part of his stock in trade.
+He must not only know the regular patrons of the store, but all of their
+neighbors. While by the correct and courteous handling of both he may
+not only retain trade for it but bring new customers to its doors.
+
+
+Let us now suppose that milady does not live in either Manhattan,
+Brooklyn or the Bronx, but in one of those smart suburbs: Forest Hills,
+New Rochelle, Englewood or the Oranges, to pick four or five out of
+many. She still is well within the limits of Macy's own delivery
+service. If she lives in the first of these--Forest Hills--she will be
+served, not direct from the Herald Square establishment, but from the
+little Long Island community of Queens. Fifteen wagon and motor truck
+routes run from the Macy sub-station there, which in turn is fed by the
+merchandise coming out over the great Queensborough bridge, each
+evening, on heavy five-ton trucks. And, to go back even further, these
+have been filled from the super-sized compartments at the end of the
+conveyor-chute marked "Suburban."
+
+Similarly, if she dwell in New Rochelle, she will be served by one of
+the fifteen motor trucks running out from the sub-station at Woodlawn,
+remembered by travelers upon the trains to Boston chiefly as the place
+of the enormous cemetery. It serves the great suburban territory north
+of the direct delivery routes out from the main store--a line drawn
+through Kingsbridge and Pelham Avenue--out as far as Ossining, Mt. Kisco
+and Stamford.
+
+Englewood and the New Jersey territory roundabout are served by Macy's
+Hackensack sub-station, with nine more routes; while the Oranges, mighty
+Newark, Montclair and that immediate vicinage draws its merchandise
+through a fourth sub-station, right in the heart of Newark, itself, and
+operating ten regular motor truck routes. The fifth and last
+all-the-year sub-station is at West New Brighton, Staten Island. It
+serves that far-flung and least populated of New York's five boroughs,
+Richmond.
+
+In the summer months another sub-station is added to the list, at
+Seabright, down on the New Jersey coast, and serving all those populous
+resorts from the Atlantic Highlands on the north to Spring Lake on the
+south. This is an expensive feature of Macy service, and one for which
+the store receives no extra compensation. It is one of the many
+expensive things that must be charged to profit-and-loss or the somewhat
+indefinite "_overhead_"--indefinite enough when one comes to consider
+its ramifications, but always fairly definite in its drain upon the
+daily financial balances of the store.
+
+At each of these sub-stations there are, in addition to the fairly
+obvious necessary facilities for re-sorting the merchandise, complete
+garage facilities for the wagons and trucks running out from them;
+these, of course, are in addition to the store's main stables and
+garages in West Nineteenth Street and also in West Thirty-eighth,
+Manhattan. Together all of these form a very considerable fleet upon
+wheels, with a personnel in keeping. For the delivery routes alone, and
+taking no account of the sizable force employed in the upkeep of
+vehicles and horses, there are employed, in the city service of the
+store, one hundred and ninety drivers and chauffeurs, with one hundred
+and eighty-six helpers, and in the suburban service, seventy-four
+drivers and eighty-six helpers.
+
+Through the hands of these there pours a constant and a terrific stream
+of merchandise. The conveying system in the basement of the Herald
+Square store has a generous maximum carrying capacity of five thousand
+packages an hour--a capacity which sometimes is actually reached toward
+the close of an exceptionally busy day, say toward the end of the
+pre-Christmas season. Twenty-five thousand packages is an average day's
+work for that basement room; upon occasion it has gone well over
+forty-one thousand. It should be borne in mind, moreover, that a package
+does not always represent a single purchase; in fact, it rarely does.
+Inside of one assembled package--generally assembled, as we saw in a
+previous chapter, at the store's transfer desk--there may be all the way
+from two to ten separate parcels. You may take your own guess as to the
+average number.
+
+
+Here, then, is the great and complicated system in its simplest form.
+Its ramifications are many and astonishing. For instance, milady is apt
+at times to change her mind. Yes, she is. And send the package back.
+Even though not as often in Macy's as in the charge account stores. Here
+is another decided benefit in the cash system--not alone to the store,
+but, because of its habit of passing on its economies, to its patrons as
+well. Yet in the course of a year a considerable number of packages must
+come back. Despite a thorough educational system and constant oversight
+and admonition there is bound to be a percentage of incorrect address
+slips. These and other causes produce a certain definite return flow of
+merchandise; which must have its own forms and safeguards, for the
+protection both of the store and its customer. They all make detail, but
+extremely necessary detail.
+
+In the basement there is a store room whose broad shelves hold a variety
+of merchandise, bought and paid for, but never delivered. The store
+makes at least two attempts to deliver every article given to its
+delivery department. That department is unusually clever with telephone
+books, club lists and other less used avenues of finding recalcitrant
+addresses. But there come times when even its resourcefulness is
+entirely baffled. Then the undelivered goods must go to the store room
+until some properly accredited human being comes up somewhere, sometime
+to demand them. In an astonishing number of cases the some one does not
+come up sometime or somewhere. In such a case after a fair length of
+time the goods themselves go back to stock. But the record of the
+transaction stays accessible in the store's files, so that its bureau of
+investigation, at any future time, may order a duplicate of the lost
+shipment out of the stock--out of the open market if the stock then
+fails to hold it--in order that Macy's may keep full faith with its
+patrons.
+
+Such a holdover is, of course, to be entirely distinguished from those
+which are held in advance of delivery; in certain cases up to thirty
+days without advance payment, in others up to sixty upon partial payment
+and in still others up to six months after full payment. This last,
+however, is a merchandising procedure quite common to most retail
+establishments.
+
+
+One feature of the delivery department remains for our consideration;
+the branch of it which is situated upon the ninth floor and which, oddly
+enough, handles the heaviest merchandise shipped out of the
+store--furniture. There are, of course, heavy shipments that go out of
+the basements--hundreds of them on an average that are entirely too
+heavy for the conveyor-chutes and the "revolving-ring." A notable one of
+these is an electric washing-machine, which, crated, will weigh slightly
+in excess of two hundred pounds. Shipments such as these go to the
+basement on hand trucks and by the freight elevators. There they are
+boxed and crated; often a considerable job. As a rule the expert packers
+of the delivery department can put even a fairly sizable or unwieldy
+purchase into boxing within twelve or fifteen minutes; an elaborate and
+fragile bit of statuary has been known to take a full hour and a half
+before it was safely prepared for wagon shipment.
+
+Likewise the furniture craters upon the ninth floor oftimes find their
+job a sizable one indeed. The boxing of a divan or a dining-room table
+is no easy task whatsoever. And in cases where the delivery is to be
+made within the limits of Macy service it is often avoided entirely. The
+freight elevators of the store are of the largest size ever designed; so
+big that a heavy motor truck is no particular strain upon their
+individual capacity. One of these trucks can be and is driven straight
+to and from the ninth floor. After it has reached the department the
+placing of fine furniture in its cavernous interior is merely a nicety
+of planning and arrangement, a skillful use of ropes and blankets and
+padding. The truck may run to any point within forty or fifty miles of
+the store at less cost than crating; even though crating be done at
+cost, itself.
+
+
+So spread the tentacles of Macy's, those long arms of distribution that
+keep the store from ever being a merely abstract thing. The bright red
+and yellow wagons and trucks--each bearing its good-luck symbol of the
+red star--carry Herald Square to the far limits of a far-flung city. The
+men who ride them are upon the outposts of salesmanship. Yet through
+system and through organization they are forever closely connected with
+it. The blood that courses through your finger-tips comes straight from
+your heart. The life-blood of understanding, of enthusiasm, of morale,
+that Macy's outriders bring with them is the life-blood of the humanized
+machine that functions so steadily there in the heart of Manhattan.
+
+
+
+
+VI. The Macy Family
+
+
+In the bazaars of ancient Bagdad, the human factor was not only the
+great but the sole dominating influence. The ancient Bagdadians,
+including those commuters and suburbanites, far and near, who came
+cameling into town at more or less frequent intervals, did business, not
+with a machine, not with a system, but with men. Which, being freely
+translated, meant bargaining. They not merely bargained, but haggled,
+and haggled at great length. Prices? There were none. The price was what
+you made it--you and the merchant with whom you finally came to
+agreement; if finally you did come to agreement.
+
+In the great bazaars of the modern Bagdad one does not need to bargain
+or to haggle. One is doing business primarily with a system. Prices are
+fixed, and firmly fixed. This is so generally understood and accepted a
+rule today that it would be a mere waste of time to discuss it at
+further length, save possibly to recall once again the large part which
+Rowland Hussey Macy and the men who followed him played in giving a
+Gibraltar-like firmness to this solid modern business principle.
+
+Yet even in these same modern, scientifically organized bazaars of
+today, the system rarely ever can be better than the men who direct it.
+Four thousand years of business progress between the two Bagdads have
+not taken from man his God-given power to make or break the best of
+systems. And Macy's, with its own business system organized, carefully
+developed and upbuilded through sixty-three long years, is still
+dependent to no little degree upon the faith and loyalty and interest of
+its men and women; that same thing which in the days of the war just
+past we first learned to know by that new name--morale.
+
+
+Under the sign of the Red Star there are at all times these days not
+less than five thousand workers; in the Christmas season this pay-roll
+list runs quickly to seven thousand or over. Then it is that the Macy
+family takes its most impressive dimensions. Seven thousand souls! It is
+the population of a good sized town! It is four good regiments--it is
+the New York Hippodrome with every one of its seats filled and eighteen
+hundred folk left standing up!
+
+Yet even the all-the-year minimum of five thousand men and
+women--roughly speaking, one-third men and two-thirds women--is an
+impressive array. It is a human force which only gains impressiveness
+when one finds that all but three hundred of it are employed beneath a
+single roof. The small outside group chiefly comprises those in the
+delivery stations.
+
+To bring action, foresight, co-operation, correlation--and finally
+morale--into such a force is a thing not gained by merely talking or
+thinking about it, but by long study, experimentation and great
+continued effort. Which means, in turn, that Macy's, among several
+other things, is a responsibility. For, as we shall presently see, there
+are any number of problems in addition to those of buying and selling;
+problems in the solving of which unceasing demands are made upon the
+store's time, money and heart. It is, in the last analysis a matter of
+mere good business at that. Yet at Macy's it has been considerably more.
+And the store's satisfaction in realizing that it was a very early and a
+very advanced pioneer in developing personnel--and morale--as necessary
+factors in modern merchandising is a very large one indeed.
+
+
+A machine or a family--or a department-store--is only as good as its
+component parts, and by the fact that there is a strict interdependence
+between the whole and its parts, the success of Macy's must mean that
+the rank and file of its employees maintain a high average of
+intelligence, initiative and loyalty. That these qualities are
+successfully co-ordinated in Macy's is due to real leadership, and it is
+to this same leadership that we may look for the basis of the store's
+morale.
+
+Little things indicate. And indicate clearly. Here on the wall of the
+passageway at the head of the main employee's stair is a placard which
+reads:
+
+"Once each month three prizes are given to the employees who make the
+best suggestions for the betterment of store service or conditions.
+Don't hesitate to try for a prize, even if your suggestion does not
+appear important. We need your ideas and like to have as many as
+possible presented each month. Write plainly and drop your suggestions
+in the boxes furnished for this purpose. The first prize is $10.00, the
+second $5.00, and the third $2.00."
+
+Here is only a single one of the many evidences of Macy co-operation
+with the employees. Yet it illustrates clearly the house's policy of
+making its workers feel an interest in and beyond the mere amount of
+money that they draw at the end of the week. Not a few of these prizes
+are awarded for suggestions as to procedure in technical matters
+relating to the details of the business. Some of them result in the
+saving of time--and consequently money--and others in the improvement of
+working conditions. For example: ten dollars was awarded to the man who
+suggested that the doors of fitting-rooms be equipped with signals to
+show whether or not they are occupied; five dollars went to the one who
+made the suggestion that the fire-axe and hook standing in the corner of
+the customers' stairway be placed on the wall in a suitable case so that
+children could not play with them; two dollars to her who advanced the
+very reasonable idea that a scratch-pad in the 'phone booths would
+prevent memoranda and art manifestations being made upon the walls. Here
+are a few suggestions that were proffered and acted upon. The entire
+list runs to a considerable length.
+
+There is another notice upon the big bulletin board at the head of the
+employees' stairs--a sort of town-crier affair with temporary and
+permanent notices of interest to the store's workers--which tells the
+working force that when vacancies occur within the big store they will
+be promptly posted on this and other bulletin boards. The workers are
+advised to apply for any position which they may feel they are competent
+to fill. Ambition is not curbed in Macy's. On the contrary, it is
+stimulated to every possible extent. The employee is restricted only by
+his own limitations, if he has them. It is a firmly-fixed house policy
+to promote, wherever it is at all possible, from its own ranks. Among
+its high-salaried men and women are not a few who have worked their way
+up from the bottom. In fact, among these six or eight of the best paid
+men in the store, is one who boasts that he first came to New York
+fifteen years ago, with but a suitcase and eleven dollars in his pocket.
+
+The employment department must have been very much on the job when it
+hired this man. It generally is very much on its job.
+
+Obviously, the hiring of workers for an enterprise as huge as Macy's
+cannot be conducted on any hit-and-miss plan. We have gone far enough
+with the store in these pages to see that hit-and-miss does not figure
+at any time or place in its varied functionings--and nowhere less than
+in its employment department. The hiring of new workers for the store is
+indeed a branch of the business machine that receives constant and great
+care and systematic attention. A store must employ the right sort of
+people in order to be a good store. This is fairly axiomatic these days.
+
+These workers are gathered in a variety of ways--by volunteer
+applications, by newspaper advertisements (in New York and outside of
+it), by outside free employment agencies, by circular appeals generally
+to educational institutions, and, best of all, through the solicitation
+of its regular employees. There is no appeal for a worker that, in my
+opinion, can compare with the suggestion made by an employee that the
+place of his or her employment is a good place for his or her friends,
+as well.
+
+I am warmly concurred with in this opinion by the store's employment
+manager, a big, upstanding man, who in his Harvard days was a famous
+football player. The rules of that fine game he has brought to the
+understanding of his present problem.
+
+"One of the most desirable class of applicants is that brought by our
+own employees," he says, frankly, "as in hiring these people we have a
+feeling of security; especially if they have been brought in by some of
+the old and most loyal employees. It has been our experience that such
+applicants enter more readily into the spirit of their work and develop
+more rapidly than those obtained from other sources. We advertise in the
+classified columns of the newspapers only when it is absolutely
+necessary. Our regular daily advertisements keep the store constantly
+before the public eye--and generally that is enough.
+
+"During the recent war period, however, we had no scruples about
+advertising, as nearly every other line of endeavor was in the same boat
+as we. Never before have the newspapers carried so much classified
+advertising. Yet when all is said and done, besides the moral
+undesirability of this source of supply, we found it also very expensive
+indeed.
+
+"Some people believe that the function of an employment department is
+merely to keep in touch with the labor market and engage employees," he
+continued. "This is erroneous. The duty of this employment department is
+to raise the standard of efficiency of the whole working force by the
+proper selection, placing, following up and promotion of employees and
+so bringing about a condition that will result in their rendering as
+nearly as possible one hundred per cent. service to the store. That is
+the real reason why employment departments such as this first came into
+existence. Business some years ago awoke to the realization of the fact
+that its indiscriminate handling of the entire labor problem was causing
+a tremendous economic waste, not alone to the employee and to society,
+but to itself. It then began for the first time to deal with the problem
+of its personnel in a scientific and practical way."
+
+
+The market for workers--like pretty nearly every other sort of
+market--is, as we have just seen, subject to fluctuations; there are
+seasons when the employment manager--ranking as the store's fourth
+assistant general manager--must look sharply about him for the
+maintenance of its ranks, other seasons when long files of would-be
+workers present themselves each morning at his department doors. For the
+five or six years of the World War period the first set of conditions
+prevailed. It was difficult for any department-store, ranked by the
+Washington authorities in war days as a non-essential industry, always
+to maintain its full working force, to say nothing of its morale.
+Recently the pendulum has swung in the other direction. America is not
+exempt from the labor conditions which are prevailing in the other great
+nations of the world. And there are plenty of people who would work in
+Macy's. Yet the store has refused to use this situation as a club over
+its workers. Throughout the darkest days of the business depression it
+told them that it had no intention either of reducing its force of
+workers (beyond the usual lay-off of extra Christmas people) or of
+reducing their individual salaries. Which was a considerable help to its
+_Esprit de corps_.
+
+Yet even in the hardest days of labor shortage Macy's never ceased to be
+most particular as to the quality of its help. Applicants for positions
+underneath its roof were scrutinized with great care to make sure as to
+their desirability as additions to the organization. And before they
+finally were accepted and turned over to the training school, they were
+examined, with as much thoroughness as if there were hundreds of others
+in the file behind them, from whom the store might pick and choose.
+
+All this is part and parcel of the definite management policy of the
+employment department, just as it is part of its policy to make sure
+that the prospective member of the Macy family has more than one arrow
+to his or her quiver. Alternate capabilities are assets not to be
+scorned. And there is an obvious store flexibility in being able to use
+its human units in a variety of endeavor that the management can hardly
+afford to ignore. And it does not.
+
+There is a function of the employment department of the modern business
+machine that Macy's recognizes as second in importance only to that of
+engaging its workers. I am referring to that moment when they may leave
+its employ, either from choice or otherwise. If "otherwise"--in the
+colloquial phrasing of the store being "laid-off"--there is the greatest
+of care and discretion used.
+
+"Remember the Golden Rule," says its general manager to his assistants,
+and says it again and again. "Do unto others as you would have them do
+unto you. And remember that there is never a time when this Golden Rule
+is more necessary or applicable in business than in the moment of
+discharge."
+
+Translated into the terms of hard fact this means that in Macy's no
+buyer, no department head, no department manager has the power to
+dismiss one of his workers. He may recommend the "lay-off" but only the
+general manager himself may actually accomplish the act. In which case
+he first refers the case to one of his five assistants, for personal
+investigation and recommendation.
+
+When the saleswoman--or man, as the case may be--leaves of her own
+volition the matter becomes, in certain senses, more serious. Why is she
+dissatisfied? Are the conditions of labor more onerous at Macy's than in
+the other stores of the city, the remuneration less satisfactory? Macy's
+does not intend that either of these causes shall obtain beneath its
+roof. So the retiring employee, before she may leave its pay-roll, is
+carefully examined as to her reasons for going. The last impressions of
+the store must be quite as good as the earliest ones--even upon the
+minds of its workers. And a careful system of observation and of record
+has been upbuilded to make sure that this is being obtained; which may
+often lead to valuable opportunities for the correction of store system,
+particularly in the relationship between Macy's and its employees.
+
+
+We come now face to face with the training department--another
+individual organization strong enough and important enough to demand as
+its head an officer of the rank and title of assistant general manager.
+But before we come to consider it in some of the many aspects of its
+workings--before we come to see how in these recent years education has
+come to be the hand-maiden of merchandising, let us consider the actual
+experience of a young woman who recently entered the employment of the
+store. She was a college woman--a good many of the store people are
+these days. The mass of young women who come trooping out of our
+colleges each June are apt to find their employment bents trending more
+or less to a common course and in great cycles. Yesterday the cycle was
+teaching; the day before, literature or the sciences; today it is
+merchandising. The great department-stores of our metropolitan cities in
+America are, as we already know, today paying their executives and
+sub-executives salaries more than commensurate with the earnings of
+those in other lines of industry and well ahead of those in the learned
+professions. Moreover, they have brought their hours of employment down
+to a point at least approaching those of other business organizations.
+Their appeal thus has become measurably greater. And they are reaping
+the reward--in the attraction of a higher grade of executive young
+women.
+
+[Illustration: THE SCIENCE OF MODERN SALESMANSHIP
+
+Education places the saleswoman of today at highest efficiency.
+
+A Macy schoolroom]
+
+This young woman was of that type. And here is how she came to
+Macy's--told in her own words:
+
+"Not at all long, long ago, I went rather hesitatingly into the rooms
+labeled 'employment office' at Macy's. 'Hesitatingly' because, if you
+have ever gone around very much looking for a job, you know that
+'Welcome' is not always written on the door-mat that receives you. But
+it is at Macy's--and a woman, who made me feel that she was my friend by
+the warmth of her smile, talked with me and after filling out the usual
+blanks I was told when to report for work. They were mighty decent, too,
+about trying to place me selling the kind of merchandise that _I_ wanted
+to sell--and that means a lot!
+
+"The Monday morning that I came to work was, of course, rather
+hard--it's not easy to go into any strange and new place and be crazy
+about it right at first! There were a lot of us--all new girls--and it
+was fun to see what they did to us. We went from the employment office,
+where there is a good sign reading 'Say "we" not "I" and "ours" not
+"my",' to our locker room (which, by the way, is the best of any of the
+places I have ever worked in) and then up to the training department for
+a little first time; after which they sent us to our respective
+departments. We felt rather like ping-pong balls, being knocked hither
+and thither, and though we didn't know why we were doing any of these
+things we trusted that those holding the ping-pong bat did.
+
+"While we were waiting up there in the training department, we had a
+chance to get to know each other a little--two or three of us were
+charmingly Irish--and time to note the people busy about that
+department. Nice efficient-looking people they were--and of course we
+labeled and cubby-holed them. One man, we all decided, could well be a
+matinee idol and another might have hailed from down Greenwich Village
+way.
+
+"At last we parted and went down through the store to our own
+departments--and on the way any importance which we may have felt was
+quickly submerged in seeing what a distressingly small part we were of
+the large Macy organization. Even so, we later found out how many, many
+other 'we's' like each of us could make a deal of trouble for it, should
+we fail to carry on our work correctly. A talk we had from the store
+manager, a little later on, made me feel directly responsible to the
+poor fellows who are the Macy delivery men. If I were not careful to
+write the address clearly in my salesbook, the delivery man would get in
+trouble--and all because of my handwriting! Funny, how we were all
+linked up together.
+
+"Well, to go back, I got to my department feeling decidedly unimportant,
+and was put to work behind a counter which sold women's and children's
+woolen gloves and women's kid gloves. That was the first counter I had
+ever sold from. In other stores I have sold from what are known as
+'open departments'; the counter trade was a revelation to me. Did you
+ever notice the lack of space behind the counters in the stores? Well,
+with the Christmas rush and all the extra salesgirls, it is lucky indeed
+that some of us have a sense of humor.
+
+"I had not been behind the counter for two whole minutes before a
+customer came along and asked for something. I tried to look wise and
+answer. It was all terribly new. The customers are always so plentiful
+in Macy's that a new girl hardly has time to have the old girls tell her
+about the stock. Moreover, our counter was very near the store's main
+entrance--which meant that we were an informal but very busy little
+information bureau on our own account--not only about Macy's but
+apparently anything else in the city of New York.
+
+"Of course, I didn't have a salesbook that day; I didn't receive one
+until after I had had some training and was beginning to know something
+about the Macy system. However, customers could not see the
+'new-and-green' written on my face, so I waited on them thick and fast;
+even through that first morning. And a wild time I had of it--gym was
+never so exhausting as stooping down to look for a certain pair of
+gloves which must be a certain color combined with a certain size, plus
+a certain style and so on. Some people must stay up nights figuring
+along the lines of permutations and combinations, so as to work out some
+unheard of ones for the things they ask for in Macy's. The other girls
+were mighty nice to me, though, and as helpful as could be. And our
+having to almost walk upon one another and squeezing past and bumping so
+often--why, you all get clubby, mighty soon. At the end of that first
+day I was rather wrecked, though happy--for in my desire to find things
+for customers speedily I had, in bending down, burst through the knee of
+one stocking, broken a corset-stay and ripped loose a garter! Henceforth
+I managed to dress in a manner prepared for doing gymnastic stunts, such
+as deep-knee-bending and leap-frog.
+
+"My first lesson on the store system came on my first day in the
+store--and then one every day for an hour, during the whole first week.
+I liked that--for then I knew how things were supposed to be done. They
+even took us out into departments that were not busy early in the
+morning and had us make out certain kinds of sales right behind the
+counter, and carry the whole thing through--all that was lacking being
+the _real_ customer. It gave us confidence and showed us things that we
+thought we knew, but that, when it came right down to it, we didn't know
+at all. The training department also gave us pamphlets and notices about
+how to use the telephones and telling us to do certain things, as well
+as how our salary and commission were to be figured. Also one leaflet
+told us about Macy's underselling policy, and what we should do in case
+a customer reported merchandise as being cheaper somewhere else--and,
+although I had heard before of this policy of Macy's, I came to believe
+in it faithfully, after I had read the booklet.
+
+"When you're new in a department the 'higher up' man can do much to
+make you feel glad that you are there. My section manager and buyer were
+both fine. The buyer told us in a talk she gave us all about how she'd
+been with Macy's for twenty-five years; that she had worked for several
+years, when she first began, at six dollars a week. She made us feel
+that there surely must be a chance for every one of us--that a firm that
+is worth staying with that long must be pretty fine indeed--and that it
+was just up to us individually, whether or not we would go ahead. As for
+our section manager, he was always so nice in the way he handled any
+transaction with us--giving us an extended lunch-hour or signing any
+sales checks that needed his 'O. K.' In many stores the section managers
+are so disagreeable about doing their work that the salesgirls hate to
+have them 'O. K.' things--but I have found it quite the opposite at
+Macy's. And when he had the time and saw any of us looking glum or tired
+our man would talk to us and succeed in cheering us up.
+
+"There are many things, too, that I discovered Macy's doing for its
+employees--all sorts of clubs and parties. One of the most useful of the
+first of these I found to be the umbrella club. All I had to do one day
+when it began unexpectedly to rain was to go up to the training
+department, deposit fifty cents and receive an umbrella. If I left
+Macy's within the month, I would get my fifty cents back. Of course, I
+was to return the umbrella the very first clear day but any time
+thereafter that I needed one I could go upstairs and get it.
+
+"Then, too, there's the recreation room--you have two fifteen-minute
+relief periods a day in the store in addition to your lunch time. You
+can go to the dressing rooms and wash up a bit and then go to the
+recreation room, where there are plenty of large, comfy chairs, a piano,
+books and the like. The room is a veritable social center all the day
+long--I always found lots of friends there, no matter at what time I
+took my relief periods. And you go back to your work refreshed and 'full
+of pep' once again. Another place where you have a chance to see your
+friends is the employees' lunchroom--and it certainly is a popular
+place. Despite the clatter and rush, the Macy folks have a good time in
+their cafeteria; the crowds that eat there every day prove the
+wholesomeness of its food. It is good home cooking and, as far as its
+cheapness is concerned--well, I've eaten veritable dinners there at the
+noon hour, day after day, and never had my check total more than
+twenty-five cents; with thirteen or fifteen nearer the average.
+
+"One morning we all came early to the store--to a courtesy rally.
+Thousands of us--yes, literally thousands of us--gathered on the main
+floor, on the central stair and everywhere roundabout it, and we sang
+songs about smiling; and other optimistic things. Then, after good
+addresses by Mr. Straus and Mr. Spillman, we all sang again and, in
+response to an inquiry from one of the store executives, all shouted
+that we would try to carry on with the new Macy slogan of 'A smile with
+every package' and 'a thank you as goodbye.'"
+
+Frank testimony, indeed. And honest.
+
+To bring this atmosphere about the worker in the store may no more be
+the result of hit-and-miss than the right sort of hiring. In the modern
+marts of the new Bagdad the creation of morale, not merely the retention
+of a good industrial relationship between a store and its workers but a
+constant bettering of it, has come to be as important a problem as that
+of the buying or the delivering of its merchandise, or even its problems
+of making its public constantly acquainted with its offerings and
+advantages.
+
+The work of such a department--in Macy's the department of
+training--divides itself quite logically and clearly into two great
+avenues; the one educational, the other recreational. Each takes hold of
+the newcomer to the store almost from the very moment that he or she
+enters upon its lists of employment. The new salesgirl's name is hardly
+upon the rolls of the department to which she is assigned before a
+member of the store's reception committee is upon her heels and steering
+her straight through all the maze of fresh experiences that necessarily
+must await the novitiate. She is told all about her time disc of
+brass--the individual coin that bears her distinctive number (built up
+of her department number plus her own serial one) which she must drop
+into its allotted slot at the employees' entrance when she comes to it
+in the morning and which she must see is returned to her before the day
+is done in order that she may have it to use again upon the morrow; how,
+going from the locker room to her department at the day's beginning, she
+must sign its own time-roll, which then becomes accountable for her
+comings and goings through the rest of the day; how she can go and when
+she must return; how she is paid--her salary, her quota, her
+commissions, her bonuses.
+
+All of this might sound complicated, indeed, to the new girl, were it
+not for the kindness of her assigned "committeeman." Complications in
+the hands of a woman who has been through the mill, herself, and who has
+come to see how they are really not complications at all, but cogs in
+the grinding wheels of a great and systematic machine, are easily
+explained. The new girl catches on. The simple but accurate
+psychological tests through which she was put before she was accepted
+for Macy's assure this. She catches on and within a year--perhaps within
+a space of but a few months--she, herself, is on the reception committee
+and helping other new girls through the maze of first employment.
+
+The new girl catches on--
+
+There lies before me, as I write these paragraphs, a neatly typewritten
+loose-leaf memorandum book. It is the work of a girl who has yet to
+round out her first year in Macy's and it is a work that all must
+produce before they may hope for very definite advancement.
+
+This typewritten book is, in itself, a book of the Macy store. Its pages
+are a brief, succinct and thorough account of the store's organization,
+its selling policies--including, of course, the stressed under-selling
+policy--and its methods. Yet it is much more, too. It is, if you please,
+a manual of salesmanship. Under a heading, "Steps in an Ideal Sale,"
+these are not only enumerated but are given relative values in
+percentages. Thus we see that "attracting attention" is twenty per
+cent.; "arousing interest," twenty; "creating desire," fifteen; "closing
+sale," twenty; "introducing new merchandise," ten; and "securing good
+will," fifteen. Under each of these sub-heads, the salesclerk has
+collected a group of points necessary to their attainment. Thus, under
+"attracting attention" one finds "facial expression" and under it, in
+turn, "pleasant and expectant."
+
+All of these things have been taught the salesgirl author of this
+book--the volume, itself, is the result of her notes at her lecture
+classes. When she is taught "attracting attention" she is told that
+alongside of "facial expression" there comes "tone of voice," and under
+this last there are five distinct classifications: "audible, distinct,
+sincere, rhythmical, suited to customer." Truly the science of
+salesmanship goes to far lengths these days. From time to time the store
+has engaged a professional teacher of elocution to take up and carry
+forward this last function of its work. Here is this saleswoman being
+taught that "swell" is a word forever to be avoided over the counter,
+"smart," "stylish," "fashionable," "original," and some others being
+substituted. Similarly "elegant," "grand," "nifty," "classy," "cheap,"
+"awfully" and "terribly" are under the ban, appropriate synonyms being
+suggested to replace them. "Flat" is not to be used, when "apartment" is
+meant. The entire list of words to be avoided in a Macy sales
+conversation runs to a considerable length.
+
+This particular saleswoman was trained to textile salesmanship.
+Consequently, although the first half of her book, which treats of the
+store's methods and policies, is common to those that are being prepared
+by her fellows in all the other selling departments, the second half is
+the result of the special training that was given her in the department
+of training along the lines of her own merchandise. Not only did she
+spend long hours of the firm's time in its classroom upon the third
+floor of the store and surrounded by cabinets in which were displayed
+textile materials of every sort and in every stage of development, but
+she was given a printed booklet which told her much about her
+merchandise, its history, its production fields and the details of its
+manufacture.
+
+From it she evolved her own history of textiles, setting down with
+accuracy the four fundamental cloths--cotton, linen, silk and wool--and
+not alone tracing their development and manufacture, but by means of
+carefully hand-made diagrams, pointing out the difference between the
+different textures and weavings. "Warp" and "weft" and "twill" have come
+to be more than mere words to her. They are a part of her business
+capital, which she can--and does--turn to the good account of the store.
+So she is to her compeer of twenty-five years ago--selling dress-goods
+in the old Macy store down on Fourteenth Street--as the electric light
+of today is to the old-fashioned lamps of that day and generation.
+
+
+Back of this little black-bound notebook there is system--organization
+if you would read it that way. Education, of a truth, has become the
+handmaiden of merchandising. And the store's school has become one of
+its ranking functions.
+
+As teachers in this school there is a specially trained corps of men and
+women who do nothing but instruct and then follow up their pupils to see
+that they put into practice the things that they have learned. The
+educational work consists of individual instruction, informal classes
+and practical demonstrations. And the result of it all is not merely to
+make the employee valuable to the house, but to lend interest to
+merchandising, itself, and to lift the salesperson out of the mere
+mechanical process of taking orders for goods.
+
+The moment that a new employee comes into the Macy store his or her
+instruction in its system, organization and salesmanship begins. We have
+just seen how one typical new saleswoman began receiving her training
+from the first day of her employment. She was no exception to an
+inflexible rule. The training is given invariably. It does not matter
+whether the applicant has had experience in other large
+department-stores. Even a former Macy employee, accepting re-employment,
+must go through the department of training for, like everything that
+grows, the store system changes steadily from year to year and from
+month to month.
+
+
+A school such as this must have teachers. It is futile to add that they
+must be specially trained and thoroughly competent in every way to
+fulfill the unusual task set before them. And this, of itself, has been
+a problem, not alone with Macy's, but with the other large
+department-stores of New York. They have co-operated to solve it, with
+the direct result that some two or three years ago retail store training
+became a practical factor in the city's educational system. Under the
+enthusiastic aid of Doctor Lee Galloway, its head, the successful and
+rapidly expanding business division of New York University created the
+school of retail selling, bearing the name of and affiliated with the
+parent institution. The merchants of New York raised a fund of $100,000
+for the establishment and promotion of this enterprise and from it last
+June came its first graduating class--young men and women qualified to
+teach store training in the great bazaars of our modern Bagdad.
+
+The purposes of this school are set forth succinctly in its first
+manual, which has come off the press. Its object is "to dignify retail
+selling through education in the following ways: To train teachers in
+retail selling for public high schools and for retail stores, to train
+employees of retail stores for executive positions and to do special
+research work for the department managers of retail stores."
+
+In accordance with the first of these expressed avenues of its endeavors
+the Board of Estimate of the city of New York already has begun to move
+in full co-operation. A high school in the lower west side of
+Manhattan--the Haaren High School at Hubert and Collister Streets--has
+been designated as training center for this work. Girls are there being
+taught retail selling. Nearly one hundred already are entered in the
+course and within a few short months the larger stores of the city will
+begin to benefit by this highly practical educational work.
+
+That this experiment will prove successful seems now to be well beyond
+the shadows of doubt. Yet such success will be in no small measure due
+to the individual efforts of Dr. Michael H. Lucey, principal of the
+Julia Richman High School--in West Thirteenth Street, just back of
+Macy's original store--who has devoted great energies to its launching.
+Convinced, from the outset, of the real necessity of a training course
+in retail selling in the city schools, Dr. Lucey makes no secret of his
+dubious fears at the beginning of the experiment:
+
+"I honestly didn't see how we were going to do it," he says, in frankly
+discussing the entire matter, "the tradition in favor of an office
+career rather than a selling one in a store has so long ruled in the
+high schools of the city. There are several reasons for this--the most
+important one, in my mind, the feeling in the average high school girl's
+head that less education having been required in past years for the girl
+behind the counter than for the girl behind the typewriter, she lost a
+certain definite sort of caste, if she followed the first of these
+callings. Of course, that is utter rubbish. I have no hesitancy today in
+telling my girls that if they are looking for a genuine career retail
+selling is the thing for them. In office work, if they are very good,
+they may get up to forty or even fifty dollars a week but there they
+are pretty nearly sure to come to a standstill."
+
+The skilled educator shakes his head as he says this.
+
+"You see the difficulty is that so many girls coming out of schools such
+as these look upon business not as a boy would look at it, as a career
+with indefinite and permanent possibilities, but rather as a bridge
+between schooling and matrimony--a bridge of but four, or five, or six
+years. And when they are frank with me--and they often are--and tell me
+of this bridge that is in their minds, I am frank to advise office work.
+It offers better immediate returns--yet in the long run none that are
+even comparable with those of a high-grade department-store."
+
+
+Following the successful plan of the University of Cincinnati in its
+technical engineering courses, the students down at Haaren are grouped
+into working pairs, which means that, in practice and working in
+alternation, each goes to school every other week. In the week that one
+is in the classroom, her partner is in one of the city stores studying
+retail selling at first hand. When, at the end of six days, she returns
+to her schoolroom she has many questions derived from her actual
+practice to put to her instructor. So the practice and the principles of
+this new hard-headed science are kept hand in hand with its actual
+workings.
+
+Nor is this all: some six or seven hundred young women--and young men,
+too--are also making a special study of retail selling in the city's
+evening schools. A single course at the DeWitt Clinton High School is
+quite typical of these. Four evenings a week, for two hours each
+evening, a huge class is being taught--in an even more detailed way than
+is possible under a department-store roof--the principles and
+manufacture of textiles. In these classes a goodly number of the Macy
+family are enrolled. Another goodly enrollment goes into the special
+lectures given by a museum instructor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
+on certain evenings and Sunday afternoons.
+
+Truly, indeed, education has become the handmaiden of merchandising.
+
+
+As teachers in Macy's department of training there are enrolled today
+only those men and women who have received a thorough normal school
+education in this great new science of retailing. They do nothing but
+instruct the store's workers and then follow up to make sure that these
+are putting into practice the principles in which they have just been
+instructed. Except for the training of the future executives the school
+time is taken entirely from regular business hours and so, at the
+expense of the house, itself. This schooling--under the Macy roof,
+please remember--consists of individual instruction, informal classes
+and practical demonstration.
+
+Specialized training under the roof includes instruction under the
+direct supervision of the Board of Education in fundamental school
+subjects to those classed as "juniors" and "delinquent seniors"; a
+junior salesmanship course given to all employees promoted from the
+non-selling divisions of the store to its selling divisions; a senior
+salesmanship class--including the study of textiles and non-textiles,
+and covering three busy months; the instruction of special groups of
+salesclerks to be transferred for special sales; "demonstration sales,"
+in which teacher and pupil "play store," with the teacher impersonating
+various types of customers; the executive course to prepare employees
+for high executive positions of different rank and order; and the
+specialized instruction for dictaphone and comptometer operators,
+correspondence and file clerks and the like.
+
+
+In the limited space of this book, I shall have no opportunity to carry
+you further into the details of this fascinating department of the
+modern store. The saleswoman's little black book that we saw but a few
+minutes ago ought to show it more clearly to your eyes than any
+elaborate presentments of schedules and curriculums. The result's the
+thing. And Macy's has the results. It has already achieved them. Not
+only has it lifted retail selling from the hard and rutty road of cold
+commercialism but it has lifted the individual seller, himself--which,
+to my way of thinking, is to be accounted a good deal of a triumph. In
+such a triumph society at large shares--and shares not a little.
+
+It is house policy--sound policy--to encourage employees to look out not
+only for the store's interest, but for their own. An ambitious salesman
+is indeed an asset; and there are ways of keeping him ambitious. There
+is, for instance, the system of bonuses for punctuality, which takes the
+final form of extra holidays in the summertime. A week's holiday with
+pay is given without fail to each and every employee of eight months'
+standing. But a record of good attendance and punctuality for fifty long
+weeks brings another week of vacation, also with full pay.
+Department-stores not so long ago used to penalize their workers for
+tardiness. The new Macy plan works best, however.
+
+The list of those bonus possibilities is long. There is, of course,
+chief amongst them, the bonus which takes the concrete form of a sales
+commission. The salesclerk is set a moderate quota for his or her week's
+work. On sales that reach above this figure he or she is paid a
+percentage commission. And, lest you may be tempted to dismiss this
+statement with a mere shrug of the shoulders, as a perfunctory thing
+perhaps, permit me to tell you that but last year a retail salesman in
+the furniture department earned in excess of $6,000 in wages and
+commissions.
+
+One other thing before we are done with this main chapter on the Macy
+family and starting up another which shall show the super-household at
+its play; it is a thing closely associated both with department-store
+employment and training: this "special squad" which has become so
+distinctive a feature of the big red-brick selling enterprise in Herald
+Square. Concretely, it is a group of college graduates--the heads of the
+firm are themselves college men and have none of the contempt for
+education that has become so blatant a thing in the minds of so many
+"self-made business captains" of today--who desire to enter upon this
+fascinating and comparatively new field of department-store service.
+
+As one of the executives of the department of training himself says,
+"Many of these young grads come in here with the rattle of their
+brand-new diplomas so loud in their ears that for quite a while they
+can't hear anything else."
+
+Yet they are good material--as a rule, uncommonly good material. So Dr.
+Michael Lucey says, and Dr. Lucey knows. As a supplement to his
+educational work in the commercial high schools he entered Macy's last
+summer and spent the two months of his vacation in the special squad,
+studying the store from a variety of intimate and personal angles. On
+his first day in it, the distinguished educator sold clothing--men's
+clothing--and he sold to his first customer, an accomplishment which he
+notes with no little pride. His pride at the moment was large. But the
+next moment was destined to take a fall. A floor manager down the aisle
+espied the new clerk.
+
+"Don't let those trousers sweep the floor," he admonished.
+
+And the educator had his first taste of store discipline.
+
+
+Sooner or later all these young men out of college get that first taste.
+It does not harm them. And it is not very long before they begin to
+observe that, after all, there are still a few things about which they
+know practically nothing. After which their real education begins.
+
+A department-store is, among other things, a great melting pot. An
+Englishman who came into Macy's special squad last year inquired just
+what work might be expected of him. He was told.
+
+"Manual labor," he protested, "I can't think of it. I wear the silver
+badge."
+
+Which meant that he was one of the King's own--a pensioner of the late
+war. The store executive who first handled this bit of human raw
+material possessed a deal of real tact; most of them do. He smiled
+gently upon the Britisher.
+
+"After all," he suggested, "you know you don't have to tell your King
+that you had to use your two good hands in hard work."
+
+The Englishman saw the point. He laughed, shook hands and went to work.
+In six months he was an executive, himself. It's a way that they have at
+Macy's. And here is part of the way.
+
+Manual labor is demanded invariably of those who enlist in the special
+squad. It has a regular system through which each of its workers must
+pass. First he is given the history and development of the store and of
+its policies. This work is followed by a week on the receiving platform
+and then a good stiff session in the marking-room. The college boy
+follows the merchandise along a little further. He proceeds for a while
+to sell it--then does the work of a section manager. After which there
+come, in logical sequence, the delivery department, the bureau of
+investigation, the comptroller's office, the tube system, an intensive
+study of the departments of employment and of training. These are not
+only studied but written reports are made upon them. After which he
+should have a pretty fair idea of the store and the things for which it
+stands.
+
+The course is only varied in slight detail for the woman college
+graduate. Macy's has naught but the highest regard for the gentler
+sex--not alone as its patrons but as members of its staff--yesterday,
+today and tomorrow. A woman may not be able to handle heavy cases upon
+the receiving platform. But there are other sorts of cases that she may
+handle--and frequently with a tact and diplomacy not often shown by the
+more oppressed sex. I might cite a hundred instances from within the
+store where she has shown both--and initiative as well. But I shall give
+only one--where initiative played the largest part. Some few months ago
+a young woman who has climbed high in the store organization, to the
+important post of buyer of a most important line of muslin wearing
+apparel, found herself in France, but a few hours before the steamer
+upon which she was booked to sail to the United States was to depart
+from Southampton. To take a steamer across the Channel and then catch
+her boat was quite out of the question. She did the next best thing. She
+hopped on an aeroplane and flew from Paris to London; seemingly in
+almost less time than it here takes to tell it. She caught her boat. Her
+instructions were to catch the boat. And long since she had acquired the
+Macy habit of obeying orders.
+
+Upon this, again, a whole volume might be written--upon the thoroughness
+of an organization which really organizes, a training department that
+really trains, a system which really systematizes. And all under the
+title of a family group--in which affection and tact and understanding
+come into play quite as often as discipline and energy and initiative.
+
+
+
+
+VII. The Family at Play
+
+
+In the business machine of yesterday there were no adjustments for play.
+It prided itself upon its efficiency. And in the next breath it
+proclaimed that such efficiency left no room whatsoever for such
+foolishness as recreation. Today we know much better. We know that
+play--healthy, uniform play in a decent amount--is one of the very
+finest of tonics for the human frame. And so count it as one of the very
+highest factors in our modern schemes of efficiency.
+
+Macy's plays and makes no secret of the fact. On the contrary, it is
+intensely proud of its provisions for the welfare of its workers.
+Industrial recreation is no mere idle phrase to it. In hard fact no
+small portion of the remarkable esprit de corps of the store is due to
+its well organized recreational and social service work. In a large
+measure this part of the operation of the store corresponds to what the
+War and Navy Departments did through their Commissions on Training Camp
+Activities during the great war. Bearing in mind our likening Macy's to
+an army in an earlier chapter, the parallel now becomes a close one
+indeed. Organized recreation promoted better team work in the war; it
+now promotes better team work in business. Ergo, it is for the welfare
+of Macy's that it shall promote organized recreation beneath its own
+roof.
+
+And yet that very phrase, "welfare work," is not often used underneath
+that roof. It has the flavor of patronage which is so wholly lacking in
+this family of thousands, and so it is thrust forever into the discard.
+"The bunch" gets together--you see, you may call the family by almost
+any name that pleases you best--various groups are forever assembling at
+the Men's Club or the Community Club and making plans for their numerous
+activities. And these last cover a surprisingly large range.
+
+Any male employee of the store may join the Macy Men's Club. It is a
+wholly self-governing body and, aside from making up the inevitable
+deficits that accrue, the store has no paternalistic or direct attitude
+whatsoever toward it. The club itself is situated at 156 West
+Thirty-fifth Street, just west of the store, but entirely separated from
+it. It occupies two floors of an extremely comfortable building. In its
+externals it differs very little from any other sort of men's club.
+There are a reading room and a smoking room where, toward the close of
+the day and well into the evening, its members may relax. And there is a
+restaurant serving extremely good meals.
+
+It is only as one pokes beneath the surface that he begins to find out
+how very real this small institution, that is an offshoot of the larger
+one, really is. Its restaurant serves meals at considerably less than
+cost. And the fact that this club is regarded as something more than a
+mere combination of eating-place and rest-room is shown by its
+organization activities in other directions. For example, its members
+interest themselves in general athletics to the extent that, in the
+proper seasons, they have very creditable teams of baseball, basketball,
+football and the like, while occasional outings with suitable field
+events are arranged. Each Thursday evening there is organized athletic
+work in a large private gymnasium that is especially hired for the
+purpose.
+
+In fact it is at this last point that the Men's Club comes in contact
+with the Community Club, which is the nucleus organization covering
+other recreational activities among the women, the girls and the younger
+men of the store family. For, by careful planning, both of these clubs
+manage to use the big gymnasium of a single evening, while, after the
+athletic work is over, the floor is cleared and there is dancing until
+going-home time.
+
+These comforts are not given without some cost to the Macy folk. That
+would be very bad business indeed. It has been so decided long since.
+And so, while it may be human nature to be ever on the lookout for
+"something for nothing," it is quite as human to derive very much
+additional enjoyment from the things for which one pays. Even the
+suggestion of charity is not pleasant. And with this in view these clubs
+charge nominal sums for their privileges. In so doing they earn the
+respect of those who share in them.
+
+Dues for the Men's Club are placed at three dollars a year--that surely
+is a nominal figure. These go toward the development of club activities
+outside of its actual running expenses (rent, the restaurant, etc.). The
+gymnasium fee is another three dollars, which is much less than one
+would pay for a similar facility elsewhere in New York.
+
+The scale of charges for the Community Club is quite different. The dues
+here are but twenty-five cents a year--its membership is made up mainly
+of lower-salaried folk--with small extra charges for special activities.
+For instance, the Spanish class, which is taught by one of the Spanish
+interpreters in the store and which has a constant attendance of about
+forty, costs its pupils the very inconsiderable sum of five cents a
+lesson. The gymnasium charge is kept in a like ratio. There are a few
+others in addition. The aggregate cost, however, of as many activities
+as an average employee can take up is of little moment or burden to him
+or to her--nothing as compared with the sense of independence that goes
+with the small act of payment.
+
+The Choral Club, under the direction of a competent leader, meets
+Wednesday evenings in the big recreation room on the third floor of the
+store, with a usual attendance of about two hundred men and women who
+are trained in part singing and in chorus work of various sorts. This is
+not only enjoyable and popular for its own sake but it has an added
+value in leading toward the organizing of the store's talent for
+concerts and for musical plays.
+
+And it has such talent. Do not forget that--not even for a passing
+moment. It would be odd, indeed, if a family of five thousand folk did
+not develop upon demand much real histrionic and artistic ability of
+every sort. And when such potentialities are fostered and encouraged,
+the results--well, they are such as to warn Florenz Ziegfeld and the
+rest of the Forty-second Street theatrical producers to keep a sharp
+eye, indeed, upon Macy's.
+
+On Monday evenings, the entire winter long and well into the spring, the
+Dramatic Club meets and here every budding Maxine Elliott or Ina Claire
+has her full opportunity. On Tuesday there is a get-together
+evening--one begins to think with all these evenings so neatly filled of
+the calendar of a real social enterprise--and then one sees the store
+family at its fullest relaxation. Here was a recent Tuesday night. It
+was just before Christmas and the store was approaching the annual peak
+load of its year's traffic. Yet it had no intention whatsoever of
+relaxing a single one of its social endeavors.
+
+On this particular Tuesday evening our salesgirl--the one whom we saw
+but a moment ago being inducted into the selling organism of the
+store--made her first personal acquaintance with the Community Club. Let
+her tell her own story, and in her own way:
+
+"Up in the recreation room a few hundred of us gathered for a regular
+party. Some few of us had gone home after store hours for our dinner;
+the others had had it right in the store's own lunchroom. It surely is
+great the way that you _can_ get a meal there in Macy's at any time you
+are staying late--either on duty or on pleasure.
+
+"At about six-thirty the evening's program got under way--so that the
+many friendly, chattering groups of girls in the big room finally had to
+simmer down to something approaching silence. Then the Choral Club
+began singing for us--some good, old-time Christmas carols first, and
+then some other songs. All of us joined finally in the chorus, leaving
+the club to carry the difficult parts. They could do that all right,
+too. Mr. Janpolski, their leader, finally gave us a solo and after that
+there was a grand march led by our own beloved Marjorie Sidney.
+Everybody joined in--not only in body, but in spirit. It was like
+Washington's Birthday in the big gym up at Northampton. Messenger girls,
+college graduates, salesfolk, deliverymen, managers--everyone was just
+the same in that blessed hour. Distinctions of the store were gone. We
+were boys and girls--some of us a bit grown up and grayed to be sure,
+but all with Peter Pannish hearts--having a real party once again.
+
+"The grand march ended in dancing for every one--with a jolly negro at
+the piano doing his level best to uphold the reputation of his race for
+really spontaneous music. Finally, after many encore dances, everybody
+withdrew from the floor and out came Mr. Salek, the director of the
+Men's Club, and Miss Knowles, doing an almost professional dance. The
+Castles had very little on this couple--the way Salek lifted his partner
+and then let her down--slowly, slowly, still more slowly--reminded me of
+Maurice and Walton. Their performance brought down the house. Of course
+they had to respond to encores; again and again and again.
+
+"Following this--for Macy's believes that variety is the spice of all
+life--a Junior recited the unforgetable ''Twas the night before
+Christmas and all through the house.' She really was a darling. And how
+Christmassy she looked, with her big butterfly sash and her hairbow of
+scarlet tulle.... Next on the program came dancing--for everybody.
+First, however, there was another march, so that each couple received a
+number--while every little while certain numbers (the couples that held
+them) were eliminated from the floor. The nicest part about this
+elimination dance, as they called it, was that instead of only the last
+couple getting the prize, as is generally done--every couple, as soon as
+its number was called and it left the floor, went over to a big
+chimney-top, with a proverbially jolly 'Santa' peering out of it. There
+Santa gave to each one a little gift, such as a whistle, a stick of
+candy, or a jolly little rattle. Then, after more dancing, refreshments
+were served by gaily garbed Junior waitresses. After which the dancing
+continued until the merry Community Club Christmas dance was entirely
+over."
+
+
+Already I have touched upon the annual vacation of the Macy worker--one
+week with pay after eight months continuous employment, two weeks after
+two years, three weeks after five years, and a month after twenty-five
+years of service. A charming retreat among the hills of Sullivan County,
+eighty-seven miles from New York and, through the foresight of the
+management of the store, purchased long ago, provides an ideal vacation
+spot for the Macy girls who wish to spend their holidays among truly
+rural surroundings. For this purpose a large farm house and a hundred
+acres of surrounding land were acquired by Macy's and more than fifty
+thousand dollars spent in enlarging the house, beautifying the grounds
+and otherwise making them suitable for their summertime uses. In
+addition to the big and immaculately white farm house there are three
+cottages upon the property. As many as sixty-five girls can be
+accommodated at a single time upon it.
+
+Three jumps or so from the main house and stretched out in front of it
+is a lake; a regular lake, if you please, big enough for boating and for
+bathing, although not so large that one of the keen-eyed chaperones may
+keep her weather eye on those of her charges whose tastes run toward
+water sports. In this Adamless Eden bloomers and middy blouses are _de
+rigueur_, and as the few restraints imposed are only those inspired by
+ordinary good sense, the girls experience the real joys of living.
+
+
+All of these activities and interests--and many, many more besides--are
+faithfully chronicled in the Macy house organ, _Sparks_. Here is a
+monthly magazine--of some sixteen pages, each measuring seven by ten
+inches--that in appearance alone would grace any newsstand, while its
+contents almost invariably bear out the attractiveness of its cover
+designs. Practically the entire publication is prepared by its staff,
+which, in turn, is composed of members of the Macy family.
+
+House organs, such as this, are, of course, no novelty in the American
+business world of today. There probably are not less than fifty
+department-stores alone which are now printing brisk contemporaries of
+_Sparks_. The internal publications of a house, such as Macy's, have
+long since come to be recognized as one of its most valuable media for
+the promotion of morale. It costs money, but it is money well expended.
+So says modern business. And modern business ought to know. For it has
+tested the results. And the house organ long since became one of the
+really valuable aides.
+
+Here, then, in _Sparks_ is not only a medium in which the Macy folks may
+come the better to know about one another, a bulletin board upon which
+the heads of the house may from time to time carry very direct and
+sincere messages to their big family, but a mouthpiece in which the
+embryo literary genius may become articulate. And, lest you be tempted
+to believe that I have permitted simile to carry me quite away from
+fact, let me show you a single instance--there are a number of others
+beside--in which a real literary genius has come to bloom underneath the
+great roof that looks down upon Herald Square:
+
+His pen name is Francis Carlin--but his real name, the one under which
+he entered Macy's, is James Francis Carlin MacDonnell. Of him _Current
+Opinion_ but a year or two ago said: "The writer (Carlin) ... was until
+a few weeks ago a floorwalker in one of the big department-stores of New
+York City (Macy's) and was discovered by Padraic Colum. He had his book
+obscurely printed and it has been unobtainable at bookstores until
+recently.... It has the true Celtic quality. The dedication alone is
+worth the price of admission: 'It is here that the book begins and it is
+here, that a prayer is asked for the soul of the scribe who wrote it for
+the glory of God, the honor of Erin and the pleasure of the woman who
+came from both--his mother.'"
+
+Mr. MacDonnell has written two books: this first, _My Ireland_, and more
+recently the _Cairn of Stones_. That he has great talent is again
+attested by _The Boston Transcript_ which said recently: "Mr. Carlin's
+Celtic poems, ballads and lyrics are nearer the fine perfection of the
+native poets belonging to the Celtic renaissance than those produced by
+any poet of Irish blood born in America."
+
+After which, who may now dare say that genius may not blossom in a
+department-store? And even were it not for the gaining glory of Carlin,
+the pages of any current issue of _Sparks_ would show that there is more
+than a deal of artistic merit in the widespread ranks of the Macy
+family. The desire for self-expression is never stunted. And the pages
+of its avenue of expression are read by none more closely than the
+members of the family who hold the ownership of Macy's.
+
+
+And yet these men--the heads of the great merchandising house--are not
+only accessible to their business family through the printed word. They
+are not standoffish. On the contrary, they are most widely known
+throughout the store; most reachable, both within their offices and
+without. Take the single matter of grievances, for a most important
+instance: A Macy worker may feel that justice on some point or other is
+being denied him by a superior. In such a case he has immediate recourse
+to any one of three expedients: he may take his case to the department
+of training, to the general manager of the store, or to one of the
+officers of the corporation. As a rule, however, the difficulty can be
+straightened out in the first of these avenues of appeal, which is an
+automatic clearing-house for all matters of personnel. The heads of this
+department have been chosen as much as anything for the sympathy which
+enables them to review any employee's case intelligently and fairly and
+for the influence that makes it possible for them to see at all times
+that full justice is being done. While the fact that the worker,
+himself, may take the matter to the general manager or even to one of
+the three members of the firm, is a practical guarantee against
+persecution of any sort.
+
+[Illustration: THE SUMMER HOME OF THE MACY FAMILY
+
+Recreation in the modern store stands side by side with education in
+perfecting the individual employee]
+
+Just off the corner of the recreation room on the third floor is the
+private office of the assistant superintendent of training. Her title
+sounds rather formidable and does justice neither to her job nor to her
+personality: for in reality she combines the qualities of a charming
+hostess, an efficient manager and a mother confessor.
+
+In the Macy book of information for employees there is a paragraph under
+the heading, "Department of Training," which says: "It is the purpose of
+this department to interest itself in all the employees of this
+organization. Do not hesitate to go with your troubles to the assistant
+superintendent of training, whose duty it is to interest herself in you:
+both in the store and at your home. She will be glad to give you advice,
+both in business and in personal matters."
+
+And so she has her hands full, and sometimes her heart as well; for,
+among five thousand folk of every sort and kind, there are bound to be
+many perplexing personal problems and troubles, to which the very best
+kind of help is the kindly and disinterested advice of a sympathetic and
+understanding person. And when that person is a woman--a woman of rare
+tact--the problem is generally apt to approach its solution. Which makes
+for friendship, not merely between the worker and that woman, but
+between the worker and the store. And so still another rivet is clinched
+in the great morale bridge between the business machine and the human
+units that enable it to function so very well indeed. And the Macy
+spirit becomes an even more tangible thing.
+
+
+As one goes through the store he finds many evidences of the things that
+go to upbuild that spirit. It may be only a printed sign cautioning
+courtesy and cheerfulness, not merely between the store workers and its
+patrons, but between the members of the Macy family, themselves. "A
+smile with every package and a 'thank you' as good-bye," rings one. And
+remember that other, again more cautious: "In speaking say 'we' and
+'our,' not 'I' and 'mine.'" It may be the warm hand of friendship from
+the member of the reception committee to the new girl that comes to work
+under the Herald Square roof, or it may be any of the long-planned,
+coolly devised methods of social justice to the store employee. These
+last are never to be overlooked.
+
+For instance, three months after the day that a new employee first
+arrives to work at Macy's, membership in the Macy Mutual Aid
+Association becomes automatic. In no small way it becomes a real part of
+his job. It is the object of the M. M. A. A. to provide and maintain a
+fund for the assistance of its members during sickness and of their
+families or dependents in case of death. Dues in this association are
+graded according to the worker's salary, consist of one per cent. of the
+salary up to thirty dollars; while the sick benefits are two-thirds of
+the salary, limited by a benefit of twenty dollars. The death benefits
+are five times the weekly salary, with a minimum of sixty dollars and a
+maximum of one hundred and fifty dollars.
+
+It is obvious that these dues do not of themselves pay the benefits. The
+house "chips in." Yet not through sympathy, but through one of the
+tenets of good business as we moderns have now begun to know it.
+
+"It would be poor business for me, indeed," said a silk manufacturer of
+Connecticut to me not long ago, "to let my people become sick. I want no
+germ diseases in my mills. Neither do I want the mills to cease their
+continuous operation. That, too, is poor business. And so the sickness
+that may cost my worker ten dollars may easily cost me twenty-five--in
+the stoppage of my plant, alone."
+
+The control of the Macy Mutual Aid Association is, moreover, vested
+solely in the hands of the store employees. An itemized statement of its
+receipts and its disbursements as well as its proceedings is posted each
+month on the store bulletin boards and printed in _Sparks_, so that
+every member of the organization may know its exact affairs. It
+decidedly does not work in the dark.
+
+
+I should be derelict, indeed, in regard to this whole question of health
+in modern industry--and of the particular modern industry of which this
+book treats--if I neglected in these pages that corner of the high-set
+eighth floor--flooded by sunshine during the greater part of each
+pleasant day--where sits the Macy hospital, conducted by the Macy Mutual
+Aid Association. It is, of course, solely an emergency hospital, yet one
+where doctors, nurses, dentists and a chiropodist are constantly on
+duty. Three doctors--two men and one woman--consult with and prescribe
+for the patients, two dentists look after their teeth, and a chiropodist
+takes care of that prime asset to all salespeople--the feet. Those
+members of the hospital staff are professional men and women of the
+first rank and they work with the best and latest equipment. Although
+the emergency hospital is primarily for the services of the store
+workers it stands also at the service of any one who may come into the
+building and need its services. For instance, in case a customer becomes
+ill, a wheelchair is sent, and he or she, as the case may be, is taken
+to the hospital for immediate restorative treatment.
+
+
+One or two final phases of this family life upon a huge scale in the
+very heart of New York and I am done with it. Thrift, in the Macy
+category of the making of a good worker, comes only next to good health.
+Under that same widespread roof there is a savings bank for the sole
+use of Macy folk. Any amount from five cents upward is accepted as a
+deposit and the fact that good use is made of this constant incentive to
+thrift is evidenced by the continued and prosperous operation of the
+institution. It has not been necessary to organize it as a full-fledged
+savings bank. At the end of each day it transfers its funds, by means of
+a special messenger, to one of the largest of New York savings banks
+which handles the accounts directly. The law does not permit a savings
+bank in the State of New York to open branches--else that would have
+been done at Macy's long ago. The messenger method was the only feasible
+substitute.
+
+Believing that even the most provident may occasionally have good
+reasons, indeed, for wishing to borrow money, the heads of the house
+have set aside a permanent fund as a loan reserve for the Macy folk. Any
+one who has been in the store's employ for at least three months may,
+upon advancing even ordinarily satisfactory reasons, borrow from this
+fund. The limit is a sum which can be repaid in ten weekly installments.
+No security is required nor is any interest charged. The employee is
+bound by nothing but his honor.
+
+
+That sixty-four years of continuous operation have established the
+commercial success of Macy's should be patent to you by this time. But
+now that you have known of the present-day family that dwells beneath
+its roof, you may ask: Has this policy toward its personnel worked out
+in hard practice? The question is indeed a fair one. To carry it still
+further, is this machine of modern business humanized and inspired in
+fact as well as in theory? One cannot help but think of the machine.
+Machines _are_ hard. Generally they are fabricated in that hardest of
+all metals--steel. Can steel be warmed and tempered? Can the fact be
+recognized that the units of the Macy store are human and warm; and not
+steel and cold?
+
+I think so. I imagine that you would have the answer to all these
+questions if you could talk for a little time with Jimmie Woods, whom we
+saw, but a short time hence, as a push-cart horse for the early Macy's
+and who has come today to be the assistant superintendent of the store's
+delivery department. His new job requires much more push than that
+old-time one. As a caption-line in a recent issue of _Sparks_ aptly
+said: "Jimmie Woods delivers the goods." Metaphorically speaking, the
+house of Macy does the same thing. And at no point more than in its
+treatment of its human factors.
+
+The day was not so very long ago when the life of a salesperson, even in
+a New York store of the better class, was not a particularly enviable
+thing. We saw, when we discussed the earlier Macy's, the long hours and
+the low wages of the rank and file of the organization. These things
+have changed today--in all department-stores that are worthy of the
+name. Public opinion was partly responsible for the change. But I think
+quite as large a factor was the realization that gradually was forced
+upon the minds of the merchants themselves that the old methods were
+poor business methods. Macy's knows that today. We have seen the man
+who came to New York fifteen years ago with eleven dollars and a
+suitcase come to a high-salaried position with the house today; the
+retail furniture salesman earning over six thousand dollars a year, the
+twenty-five buyers at ten thousand a year and upward, as well as those
+at twenty-five thousand a year and upward. And we know that every one of
+these men and women have been the product of the Macy organization--from
+the moment that they began at the very bottom of the ladder.
+
+And, lest you still think I befog the question, permit me to add that
+the minimum weekly wage of the woman employee in Macy's today is $14.00;
+and the average pay--apart from that of the executives and
+sub-executives--the men and women who, in the store's own nomenclature,
+are classed as "specials" and exempted from the time-disc record of
+their comings and their goings--is $25.00.
+
+Have I now answered your question fairly? If still you wobble and are
+uncertain, permit me to call your attention to the service records of
+the store. They speak more eloquently than aught else can of the loyalty
+and the interest of its workers. Qualities such as these are not
+generated under bad working practices of any sort.
+
+The records tell--and tell accurately, as well as eloquently. A Macy man
+was recently retired on a pension--the store's list of pensioners runs
+to a considerable length--after a round half-century of service. Others
+will soon follow in his footsteps. There are today upon the rolls
+ninety-two men and women who have been with it for more than
+twenty-five years. In the delivery department alone there are
+twenty-three men who have records of twenty years or more; and of these
+there are three who have been there more than forty years. Three hundred
+members of the Macy family have records of fifteen years or over,
+fifteen hundred have been with it upwards of five years and--despite the
+recent after-the-war difficulties of maintaining labor morale and
+organization--only about one-quarter of the force have come within the
+twelvemonth. The labor turnover in Macy's is low indeed--and constantly
+is growing lower.
+
+These figures, it seems to me, are the surest indication that the
+store's workers are treated fairly. Moreover, they alone show clearly
+the workings of its announced policy to give its own people every
+possible opportunity to grow within its ranks. In fact, no man or woman
+can stand still long at Macy's and continue to hold his or her job.
+Progress is a very necessary requisite there. And in order that progress
+may be recognized, steadily and fairly, system comes in once again to
+stabilize a very natural phase of human development. As the Macy
+employee shows new capabilities or additional industry, recommendations
+for increases in his remuneration are made by his department manager to
+a salary committee, appointed for this sole purpose. Periodically this
+committee receives a list of all the store folk who have not received an
+increase for a period of six months. The list is carefully reviewed and,
+whenever and wherever it can be justified, the pay envelope of the
+employee is fattened.
+
+Macy's is, after all, a very human institution. The machine may be
+steel-like, but it is not steel. It is flesh and blood and human
+understanding. I sometimes think of it as a country town, rather than as
+a family--one of those nice, old-fashioned sorts of country towns, where
+most of the residents know one another, where there is an efficient
+governing body and where the community spirit is one of the strongest
+factors in its progress. Being human it is fallible, being fallible it
+still has something for which to work; and in fulfilling this obligation
+of work it is carrying out its destiny.
+
+
+
+
+_Tomorrow_
+
+
+
+
+I. In Which Macy's Prepares to Build Anew
+
+
+Yesterday, when Milady of Manhattan went for her shopping along the
+tree-lined reaches of Fourteenth Street, and found her way into that
+perennially fascinating shop at the corner of Sixth Avenue which
+specialized in its ribbons and its gloves and its rare exotic imported
+perfumes, she dreamed but little, if indeed she dreamed at all, of a
+Macy's that some day should stand intrenched at Herald Square and
+embrace a whole block-front of Broadway. Today Milady, finding her way
+into that small triangular "Square" in the very heart of
+Manhattan--still on the sharp lookout for ribbons and gloves and rare
+exotic perfumes--and Heaven only knows what else beside--may little
+dream of the changes that a tomorrow--
+
+Tomorrow--what business has a book such as this to be talking of
+tomorrow; a vague, fantastic thing that only fools may seek to interpret
+in advance?
+
+We have seen between these covers quite a number of things--some of them
+passing odd things--yet classified among the factors of good business,
+according to all of its modern definitions. And to them we shall now add
+another--the understanding and the correct interpretation of tomorrow. I
+think that when I depicted Mr. Macy standing with his daughter,
+Florence, at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway half a
+century ago and explaining how there would be the business center of New
+York fifty years hence, I called attention to the sharp commercial fact
+that a great machine of modern business goes ahead quite as much upon
+the vision and the foresight of the men that guide it as upon their
+prudence. Which means in still another way, the proper understanding of
+tomorrows. And that understanding today is quite as much an asset of
+Macy's as its real estate, its cash balances in the banks, or the
+millions of dollars standing in the stock upon its shelves.
+
+
+More than a decade ago the big store in Herald Square first began to
+feel its own growing pains. The fact that ten years before that it had
+been planned as the largest single department-store building in the
+United States, if not in the entire world, availed nothing when business
+came in even greater measure than the most far-sighted of its planners
+had dared to dream. Within three or four years after the time that the
+caravans of trucks and drays had moved Macy's the mile uptown from the
+old store to the new, changes were under way in the new building,
+changes seeking to make an economy of space here, another economy
+there--everywhere that an odd corner could be utilized to the better
+advantage of the store and its patrons, it was at once so used. Finally
+it became necessary to abandon the exhibition hall that was originally
+located on the ninth floor and thrust that great space into one of the
+larger non-selling departments of the enterprise; and two or three
+years later an entire extra floor was added atop of the big
+building--adding a goodly ten per cent. to its million square feet of
+floor space already existing.
+
+Yet even these changes could not solve the final problem. Macy's still
+refused to stay put. Its growth was relentless, unending. Each fresh
+provision made for its expansion was quickly swallowed up, with the
+result that the proprietors of the store finally faced the inevitable:
+the need of making a real addition to their plant, not a series of
+picayune little extensions, but one fine, sweeping move which should be
+as distinct a step forward in Macy progress as the mighty hegira that
+occurred when the store moved north from Fourteenth Street to
+Thirty-fourth--a little more than eighteen years ago.
+
+And, facing the inevitable, Macy's quickly made up its mind. It never
+has been noted for any particular hesitancy. It decided to step ahead.
+
+
+Forecasting tomorrow in New York is not, after all, so vast a task as it
+might seem to be at a careless first glance. That is, if you do not put
+your tomorrow too far ahead--say more than ten or a dozen years at the
+most. I am perfectly willing to sit in these beginning days of 1922 and
+to assert that to attempt to forecast 1952 or even 1942 is not a
+particularly alluring pastime--if one has any real desire for accuracy.
+But 1932 is not so difficult. It is the business of skilled experts to
+interpret 1932 in 1922; a business which incidentally is rendered vastly
+easier in New York today than it was ten years ago by two hard and
+settled facts--the one, the wonderfully efficient new zoning plan of the
+city, and the other, the construction of the Pennsylvania Railroad
+Station on Seventh and Eighth Avenues, from Thirty-first to Thirty-third
+Streets.
+
+The first of these factors should hold the strictly commercial
+development of the city--save for local outlying hubs or centers--south
+of Fifty-ninth Street. The block-a-year uptown movement of Manhattan for
+whole decades past has finally been halted; and halted effectually.
+Central Park has of course proved no little barrier in fixing
+Fifty-ninth Street as the arbitrary point of stoppage. But the zoning
+law, protecting the fine residence streets north of that point, and the
+Pennsylvania Station are also factors not to be overlooked.
+
+True it is that at the very moment that these paragraphs are being
+written whole groups of new business buildings are being opened, in
+Fifty-seventh, Fifty-eighth and Fifty-ninth Streets, in the center of
+Manhattan. But other and bigger buildings are going up in the
+cross-streets far to the south of these. Count that much for the
+Pennsylvania Station. For it, and it alone, has proved the salvation of
+Thirty-fourth Street. Macy's, Altman's, McCreery's, the Waldorf-Astoria,
+the Hotel McAlpin--none of these alone nor all of them together--might
+have been able to save Thirty-fourth Street from becoming another
+Fourteenth, or another Twenty-third--a dull, wide thoroughfare given
+almost entirely in its later days to wholesale trade of one sort or
+another.
+
+The Pennsylvania Station could do, and did do, the trick. Opened in
+1910--but eight years after Macy's came first to Thirty-fourth Street
+and that brisk thoroughfare of today was in the very youth of its
+prosperity--the traffic which it handled day by day and month by month
+at that time was more than doubled in 1920. Not only has the business of
+the parent road that occupies it practically doubled in that decade, but
+the inclusion of the important through trains of the Baltimore & Ohio
+and the Lehigh Valley Railroads, to say nothing of the traffic of the
+huge suburban Long Island system increasing by leaps and bounds each
+twelvemonth, has begun at last to tax the facilities of a structure
+seemingly far too big ever to be severely taxed. In recent months the
+cementing of a closer traffic alliance between the New Haven and the
+Pennsylvania systems renders it a foregone conclusion that more and more
+of the through trains from New England will be brought to the big
+white-pillared station in Seventh Avenue.
+
+You cannot down a street on which there stands a city gateway,
+particularly if the city gateway be one through which there sweeps all
+the way from fifty to sixty thousand folk a day. Thirty-fourth Street
+cannot be downed. Remember that, if you will. It will not be compelled
+to share the rather bitter fate of its former wide-set compeers just to
+the south. This much is known today.
+
+And being known, it settles forever even the possibility of Macy's
+moving uptown once again. It, too, is fixed. It has cast its die with
+the street called Thirty-fourth and with Thirty-fourth it is going to
+remain. So Macy's buys the realty to the west of its present building
+and prepares thereon to erect, in connection with its present edifice, a
+great new store building--in ground space one hundred and twenty-five by
+two hundred feet--in height, nineteen full floors above the street (and
+two basements beneath)--in all, some 500,000 square feet of floor-space
+or close to fifty per cent. added to the 1,100,000 square feet of the
+present store.
+
+Offhand, it would seem to be a comparatively easy matter for the
+proprietors of a store, such as Macy's, to go to their architect and say
+to him:
+
+"Here is a fine plot, one hundred and twenty-five feet by two hundred.
+We want you to design and build for us upon it a modern retail
+building--high enough to provide all necessary facilities and scientific
+enough to bring it not merely abreast of other stores across the land,
+but a good long jump ahead of them."
+
+After which the architect would call for his young men and their
+draughting-boards and proceed, upon white paper, to erect his
+department-store.
+
+But his problem in this case is not white paper--at least white paper
+undefiled. The real problem is a perfectly good store building at the
+east end of the Macy plot--a building far too good and far too modern to
+be "scrapped"--in any recognized sense of the word. It was built to last
+all the way from half a century to a full century and its owners have
+not the slightest intention of pulling it down. It must remain the chief
+front of the enlarged Macy store. The caryatides upon either side of
+its main doors, the red star that surmounts them, must continue to look
+down into busy Broadway, as they have been looking for nearly two
+decades past.
+
+It happens, too, that the store itself was never designed for extensions
+toward the west. In the conception of its original architect there was a
+distinct section set out at the west end of the present building for
+purely service and non-selling purposes. These included, upon the
+ground-floor, the great tunnel and merchandise unloading docks for
+incoming trucks, similar ones for the outgoing merchandise, freight
+elevators a-plenty; and in between them and through them a truly vast
+variety of working provision, shops, offices, school and comfort rooms,
+and the like. A good feature, this section--which occupies almost the
+exact site of the former Koster & Bial Theater--but tremendously in the
+way when one comes to consider the extension of the store toward the
+west.
+
+A final factor of this particular reconstruction problem--and perhaps
+the greatest of all--lies in the fact that it must be carried forward
+while the store is doing its regular business. Even when the peak load
+of its traffic is reached--those fearfully hard weeks that immediately
+precede the Christmas holiday--the workaday routine of Macy's must not
+be seriously disturbed. Which complicates vastly the architect's
+problem. It is one thing to design and to erect a store building whose
+tenant does not approach the structure with his wares for sale until the
+merchant has given his final release, and another--infinitely
+harder--thing to build, and build efficiently, as business goes forward
+all the while. The machine as it grinds must be rebuilded. And all the
+while it must lose none of its efficiency.
+
+
+Yet, when all is said and done, an architect's life is made up of a
+number of things of this sort. And the associated architects of the new
+Macy store--Messrs. Robert D. Kohn and William S. Holden--have not
+permitted the overwhelming problem of its reconstruction to fill them
+with anything even remotely approaching a state of panic. For that is
+not an architect's way.
+
+They have, from the beginning, come toward the big problem quietly,
+sanely and efficiently. At the very beginning and in company with two of
+the officers of the corporation they went upon an extended trip through
+the more modern department-stores across the land. Here, there,
+everywhere, they found features worth noting and collating. When they
+were done with their journeys they had, as a foundation for their
+studies upon the new Macy store, a sort of standardized practice of most
+of its fellows across the land.
+
+This preliminary completed, the engineering member of the partnership,
+Mr. Holden, began an intensive study of the fundamental factors of the
+business machine that he was to enlarge. To begin with there was its
+traffic--divided, as we have seen in earlier chapters, into three great
+and fairly distinct avenues: the merchandise, the shoppers who come to
+purchase it, and the employees who wait upon their needs.
+
+It is fairly essential that these three streams of traffic be kept
+separate, save at such points where, for the conduct of the business,
+they must be brought together.
+
+Here, then, was a real opportunity for study. Mr. Holden began with the
+traffic streams of the shoppers.
+
+Obviously, and despite the growing importance and activity of the
+Pennsylvania Station, to say nothing of the west side subway, which runs
+down Seventh Avenue in front of it, the main traffic streams of shoppers
+must continue to come into Macy's from Broadway. The star of Broadway is
+even more firmly set in the heavens of New York than that of
+Thirty-fourth Street.
+
+These main traffic streams within the store are, then, roughly speaking,
+three in number; one comes from the northeast corner--at Thirty-fifth
+Street--another from the southeast corner at Thirty-fourth Street--the
+third still shows a decided fondness for the impressive center doors
+upon Broadway. Within the store they unite and then separate into a
+variety of smaller currents. A goodly portion of these violate all the
+similes of streams and proceed upstairs at the rate of about 10,300 folk
+an hour at the busiest times of busy days. And there are an
+astonishingly large number of these times. Of these 10,300, about 7,400
+will ascend upon the great escalator, which reaches up into the sixth,
+or last selling floor, of the present store.
+
+When this escalator was first built, eighteen years ago, it was looked
+upon as hardly less than a transportation marvel. Every similar device
+that had preceded it was known as a single-file moving-stairway, with
+the capacity estimated at sixty persons a minute, or 3,600 an hour. By
+making its escalator double-file, Macy's not only slightly more than
+doubled its capacity but rendered it the full equivalent of at least
+twenty-five passenger elevators of the largest size.
+
+
+The man whose business it is to have a sort of first-hand acquaintance
+with 1932 said that by that year Macy's would need to take close to
+twenty thousand folk an hour to its upper floors. He was not only
+estimating upon the growth of New York, but upon the growth of the store
+itself.
+
+"You will have to add another of the double escalators," said he, "that
+will bring your lifting capacity upon the two moving stairways up to
+almost fifteen thousand persons an hour."
+
+An elevator of modern size and speed in a department-store with seven or
+eight selling floors ought to lift two hundred and forty persons an
+hour. This, as you can quickly find out for yourself, means that there
+will be needed for the new store but twenty passenger elevators to make
+good that deficit between increased escalator capacity and the total
+number of folk to be carried upstairs. And this, in itself, is a most
+moderate increase. The store already has fourteen modern passenger
+elevators. Credit this much, if you will, to the escalator.
+
+So it goes, then, that the new Macy's will have a second double-file
+escalator on the opposite side of the main aisle, which is the store's
+own Broadway, and in the same relative relation to it. It will run as
+far as the fourth floor which in the new scheme of Macy things is to be
+devoted to the important business of toy selling.
+
+What goes up must come down. Shoppers are no exception to this old
+rule. If you still think that they are, stand late some busy afternoon
+at the main stair of Macy's and watch them descend. They frequently come
+at the rate of one hundred to the minute. And yet this is but a single
+stair!
+
+It is neither practical nor modern greatly to increase stairway capacity
+in remodeling Macy's and so the question of a descending escalator
+thrusts itself upon the architects' attention. Despite a certain
+old-fashioned prejudice against it on the part of some old-fashioned New
+Yorkers, a descending escalator is not only practicable but entirely
+safe. Otherwise Macy's would not even consider its installation. The
+store planning experts went out to Chicago a few months ago, however,
+and into a great retail establishment there which boasts twelve selling
+floors. Escalators were its one salvation--descending, as well as
+ascending. The Macy party saw old ladies, women with children in their
+arms--everyone who walked, save only those walking upon crutches, using
+this quick and constant method of descent. They found the same devices
+in Boston--in subway stations as well as department-stores--and being
+used with equal facility. Straightway they decided that the New York
+shopper was neither more timid nor more reluctant to use a new idea than
+was her Boston or her Chicago sister. A descending escalator was placed
+in the plans for the new Macy's--for the use of the store's patrons.
+
+Still another ascending and descending escalator; this time for the
+store's own family. Remember that here is a second stream, whose prompt
+and efficient handling is quite as important as that of the shoppers.
+The broad stair in Thirty-fourth Street at which the majority of the
+family arrives, between eight-thirty and eight-forty-five of the
+business morning, is frequently choked with the rush of incoming
+employees. It will never be choked once the new Macy's is done. For then
+the workers will be handled in great volume upon a double escalator, not
+merely double-file, but double in the sense that ascent and descent are
+handled simultaneously and in compact space, very much as the double
+stairways that are installed in modern school-houses and industrial
+plants.
+
+In the enlarged building the locker rooms and the other facilities of
+the arrival of the store's employees will be placed upon the second
+floor and the first and second mezzanines; retained from the present
+plan, but very greatly enlarged. The Macy worker comes to them by means
+of the escalator, quickly and easily, and in a similar fashion ascends
+or descends to his or her department. It sounds simple and easy but it
+is not quite so easy when one comes to plan for a maximum of 8,800
+employees--in 1932.
+
+
+A third traffic stream remains for our consideration--and the
+architect's. In many respects it is the most difficult. Human beings, to
+a large extent at least, can move themselves. Goods cannot. Yet
+obviously the great stream of merchandise into the building and then out
+again must never be permitted to clog its arteries--not for a day, nor
+even for an hour. This means that there must be not only plenty of
+channels and conduits for it, but ample reservoir space as well. Which,
+being translated, means of course generous warehousing rooms, of one
+sort or another.
+
+Perhaps it would be well before we come to the ingenious plans for
+making this inanimate stream most animate indeed, to consider the
+general plan of Macy's as it will be after its structural renaissance.
+The exterior of the present great building will remain practically
+unchanged. Just back of it and to the west of it on the new plot, one
+hundred and twenty-five feet in depth in both Thirty-fourth and
+Thirty-fifth Streets, and extending the full two hundred feet between
+them, will be erected a new steel and concrete building, harmonizing in
+its facade and of the most modern type of construction; as we have
+already seen, nineteen stories in height with two sub-basements in
+addition. The first ten stories of this structure, at the exact floor
+levels of the old, will be thrown into the existing building and the
+lower seven of them used for selling purposes. The uppermost three
+stories of the combined building--covering the entire Macy site--will be
+used, as we shall see in a moment or two, for the reception and the
+warehousing of the merchandise, and other non-selling activities of the
+store.
+
+The nine stories of the new addition which will rise tower-like above
+the parent building are destined to be used entirely for non-selling
+functions. Thus from the architects' plans we see the executive and
+financial offices, including that of advertising upon the thirteenth and
+the fifteenth floors of this super-cupola; and the store's own great
+laundry upon the high nineteenth. The department of training and the
+bureau of planning, with an assembly room, will share the sixteenth. The
+more purely recreational features, however, the Men's Club and the
+Community Club and the lounging rooms and library, are placed as low as
+the accessible eighth floor. The general manager's and employment
+offices will be as low as the second mezzanine--for obvious reasons of
+convenience.
+
+None of these departments will be hampered for a long time to come, as
+they have been hampered for a number of years past, by a fearful lack of
+elbow room. The new plans have provided for abundant facilities of this
+and every other sort. The employees' cafeterias also are to go into the
+new section--also upon the eighth, or public restaurant floor. They will
+be greatly enlarged over their present capacity.
+
+These non-selling facilities are given their own elevator service from
+the street; a separate and distinct entrance there. The purpose of this
+last quickly becomes evident. There are many occasions--nights and
+Sundays even--when some or all of the recreation facilities are in use
+far beyond the regular store hours. Access to them, entirely free and
+separate from the store itself, is an enormous working convenience, and
+the new Macy's has been planned to be filled with working conveniences.
+
+
+The elevator as well as the escalator will play a vastly important part
+in the fabrication of the new Macy's. The one has by no means been
+overshadowed by the growing importance of the other. There are to be in
+all fifty-six elevators, of one type or another, in the reconstructed
+building. Of all these none is more interesting than the ingenious lifts
+by which whole motor trucks, laden as well as empty, are carried into
+the structure, up eleven floors to the merchandising reception rooms and
+down into the basement and sub-basement for filling for the city
+delivery.
+
+Now are we back again to the handling of that merchandise stream which
+we first began to consider but a moment ago. At the beginning we can
+make assertion that in the entire history of retail selling no more
+ingenious scheme has been devised for the orderly and rapid movement of
+goods in and out of a department-store.
+
+This flow is kept normal and downward by the simple process of first
+taking the loaded incoming trucks up to the eleventh floor of the
+building for unloading. In the present store--as well as in a good many
+other stores--a great amount of immensely valuable ground floor space is
+given over to the various functions of receiving and distributing
+merchandise. We have seen long ago how a modern store values this ground
+floor space. For instance, in relation to the value of, let us say, the
+third floor, it is about as ten to one.
+
+Neither does Macy's propose to clutter the sidewalk frontage of even the
+least important of its frontage streets--Thirty-fifth Street--by long
+lines of motor trucks or drays, receiving or discharging goods. In fact
+this sort of thing has become practically impossible in the really
+important cities of the America of today. If municipal ordinance
+permits it, public sentiment rarely does. And the keen merchant of
+today--to say nothing of tomorrow--never ignores public sentiment.
+
+So, to the eleventh floor the motor trucks must go--on two huge
+high-speed freight elevators which open directly into Thirty-fifth
+Street. Our horseless age makes this possible. The modern architect,
+planning for the congested heart of the island of Manhattan, can indeed
+and reverently thank God for the coming of the gasoline engine and the
+electric storage battery--to say nothing of the engineers who helped to
+make them possible.
+
+Upon that eleventh floor there will extend, for the full width of the
+building, a giant quay, or high-level platform, with its stout floor at
+the exact level of the floors of the standardized motor trucks of Macy's
+(the comparatively small proportion of "foreign" or outside vehicles
+that bring merchandise to the store are to be unloaded at the
+Thirty-fifth Street doorways and not admitted within the building). The
+unloading under the present well-developed system is a short matter; the
+trucks may quickly be despatched back to the street once again; while
+the refuse and debris of the packers goes to appropriate bins behind
+them.
+
+
+Through chutes and sliding-ways the merchandise descends a single floor
+to the great tenth story--extending through both the present building
+and the new one to come. Here it will be quickly classified and placed
+upon a conveyor which moves at the level of and between the two sides of
+a double table some five or six hundred feet in length which will
+extend the greater part of the length of the enlarged store. From this
+center table--the backbone of the whole scheme of this particular
+distribution--will extend in parallel aisles at right angles to it,
+whole hundreds of bins and shelves and compartments. The entire
+arrangement will resemble nothing so much as a huge double gridiron,
+with many tiny interstices.
+
+Now do you begin to see the operation of this scheme? If not, let me
+endeavor to make it more clear to you. This miniature and silent city,
+whose straight and regular streets are lined in turn with miniature
+apartment houses of merchandise, is zoned--into six great zones. Every
+selling department of the store--118 in the present one--is assigned to
+one or the other of these zones. There it keeps its reserve stock. It
+is, in truth, a reservoir.
+
+Now, see the plan function! The men's shoe department is out of a
+certain small part of its highly diversified stock. It sends a
+requisition up to its representative upon the tenth floor. It is a
+matter of minutes--almost of seconds--to locate the necessary cartons in
+the simplified and scientifically arranged compartments and shelves; a
+matter certainly of mere seconds to despatch them down to the selling
+department.
+
+For this, the second thrust of the goods-stream through the new Macy's,
+especial provisions have been made by the installation of six so-called
+utility units. Three of these are placed at equal intervals along the
+Thirty-fourth Street wall of the enlarged building; the other three at
+equal intervals upon its Thirty-fifth Street edge. Each unit consists of
+one elevator (large enough to hold two of the rolling-carts,
+standardized for the floor movement of merchandise through the aisles of
+the selling departments of the store), one small dummy elevator (for the
+handling of single packages of unusual size or type), and a spiral chute
+(this last for the despatch of sold goods).
+
+The selling-floor location of these utility units determines the zoning
+system of the warehouses on the tenth. There is a zone to each unit.
+While from that zone the requisitioned merchandise descends to the
+selling department which has asked for it by its own unit--which always
+is closest to it. Haul is reduced to a minimum. And system becomes
+simplicity.
+
+
+With the actual selling of the goods in the store that is to come we
+have no concern at this moment. It is quite enough to say that the
+methods and the ideals that have brought Macy selling up to its present
+point are to be continued there, in the main at least, although
+broadened and advanced as future necessity may dictate. But with the
+despatch of the goods once sold in the new store we have an intimate and
+personal interest.
+
+We have bought our pair of shoes. The financial end of the transaction
+is concluded. We have asked--as most of us ask--to have them delivered.
+Now follow their movement:
+
+The clerk takes them to the packer. This, however, is but a mere detail.
+It is their future course that interests us. And if we had eyes properly
+X-rayed and farseeing we might observe that from the hands of the
+packer they will go presently to the spiral descending chute of the
+nearest utility unit.
+
+Now we shall indeed need our new X-ray eyes. They follow the package for
+us--down the chute--with its gradients and curvatures so cleverly
+devised as to bring our purchase to the basement in just the right time
+and in just the right order--and into and upon the next stage of its
+progress.
+
+Steadily moving conveyor-belts along each outer wall of the building
+receive the constant droppage of the packages from the six spirals of
+the utility units. Together these two long belts converge upon a
+terminal, the revolving-table, in the terminology of the present store.
+And here our packages receive fresh personal attention.
+
+In the chapter upon Macy's delivery department we paid a careful
+attention to this revolving-table--which really is not a table at all
+and does not revolve. We saw it, then, as the very heart of the complex
+clearing-house of Macy distributions. It is, however, in itself a
+wonderfully simple thing, and yet when it was first installed it was
+regarded as nothing less than a triumph of efficiency.
+
+Fortunately we do progress in this gray old world. Today we see how the
+revolving-table can be improved. For one thing, today we see it cramped
+and inelastic--no more than eight men may work at it at a single shift.
+Yet when it was built no one in Macy's dreamed that more than eight men
+would ever be required to work at it at a single time. And even in
+times of great emergency, but eight!
+
+At the revolving-table in the new store, not eight but forty men may
+work simultaneously--when necessity dictates. The change has been
+effected by the simple process of elongating the "table." If a
+revolving-ring may be changed from round to square--and this was the
+very thing that Macy's accomplished in its present basement--why not
+from square to oblong? There is no negative answer to this question. And
+oblong it will become. And a present handling capacity of forty thousand
+packages a day can be increased to all the way from seventy-five
+thousand to ninety thousand.
+
+Yet the main principle changes not. It is only in detail that one sees
+one's shoes traveling outward on a different path in 1931 from that of
+1921. The great conveyors that lead from the revolving-table of today to
+the various delivery classifications as they are now made, will so lead
+in the new arrangement of things to such classifications as may then be
+made: only they will no longer be revolving-tables, but will in due time
+become the moving backbone of very long tables in the basement
+mezzanine, similar to the one which we saw extending the full length of
+the great tenth floor. And from those long tables, running the entire
+width of the building and up just under the basement ceiling, the
+sheet-writers will recognize their individual group of packages (by
+means of the clearly written numerals upon them), lift them off the
+slowly moving belt and make record of them, for the delivery
+department's own protection. After which, it is but the twist of the
+wrist to thrust them into the bins, separately assigned to each driver's
+run.
+
+So go our shoes, or come, if you prefer to have it that way. Rapidly,
+orderly, systematically. System never departs from their handling. Even
+in the driver's own little compartment-bin there are four levels, or
+shelves, and each is inclined gently and floored with rollers so that he
+can pick out the packages for his run with greater facility. And in
+placing the packages upon each of these levels, the sheet-writer, well
+trained to his job, begins a rough process of assortment by streets.
+
+
+Now we are come to wagon delivery, itself. Now we shall see why Macy's
+will not have to clutter Thirty-fourth Street with a long row of its
+delivery trucks. The length of such a row may easily be estimated when
+one realizes that sixty electric trucks will stand simultaneously at
+sixty loading stations in the new basement, with a reserve or reservoir
+space there for twenty-two more. Moreover, this basement will serve as a
+garage at night and on Sundays for these trucks. There is no fire risk
+whatsoever in the storage of an electrically driven motor vehicle. So
+the new Macy basement will not only be able to store this considerable
+fleet but to charge its batteries and make necessary light repairs upon
+it from time to time.
+
+Access to and from this basement--and the sub-basement--is by means of
+elevators; not only the two which we have seen reaching aloft to the
+eleventh floor, but two more just beside them for sole service between
+the level and the two basements. As a matter of operating expediency it
+will be easy indeed to arrange in the early morning rush, or at any
+other time when emergency may so demand, to operate all four elevators
+in exclusive service between the street and basements. With such a
+battery Macy's can perform a genuine rapid-fire of discharging
+merchandise.
+
+To the mind of the novice there immediately flashes the thought: why not
+use ramps--long, sloping driveways--from the street level to the
+basement? Long ago the architects of the new building asked themselves
+that very question. It was, in this particular case at least, rather
+hard to answer. The main basement of Macy's is very high. To install a
+ramp--double-tracked, of course, for vehicles both ascending and
+descending--of any easy practical grade would therefore have required a
+great deal of valuable floor-space. So, for the moment, they dismissed
+the ramp idea for motor trucks and held to that of elevators. The Boston
+Store in Chicago solved the problem. It is the same store that has
+successfully installed descending escalators, floor upon floor.
+
+Out of the sub-basement of that Chicago store the Macy investigators saw
+thirty-two cars come, all inside of eight minutes; and all upon
+elevators. That settled the question for the big shop in Herald Square.
+Elevators it should have for this service, and elevators it will have,
+even for the big five-ton trucks that go into the deep sub-basement for
+the hampers for suburban delivery as well as large special packages.
+Furniture, however, as in the present store, will be both sold and
+packed and shipped from an upper floor of its own, the large truck
+elevators to the eleventh floor being also used for this purpose.
+
+The sub-basement of the new plan is in so many respects a replica of the
+main basement delivery service that it requires no special description
+here. It, too, has been designed, not only amply large enough for the
+present needs of Macy's, but for that mythical traffic of 1932, which we
+now know is really not mythical at all, but a matter of rather exact
+scientific reckoning.
+
+
+Architects' drawings are indeed fascinating things; doubly fascinating
+when one comes to consider all the infinite thought and labor and
+patience which have entered into their fabrication. I shall not,
+however, carry you further into the details of the plans for the new
+Macy's. You now have seen enough to give you at least a fair idea of the
+main structure for the enlarged store. You have seen how carefully and
+how ingeniously the great main traffic streams through the huge edifice
+are to be carried--to be brought together, when they needs must be
+brought together, and kept apart when properly they should be kept
+apart. Add, in your own mind, to this fundamental structure, all of the
+refinements which you expect to find in the modern retail establishment
+today and you may begin to depict for yourself the Macy's that is to
+come--to construct for yourself at least a partial vision of the year
+1932 in Herald Square.
+
+
+
+
+II. L'Envoi
+
+
+Yesterday Milady of Manhattan in her hoopskirt and crinoline; today
+Milady in thick furs above her knees and thin silk stockings and
+high-heeled pumps below them: tomorrow....
+
+Why will you persist in dragging in tomorrow? Is it not enough to know
+that tomorrow Milady of the great metropolis of the Americas will still
+be shopping? You may set tomorrow a year hence, twenty years hence,
+fifty years in the misty future that is to come upon us and still make
+that statement in perfect safety. And twenty years, fifty years, a
+hundred years hence, even, Macy's should still be in Herald Square ready
+to wait upon her needs and upon the needs of her men and children, too.
+
+To forecast far into the future is indeed dangerous. Only rash men
+undertake it. We know that 1932 is one thing, but that 1952 or even 1942
+is quite another one. A savant of uptown Manhattan, who has a nice
+facility for handling census figures, not long ago predicted that by
+1950 little old New York would hold within its boundaries sixteen
+million people. He may know. I don't. And you are privileged to take
+your guess--with one man's guess almost if not quite as good as
+another's.
+
+A New York of sixteen million souls is an alluring picture, if a
+bewildering one, withal. It is a fairly bewildering town with its six
+million of today. But I have not the slightest doubt that Rowland Hussey
+Macy said the selfsame thing of the New York of six hundred and fifty
+thousand souls, to which he first came, away back there in 1858.
+
+And the Macy's of 1952, serving its fair and goodly portion of those
+sixteen million souls, is indeed an alluring picture, which you may best
+construct for yourself. The store, itself, does well when it plans so
+definitely for 1932. Nevertheless, before you finally close the pages of
+this book, I should like to have it record a final picture upon your
+mind. It is the picture of a really great store. It runs from Broadway
+to Seventh Avenue, perhaps all the way to Eighth. It begins at
+Thirty-fourth Street and runs north--one, two, possibly even three or
+four blocks, or goodly portions of them. It employs ten, twelve, fifteen
+thousand workers. There are a thousand motor trucks in its delivery
+service--and a hundred aeroplanes as well. It has sixteen sub-stations,
+instead of six. Its own delivery limits run north to Peekskill and east
+to Bridgeport and to Huntington and west and south through at least half
+of New Jersey.
+
+Yet, above all this new enterprise there still towers the high addition
+which 1923 saw completed and added to the edifice, with the huge and
+flaming word "MACY'S" emblazoned by white electricity upon the blackened
+skies of night, visible all the way from Seventh Avenue to the thickly
+peopled range of the Orange mountains.
+
+"Macy's," whistles the small boy upon the North River ferryboat, who
+has traveled afar with his geography book. "Macy's! That's a regular
+Gibraltar of a store!"
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Romance of a Great Store, by Edward Hungerford
+
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