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
*** 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
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF A GREAT STORE ***
***** This file should be named 38921-8.txt or 38921-8.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.org/3/8/9/2/38921/
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)
Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.
Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.
*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
http://gutenberg.org/license).
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:
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
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that
- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License. You must require such a user to return or
destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
Project Gutenberg-tm works.
- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
of receipt of the work.
- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
http://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
[email protected]. Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at http://pglaf.org
For additional contact information:
Dr. Gregory B. Newby
Chief Executive and Director
[email protected]
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit http://pglaf.org
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.
Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
http://www.gutenberg.org
This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
