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The Romance of a Great Store
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Title: The Romance of a Great Store

Author: Edward Hungerford

Illustrator: Vernon Howe Bailey

Release date: February 18, 2012 [eBook #38921]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE
OF A GREAT STORE ***

THE ROMANCE OF A GREAT STORE

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

"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.

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.

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

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