"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.
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.
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.