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THE ROMANCE OF A GREAT STORE
[Illustration: THE NEW YORK TO WHICH MACY CAME--IN 1858
Looking south from 42d Street--The old Reservoir and the Crystal Palace
in the foreground]
The Romance of a Great Store
by Edward Hungerford
Author of "The Personality of American Cities,"
"The Modern Railroad," etc.
Illustrated by Vernon Howe Bailey
New York
Robert M. McBride & Company
1922
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & CO.
_Printed in the United States of America_
Published, 1922
To the Men and Women of The Great Macy Family Whose Fidelity and
Interest, Whose Enthusiasm and Ability Have Upbuilded A Lasting
Institution of Worth in The Heart of a Vast City This Book is
Affectionately Dedicated by its Author.
E. H.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
_Yesterday_
I. THE ANCESTRAL BEGINNINGS OF MACY'S 3
II. THE NEW YORK THAT MACY FIRST SAW 7
III. FOURTEENTH STREET DAYS 31
IV. THE COMING OF ISIDOR AND NATHAN STRAUS 47
V. THE STORE TREKS UPTOWN 63
_Today_
I. A DAY IN A GREAT STORE 87
II. ORGANIZATION IN A MODERN STORE 109
III. BUYING TO SELL 145
IV. DISPLAYING AND SELLING THE GOODS 163
V. DISTRIBUTING THE GOODS 185
VI. THE MACY FAMILY 201
VII. THE FAMILY AT PLAY 233
_Tomorrow_
I. IN WHICH MACY'S PREPARES TO BUILD ANEW 255
II. L'ENVOI 279
ILLUSTRATIONS
The New York to Which Macy Came--in 1858 _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
The Beginnings of Macy's 18
The Fourteenth Street Store of Other Days 34
The Herald Square of Ante-Macy Days 66
The Macy's of Today 82
Where Milady of Manhattan Shops 114
The Science of Modern Salesmanship 210
The Summer Home of the Macy Family 242
Introduction
"Caveat emptor," the Romans said, in their day.
"Let the Buyer beware," we would read that phrase, today.
For nearly four thousand years, perhaps longer, _caveat emptor_ ruled
the hard world of barter. Yet for the past sixty years, or thereabouts,
a new principle has come into merchandising. You may call it progress,
call it idealism, call it ethics, call it what you will. I simply call
it good business.
_Caveat emptor_ has become a phrase thrust out of good merchandising. It
is a pariah. The decent merchant of today despises it. On the contrary
he prides himself upon the honor of his calling, upon the high value of
his good name, untarnished. The man or the woman who comes into his
store may come with the faith or the simplicity of the child. He or she
may even be bereft of sight, itself--yet deal in faith and fearlessly.
_Caveat emptor_ is indeed a dead phrase.
How and whence came this murder of a commercial derelict?
You may laugh and at first you may scoff, but the fact remains that the
development of the department store as we know it in the United States
today first began some sixty or sixty-five years ago. And almost
coincidently began the development of a code of morals in merchandising
such as was all but undreamed of in this land, at any rate up to a
decade or two before the coming of the Civil War. Not that there were no
honest merchants in those earlier days of the republic. Oh no, there was
a plenty of them--men whose integrity and whose sincerity were as little
to be doubted as are those same qualities in our best merchants of
today. Only yesterday these honest men were in the minority. The moral
code in merchandising was yet inchoate, unformed.
It might remain unformed, intangible today if it had not been for the
coming of the department store. The enormous consolidation and
concentration that went to make these enterprises possible brought with
them a competition--bitter and to the end unflinching--which hesitated
at no legitimate means for the gaining of its end. But competition
quickly found that the best means--the finest battle-sword--was honest
commercial practice, and so girded that sword to its belt and bade
_caveat emptor_ begone.
The great department store around which these chapters are written
assumes for itself, neither yesterday, today nor tomorrow, any monopoly
of this virtue of commercial honesty. But it does assert, and will
continue to assert that it was at least among the pioneers in the
complete banishment of _caveat emptor_, that its founder--the man whose
name it so proudly bears today--fought for these high principles when
the fighting was at the hardest and the temptations to move in the other
direction were most alluring.
Of these principles you shall read in the oncoming chapters of this
book. There are many, they are varied--in some respects they vary
greatly from those upon which other and equally successful and equally
honest merchandising establishments are today operated. Macy's has no
quarrel with any of its competitors. It merely writes upon the record
that, for itself, it is quite satisfied with the merchandising
principles that its founder and the men who came after him saw fit to
establish. Upon those the store has prospered--and prospered greatly.
And because of such prosperity--social as well as commercial--because it
feels that its selling principles are quite as valuable to its patrons
as to the store itself, it has no intention of giving change to them.
Macy's of today is like in soul and spirit to Macy's of yesterday;
Macy's of tomorrow is planned to be like unto the Macy's of today--only
vastly larger in its scope and influence.
For the convenience of the reader this book has been divided into three
great parts, or books. Time has formed the logical factor of division.
Time, as in the theater, forms these three books, or acts--Yesterday,
Today, Tomorrow. They move in sequence. The stage-hands are placing the
setting for the New York of yesterday--the New York that already has
begun to fade, far from the eyes of even the oldest of the humans who
shall come to read these pages. It is a charming New York, this American
city of the late 'fifties, the city whose ladies go shopping in
hoopskirts and in crinoline. It has dignity, taste, bustle, enterprise.
But anon of these. The stage is set. The director's foot comes stamping
down upon the boards. The curtain rises. The first act begins.
_Yesterday_
I. The Ancestral Beginnings of Macy's
Interwoven into the history of the ancient island of Nantucket are the
names and annals of some of the earliest of our American families--the
Coffins, the Eldredges, the Myricks, and the Macys. Their forbears came
from England to America fully ten generations ago. They settled upon the
remote and wind-swept isle and there to this day many of their
descendants ply their vocations and have their homes.
In the beginning the vocation of these settlers was found to lie almost
invariably upon a single path; and that path led down to the sea. They
were sea-faring folk, those early residents of Nantucket: God-fearing,
simple of speech and of action, yet mentally keen and alert. And from
them sprang the segment of a race which was soon to grow far beyond the
narrow barriers of the little island and to spread its splendid
enthusiasm and energy far into a newborn land.
Among the very earliest of these Nantucket settlers was one Thomas Macy,
who, from the beginning, took his fair place in the development of its
fishing and its whaling industries. From him came a long line of
descendants--a clean and sturdy record--and in the eighth generation of
these there was born--on August 29, 1822--as the son of John and Eliza
Myrick Macy, the man whose name chiefly concerns this book--Rowland
Hussey Macy.
The record of this young man's youth is not so consequential as to be
worth the setting down in detail. It is enough perhaps to know that at
the age of fifteen he followed the common Nantucket custom of those days
and went away to sea; upon a whaling voyage which was to consume four
long years before again he saw the belfried white spire of the South
Church rising through the trees back of the harbor and which was to make
him in fact as well as in name, Captain Macy.
Three years later he married. He chose for his wife, Miss Louisa
Houghton, of Fairlees, Vermont. Their pleasant married life continued
for thirty-three years, until the day of Mr. Macy's death. Mrs. Macy
lived for several years afterwards, dying in New York City in 1886. They
had three children, one of whom, Mrs. James F. Sutton, the widow of the
founder of the American Art Galleries in New York, still survives and is
living at her suburban home in Westchester County.
Such is the simple statistical record of the man who lived to be one of
New York's great merchant princes, who, upon the simple foundations of
good merchandising, of strength, integrity and initiative, upbuilded one
of the great and most distinctive businesses of the greatest city of the
two American continents. Back of it is another record--not so simple or
so quickly told. It is the story of successes and of sorrows, of
triumphs and of failures--but in the end of the final triumph of New
England conscience and energy and vision. It is with this last story
that this book has its beginning.
It was not many moons after his marriage that young Macy started in
business, in store-keeping in Boston. He was convinced that the sea was
no calling for a married man, and, with the Yankee's native taste for
trading, decided that the career of the merchant was the one that had
the largest appeal to him. So he made immediate steps in that direction.
The record of that early Boston store is meagre. It is enough, perhaps,
to say here and now that it failed, and that if its collapse had really
dismayed the young merchant, this book would not have been written. As
it was, the failure seemed but to stir him toward renewed efforts. He
stood in the back of his little store and flipped a coin. It was a habit
of his in all periods of indecision.
"Heads up, and I go north," said he. "Tails and next week I start
south."
Heads came. And Rowland Macy and his wife went north. They went to
Haverhill and there upon the bank of the Merrimac he set up his second
store. This venture was far more successful than the first. It
prospered, if not in large degree, at least far enough to encourage its
proprietor. But he did not cease regretting that the coin had not come
tails-up. Then he would have gone to New York. For New York, he was
convinced, was about to become the undisputed metropolis of the land.
Already it was going ahead, by leaps and bounds. And men who slipped
into it quickly and who possessed the right qualities of commercial
ability would go ahead quickly. Rowland Macy was convinced of this.
He was not a man who lost much time in vain repinings. To New York he
would go. He suited action to thought, sold his Haverhill business at a
fair profit, again bundled his wife and small family together and set
out for the metropolis of the New World.
II. The New York That Macy First Saw
In 1858 New York was just beginning to come into its own. It was ceasing
to be an overgrown town--half village, half city--and was attaining a
real metropolitanism. It had already reached a population of 650,000
persons, and was adding to that number at the rate of from twelve
thousand to fifteen thousand annually. Its real and personal property
was assessed at upward of $513,000,000. New building was going apace at
a fearful rate. Already the town was fairly closely builded up to
Forty-ninth Street, and was paved to Forty-second. Above it up on
Manhattan Island were many suburban villages: Bloomingdale, where Mayor
Fernando Wood had his residence, upon a plot about the size of the
present crossing of Broadway and Seventy-second Street, Yorkville,
Harlem and Manhattanville. To reach the first two of these communities
one could take certain of the horse railroads. John Stephenson had
perfected his horse-car and these modern equipages--how quaint and
old-fashioned they would seem today--were already plying in Second,
Third, Sixth, Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Slowly but surely they were
displacing the omnibuses, which dated back more than half a century. A
goodly number of these still remained, however; twenty-six lines
employing in all 489 separate stages--New York certainly was a
considerable town.
To reach the more remote communities of Manhattan Island--Harlem or
Manhattanville--one took the steam-cars: either the trains of the Hudson
River Railroad in the little old station at Chambers Street and West
Broadway, from which they proceeded up to the west side of the island
and, as to this day, through a goodly portion of Tenth Avenue, or else
the trains of the New York & Harlem, or the New York & New Haven, from
their separate terminals back of the City Hall and Canal Street up
through Fourth Avenue, the tunnel under Yorkville Hill and thence across
the Harlem Plain to the river of the same name. A little later these
railroads were to consolidate their terminals, in a huge block-square
structure at Madison and Fourth Avenues, Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh
Streets, the forerunner of the present Madison Square Garden; but the
first of the three successive Grand Central Stations was not to come
until 1871.
Fifth Avenue, too, was just beginning to come into its own. Some of the
handsome homes in the lower reaches of that thoroughfare and upon the
northern edge of Washington Square which have been suffered to remain
until this day had already been built and an exodus had begun to them
from the older houses to the south. All of the churches were gone from
down town with but a few exceptions, the most conspicuous of which were
the two Episcopalian churches in Broadway--Trinity and St. Paul's--the
Roman Catholic Church of St. Peter's in Barclay Street, St. George's in
Beekman, the North Dutch in William, the Middle Dutch in Nassau and the
Brick Presbyterian, also in Beekman Street. This last, in fact, had
already been sold for secular purposes and had been abandoned. The
congregation was building a new house up in the fields at Fifth Avenue
and Thirty-eighth Street, a step which was regarded by its older members
as extremely radical and precarious, to put it mildly. The ancient home
of the Middle Dutch Reformed had also gone for secular purposes. In it
was housed the New York Post Office, already a brisk place, which soon
was to outgrow its overcrowded quarters and to expand into its ugly
citadel at the apex of the City Hall Park.
The two great fires--the one in 1833 and the other in 1845--had removed
from the lower portions of the city many of their more ancient and
unsightly structures. The rebuilding which had followed them gave to the
growing town much larger structures of a finer and more dignified
architecture. Six and seven story buildings were quite common. This
represented the practical limitations of a generation which knew not
elevators, although the new Fifth Avenue Hotel which already was being
planned upon the site of the old Hippodrome, at Broadway and
Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Streets, was soon to have the first of
these contraptions that the world had ever seen.
Gone, too, were other old landmarks of downtown--some of them in their
day distinctly famous--the City Hall, the Union Hotel, the Tontine
Coffee House, the Bridewell and the reservoir of the Manhattan Company
in Chambers Street. The new Croton Works, with their wonderful
aqueduct, the High Bridge, upon which it crossed the ravine of the
Harlem, and the dual reservoirs at Forty-second Street and at
Eighty-sixth, had rendered this last structure obsolete. The State
Prison had disappeared from its former site at the foot of East
Twenty-third Street. A new group of structures at Sing Sing had replaced
the old upon the island of Manhattan.
Even then the elegant New York was moving rapidly uptown. Union Square,
still known, however, to older New Yorkers as Union Place, was the heart
of its life and fashion. It was lined by the fine houses of the elect
and two of the most superb hotels of the metropolis, the Brevoort and
the Union Square, while the Clarendon, which was destined soon to house
the young Prince of Wales, stood but a block away. At Irving Place and
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets had just been completed the new Academy
of Music. New York at last had a real opera-house, with a stage and
fittings large enough and adequate to present music-drama upon a scale
equal to that of the larger European capitals. She had plenty of
theaters, too: the Broadway, the Bowery, Laura Keene's, Niblo's Garden,
and Wood & Christy's Negro Minstrels, chief amongst them. While down at
the point where Chatham Street (now Park Row) debouched into Broadway,
Barnum's Museum already stood, with its gay bannered front beckoning
eagerly to the countrymen.
And how the countrymen did flock into New York--in those serene and busy
days before the coming of a tragic war. New York harbor was a busy
place. For not all of them came by the well-filled trains of the three
railroads that reached in upon Manhattan Island. There were
sailing-ships and steamboats a plenty bumping their noses against the
overcrowded piers of the growing city; ferries from Brooklyn and
Williamsburgh and Jersey City and Hoboken and Astoria and Staten Island;
steamboat lines down the harbor to Amboy and to Newark and to
Elizabethtown; and up the Sound to Fall River, to Providence and to the
Connecticut ports. But the finest steamers of all plied the Hudson.
There the rivalry was keenest, the opportunities for profit apparently
the greatest. And despite the fact that New York was already the port of
many important ocean lines--the Cunard, the Collins, the Glasgow, the
Havre, the Hamburg and the Panama steamers, for the fast-growing fame of
the metropolis of the New World was already attracting great numbers of
travelers from overseas--the fact also remains that when the _Daniel
Drew_, of the Albany Night Line, was first built, in 1863, she exceeded
in size and in passenger-carrying capacity any ocean liner plying in and
out of the port of New York.
So came the countrymen and the residents of the other smaller towns and
cities of the land, along with many, many foreigners, to this new vortex
of humanity. They found their way, not alone to the hotels of the Union
Square district, but to such equally distinguished houses as the Astor,
the Brevoort, the St. Nicholas, the Metropolitan, the New York. They
went to the theaters and almost invariably they climbed the brown-stone
spire of old Trinity, in order to drink in the view that it commanded:
the wide sweep of busy city close at hand, the more distant ranges of
the upper and lower harbors, the North and the East Rivers, Long Island,
Staten Island, New Jersey and the western slopes of the Orange
Mountains. And some, loving New York and realizing the fair
opportunities that it offered, came to stay.
In among this throng of folk who rushed into the town in 1858 there
came--among those who came to stay--Rowland H. Macy. The partial success
of his Haverhill store, to an extent overbalancing the initial failure
in Boston, had brought him into the metropolis of America, the city of
wider, if indeed not unlimited opportunity. In those days there were few
large stores in New York; nothing to be in the least compared with its
great department stores of today. One heard of its hotels, its churches,
its theaters, its banks, but very little indeed of its mercantile
establishments. They were, for the most part, very small and exceedingly
individual. They were known as shops and well deserved that title. There
were a few exceptions, of course: A. T. Stewart's--still on Broadway
between Worth and Chambers Streets--Ridley's, Lord & Taylor's and John
Daniell's in Grand Street (this last at Broadway), McNamee & Company's,
Arnold, Constable & Co., McCreery's, Hearn's, and one or two others,
perhaps, of particular distinction.
It is hardly possible that Macy, as he found his way into these larger
establishments, believed that he might ever in his own enterprise match
their elegance and distinction. It is difficult to believe that in those
very earliest days he had the vision of a department store. At any rate
the extremely modest establishment which he opened at 204 Sixth Avenue,
between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets, in conjunction with his
brother-in-law, Samuel S. Houghton, devoted itself at first, and for a
long time afterward, exclusively to the sale of fancy goods. For
specializing was the fashion of that day and generation; John Daniell
sold nothing but ribbons and trimmings then; Aiken laces, and Stewart's
chiefly dress-goods.
Yet Macy had vision. The department store idea must slowly have forced
itself into his mind. For, five years later, we find his small business,
originally on Sixth Avenue, just a door or two below Fourteenth Street,
expanding so rapidly that he was forced to secure more room for it. And
this despite the fact that not only was he two long blocks distant from
Broadway but the particular corner which he had chosen for his store was
known locally as unlucky--two or three other stores had gone bankrupt on
it. Macy had no intention of going bankrupt. He added to his original
shop the store at 62 West Fourteenth Street, at right angles to and
connecting in the rear with it, and in this he installed a department of
hats and millinery. He was beginning to come and come quickly--this
country merchant to whom at first New York refused to extend either
recognition or credit.
Now was the complete department store idea fairly launched, for the
first time in the history of America, if not in the entire world. Yet,
when one came to fair and final analysis, it represented nothing else
than the country-store of the small town or cross-roads greatly expanded
in volume. And so, after all, it is barely possible that the canny New
Englander may have had the germ of his surpassing idea implanted in his
mind, a full decade or more before he had the opportunity to make use of
it. Incidentally, it may be set down here, that Mr. Macy in the rapidly
recurring trips to Paris which he found necessary to make in the
interest of his business developed a great admiration for the Bon Marche
of that city. He studied its methods carefully and adopted them whenever
he found the opportunity.
From hats to dress-goods--the addition of still another adjoining store
was inevitable--came as a fairly natural sequence. And one finds the
successful young merchant who had had the enterprise and the initiative
to leave Broadway--supposedly the supreme shopping street of the New
York of that day--laying in his stocks of alpaca, of black bombazine, of
silks and muslins, sheetings and pillow-cases and all that with these
go. The idea once born was adhered to. As it broadened it gained
prosperity. And as a natural sequence there came gradually and with a
further steady enlargement of the premises, jewelry, toilet-goods and
the so-called Vienna goods. Toys were added in 1869, and gradually
house-furnishing goods, confectionery, soda water, books and stationery,
boys' clothing, ladies' underwear, crockery, glassware, silverware,
boots and shoes, dress-goods, dressmaking, ready-to-wear clothing, and,
in due time, a restaurant.
For many years it was the only store in town to carry soaps and
perfumes. This, of itself, brought to the store a clientele of its
own--the most beautiful women of New York, among the most notable of
them, Rose Eytinge, the actress, who was just then coming to the
pinnacle of her fame.
Mr. Macy, accompanied by his wife and daughter--the latter of whom is
still alive at an advanced age--took up his residence at first over the
store and then, a little later, in a small house in West Twelfth Street,
within easy walking distance of his place of business. From this he
afterward moved to a larger residence in West Forty-ninth Street. He was
a man of sturdy build, of more than medium height and thick-set,
extremely affable in manner. He wore a heavy beard, and an old employee
of the store was wont to liken his appearance to that of the poet,
Longfellow. His tendency toward black cigars and to appearing in the
store in his shirt-sleeves did not heighten the resemblance, however.
He was a man of almost indomitable will. Such a quality was quite as
necessary for success in those days as in these. The modern ideas of
beneficence and generosity to the employee were little dreamed of then.
The successful merchant, like the successful manufacturer or the
successful banker, drove his men and drove them hard. Macy was no
exception to this rule. If he had been, it is doubtful if he would have
lasted long. For while '58 was a year of seeming prosperity in New York
it also followed directly one of the notable panic-years in the
financial history of the United States and was soon to be followed by
four years of internecine struggle in the nation--in which its credit
and financial resources were to be strained to the utmost.
It is entirely possible that the record of the Macy store might not be
set down as one of final and overwhelming success, if it had not been
for the driving force of a woman, who was brought into the organization
not long after the opening of the original store in lower Sixth Avenue.
This woman, Margaret Getchell, was also born in Nantucket. She had been
a school-teacher upon the island, until the loss of one of her eyes
forced her to seek less confining work. She drifted to New York and,
taking advantage of a girlhood acquaintance with Mr. Macy, asked him for
employment in his store. He knew her and was glad to take her in. She,
in turn, engaged rooms in a flat just over a picture-frame store, in
Sixth Avenue, across from her employment, so that she might devote every
possible moment of her time, day and night, to its success.
So was born a real executive--and in a day when the possibilities of
women ever becoming business executives were as remote seemingly as that
they might ever fly. For decades after she had gone, she left the
impress of her remarkable personality upon the store. An attractive
figure she was: a small, slight woman, with masses of glorious hair and
a pert upturn to her nose, while the loss of her eye was overcome, from
the point of view of appearance at least, by the wearing of an
artificial one, which she handled so cleverly that many folk knew her
for a long time without realizing her misfortune.
At every turn, Margaret Getchell was a clever woman. Once when Mr. Macy
had imported a wonderful mechanical singing-bird--a thing quite as
unusual in that early day as was the phonograph when it came upon the
market--and its elaborate mechanism had slipped out of order, it was
she, with the aid of a penknife, a screw-driver and a pair of pliers--I
presume that she also used a hair-pin--who took it entirely apart and
put it together again. And at another time she trained two cats to
permit themselves to be arrayed in doll's clothing and to sleep for
hours in twin-cribs, to the great amusement and delectation of the
visitors to the store. Later she caused a photograph to be made of the
exhibit, which was retailed in great quantities to the younger
customers. Miss Getchell was nothing if not businesslike.
It was her keen, commercial acumen that made her alert in the heart
center of the early store--the cashier's office. She tolerated neither
discrepancies nor irregularities there. There it was that the New
England school-ma'm showed itself most keenly. Did a saleswoman
overcharge a patron two dollars? And did the cashier accept and pass the
check? Then the cashier must pay the two dollars out of her meagre
pay-envelope on Saturday night. "Overs" were treated the same as
"unders." It made no difference that the store was already ahead two
dollars on the transaction. Discipline was the thing. Discipline would
keep that sort of offense from being repeated many times, and Macy's
from ever being given the unsavory reputation of making a practice of
overcharging.
"Don't ever erase a figure or change it, no matter what seems to be the
logical reason in your own mind," she kept telling her cashiers. "The
very act implies dishonesty."
So does the New England conscience ever lean backward.
Yet it is related of this same Margaret Getchell that when a little and
comparatively friendless girl had been admitted to the cashier's cage--a
decided innovation in those days--and had been found in an apparent
peculation of three dollars and promptly discharged by Mr. Macy, Miss
Getchell dropped everything else and went to work on behalf of the
little cashier. Intuitively she felt that another of her sex in the cage
had made the theft--a young woman who had come into the store from a
prominent up-state family to learn merchandising. The up-state young
woman was fond of dress. Her dress demands far exceeded her salary. Of
that Miss Getchell was sure.
Yet intuition is one thing and proof quite another. For a fortnight the
store manager worked upon her surpassing problem. She induced Macy to
suspend for a time his order of discharge and she kept putting the women
cashiers in relays in the cage, to suit her own fancy and her own plans.
The petty thefts continued. But not for long. The plans worked. The
altered checks were found to be all in the time of one of the
cashiers--and that was not the one who had been discharged. Miss
Getchell drove to the home of Miss Upper New York and there, in the
presence of her family, got both confession and reparation.
[Illustration: THE BEGINNINGS OF MACY'S
The original small store in Sixth Avenue just south of 14th Street. Here
the business starts in 1858]
She was forever seeking new lines of activities for the store--branching
out here, branching out there, and turning most of these new ventures
into lines of resounding profits. "If necessary, we shall handle
everything except one," she is reputed to have said. And upon being
asked what that one was, she replied brusquely, "Coffins." Once she
embarked Macy upon the grocery business--whole decades before the
establishment of the present huge grocery department--and while
eventually the store was forced to drop for a time this line of
merchandise, she succeeded in taking so much business from New York's
then leading firm of grocers that they came to Macy, himself, and begged
him to drop the competition.
In the retailing world of that day, tradition and habit still governed
and with an iron hand. Stores opened early in the morning and kept open
until late in the evening, and did this six days of the week. Their
workers rose and left their homes--before dawn in many months of the
year--and did not return to them until well after dark. Yet they did not
complain, for that was the fashion of the times and was recognized as
such. Wages were as low as the hours were long. But food-costs also were
low, and rentals but a tiny fraction of their present figure. The
apartment house had not yet come to New York. It was a development set
for a full two decades later. The store-workers lived in
boarding-houses, in small furnished rooms or with their families. The
greater part of them resided within walking distance of their
employment.
Mr. Macy had all of his fair share of traditional New England thrift.
One of the favorite early anecdotes of "the old man," as his
fellow-workers were prone to call him, and with no small show of
affection, concerned his refusal to permit shades to be placed upon the
gas-jets in the store, saying that he paid for the light and so wanted
the full value for his money. He was skeptical, at the best, about
innovations. Moreover, necessity compelled him to keep close watch upon
the pennies. At one time he reduced the weekly wages of his cash-girls
from two dollars to one-dollar-and-a-half, saying that the war was over
and he could no longer afford to pay war wages. Yet when a courageous
sales-clerk went to him and told him that she could not possibly live
any longer upon her weekly wage of three dollars, he promptly raised it
a dollar, without argument or hesitation. And the following week he
automatically extended the same increase to every other clerk in the
store.
Labor conditions in that day were hard, indeed. The working hours, as I
have already said, were long. In regular times the store hours were from
eight to six, instead of from nine to five-thirty, as today. On busy
days the clerks worked an extra hour, putting the stock in place, while
in the fortnight which preceded Christmas the store was open
evenings--supposedly until ten o'clock, as a matter of fact, often until
long after ten, when the workers were well toward the point of
exhaustion. Other conditions of their labor were slightly better. There
were no seats in the aisles and conversation between the clerks was
punishable by discharge. They might make their personal purchases only
on Friday mornings, between eight and nine o'clock, and they received no
discount whatsoever. In Mr. Macy's day the only discounts ever given
were to the New York Juvenile Asylum in Thirteenth Street nearby, which
was an institution peculiarly close to his heart.
There were no lockers in the early days of the old store. In one of its
upper floors several small rooms were set aside as a crude sort of
cloak-room for the employees. A few nails around the walls sufficed for
their outer wraps but there were never enough of these nails to go
around. One of the clerks was chosen to come early and stay late in
order to supervise these rooms. Inasmuch as there was neither glory nor
remuneration in this task, it was not eagerly sought after.
Nevertheless, here was the enlightened day at hand when women would and
did work in stores--not alone in great numbers but in a great majority
and in many cases to the exclusion of men. It was one of the sweeping
economic changes that the Civil War brought in its train. When the men
must go to fight in the armies of the North, women must take their
places--for only a little while it seemed up to that time. Yet so well
did they do much of men's work, that their retention in many of their
positions came as a very natural course. So while the decade that
preceded the Civil War found few or no professions open to women--save
those of teaching or of domestic employment--the one which followed it
found them coming in increasing numbers, into a steadily increasing
number and variety of endeavors.
So it was then that the great war of the last century brought women
behind the counters of the stores--Macy's was no exception to the
invasion. They came to stay. And stay they have, to this very day, even
though most of the New York stores still retain men to a considerable
extent in some of their departments--notably those devoted to the sale
of furniture, dress-goods and boots and shoes. For some varieties of
stock the male clerk still is the most suitable and successful sort of
salesman.
In his store in Haverhill, Mr. Macy had adopted as his trade-mark a
rooster bearing the motto in his beak, "While I live, I'll crow." For
his nascent enterprise in New York, however, he adopted a different and,
to him at least, a far more significant device, which to this day
remains the symbol of the great enterprise which still bears his name.
It was a star, a star of red, if you will. And back of that simple
symbol rests a story: It seems that in the days of his youth when he
sailed the northern seas in a whaling ship he had gradually acquired
such proficiency that he was made first mate and then master. It was in
the earlier capacity, however, and upon an occasion when he was given a
trick at the wheel that Macy found himself in a thick fog off a New
England port--one version of the story says Boston, the other New
Bedford. To catch the familiar lights of the harbor gateways was out of
the question. The cloud banks lay low against the shore. Overhead there
was a rift or two, and in one of them, well ahead of the vessel's prow,
there gleamed a brilliant star.
For the young skipper this was literally a star of hope. His quick wit
made it a guiding star. By it he steered his course and so successfully
into the safety of the harbor that the star became for him thereafter
the symbol of success. With the strange insistency that was inherent in
the man, he was wont to say that the failure of his Boston store was due
to the fact that he had not there adopted the star as his trade-mark. He
made no such mistake in his New York enterprise. The star became the
forefront of his business. And to this day it is a prominent feature of
the main facade of the great establishment which bears his name.
Mr. Macy never lost his boyhood affection for the sea--the one thing
inborn of his ancestral blood. It is related of him that one morning on
his way to the store he found a small silver anchor lying on the
sidewalk, picked it up, placed it in his pocket and thereafter carried
it until the day of his death, regarding it as a talisman of real value.
There was one souvenir of his early connection of which he was greatly
ashamed, however. As a boy he had permitted his shipmates to tattoo the
backs of his hands. In later years he regretted this exceedingly, and
developed a habit of talking to strangers with the palms of his hands
held uppermost, so that they might not see the tattoo marks.
From the very beginning Macy adopted certain fixed and definite policies
for his business. These showed not alone the vision but the breadth and
bigness of the man. For one of the most important of them he decided
that in his business he would have cash transactions only. This applied
both ways--to the purchase of his merchandise as well as to its retail
sale. It is a bed-rock principle that has come down to today as a
foundation of the business that he founded. It is perhaps the one rule
of it, from which there is no deviation, at any time or under any
circumstance. It is related that a full quarter of a century after Macy
had first adopted this principle, one of the then partners of the
concern was approached by a warm personal friend, a man of high
financial standing, who said that he wished to make a rather elaborate
purchase that morning, but not having either cash or a check handy,
asked for an exception to the no-credit rule. The partner shook his
head, smiled, rather sadly, and said:
"No, Mr. Blank, I cannot do that, even for you. But I can tell you what
I can, and shall do."
And so saying he reached for his own check-book, wrote out a personal
voucher for two hundred dollars, stepped over to the cashier's office,
had it cashed and presented the money, in crisp green bills to his
friend.
"You can repay me, at your convenience," was all that he said.
Convinced that trust--as he insisted upon calling credit--was a
millstone upon the neck of the merchant--let alone a struggling man of
thirty-five who previously had known failure--Macy insisted upon
matching his purchases for any ensuing week close to his sales for the
preceding one. He did all his own buying at first; and for a number of
years thereafter he employed no professional buyers whatsoever. In this
way he kept his margin closely in hand and at all times well within the
range of safety. There was little of the spirit of the gambler in him.
It would not have sat well with his Yankee blood.
A second principle of the store in those early days which has come
easily and naturally down to these--when it is accepted retailing
principle everywhere--was the marking of the selling price upon each and
every article. It seems odd to think today that the installing of such a
fair and commonsense principle should once have been regarded as a
stroke of daring initiative in merchandising. Yet the fact remains that
in the days when Macy's was young, in the average store one bargained
and bargained constantly. There was no single price set upon any
article. Even when one went into as fine and showy a store as New York
might boast one bartered. _Caveat emptor_, "Let the buyer beware," was
seemingly the dominating retail motto of those days.
But not in Mr. Macy's. The selling price went on every article displayed
in the store in those days and in such plain and readable figures that
any fairly educated person might clearly understand. This principle
alone was one of the huge factors that went toward the early and
immediate success of the enterprise.
There was still another merchandising idea born of that great and
fertile New England brain that needs to be set down at this time. For
many years a notable feature of the advertising of the Macy store has
been in the peculiar shading of its prices--at forty-nine cents or
ninety-eight, or at $1.98 or $4.98 or $9.98 rather than in the even
multiples of dollars. A good many worldly-wise folk have jumped to the
quick conclusion that this was due to a desire on the part of the store
to make the selling price of any given article seem a little less than
it really was. As a matter of fact it was due to nothing of the sort.
With all of his respect for the honesty of his sales-force, the Yankee
mind of R. H. Macy took few chances--even in that regard. He felt that
in almost every transaction the money handed over by the customer would
be in even silver coin or bills. To give back the change from an
odd-figured selling-price the salesman or the saleswoman would be
compelled to do business with the cashier and so to make a full record
of the transaction. With the commodities in even dollars and their
larger fractions the temptation to pocket the entire amount might be
present.
It required a good deal of logic, or long-distance reasoning, to figure
out such a possibility and an almost certain safeguard against it. But
that was Macy. His was not the day of cash-registers or other checking
devices. The salesman and the saleswoman in a store was still apt to
find himself or herself an object of suspicion on the part of his or
her employer. Business ethics were still in the making. A long road in
them was still to be traversed.
Mr. Macy's brother-in-law, Mr. Houghton, did not long remain in
partnership with him, but retired to Boston, where he became senior
partner of the house of Houghton & Dutton, which is still in existence.
For a long number of years thereafter Macy conducted his business alone.
Its steadily increasing growth, however, the multiplication of its
responsibilities and problems, and his own oncoming years finally caused
him to admit to partnership on the first day of January, 1877, two of
his oldest and most valued employees, Abiel T. LaForge and Robert M.
Valentine. It had long been rumored in the store that Miss Getchell's
years of faithful service were finally to be rewarded by a real
partnership in it. But even in 1876, woman's place in modern business
had not been firmly enough established to permit so radical a step by a
business house of as large ramifications and responsibilities as Macy's
had come to be. Yet the point was quickly overcome--and in a most
unexpected way. Early in 1876 Miss Getchell became Mr. LaForge's wife.
And so, in a most active and interested way, she gained at the end a
real financial interest in the profitable business, in the upbuilding of
which she had been so large a factor.
Mr. LaForge had been a major in the Northern Army during the Civil War;
in fact it was there that he had contracted the tuberculosis which was
to cause his early demise. He had come into the store in the middle of
the 'seventies as one of its first professional buyers--being a
specialist in laces--and had developed real executive ability. He had
great affection for things military. And when Mr. Macy told him of the
uniformed attendants of his beloved Bon Marche, LaForge promptly
proceeded to place the entire salesforce of Macy's in uniform. Neat
uniforms they were, too: of a bluish-grey cadet cloth, and with stiff
upstanding collars of a much darker blue upon the points of which were
interwoven the familiar device of the bright red star. The Macy uniforms
did not long remain, however. New York is not Paris. And in that day,
when uniforms in general were looked upon as something quite foreign to
the idea of the republic, American labor was particularly averse to
them.
His important partnership step taken, Mr. Macy began to lay down his
responsibilities. Despite his great fame and vigorous constitution his
health had begun to fail under the multiplicity of duties. Again he
turned toward the sea. He embarked upon a long voyage to Europe; in
which he was to combine both business and pleasure. From that voyage he
never returned. His health sank rapidly and he died in Paris, on the
twenty-ninth day of March, 1877.
Two days later in New York, Mr. LaForge and Mr. Valentine formed a
partnership, Mr. LaForge, although the younger of the two men, becoming
the senior member of the firm. It was provided in the co-partnership
papers that the business should be continued under the name of R. H.
Macy & Co., until January 1, 1879; and thereafter under the new firm
name of LaForge and Valentine. However, Mr. LaForge's death in 1878,
followed a year later by that of his wife, prevented this scheme from
being carried out. The question of changing the name of a
well-established business--now come to be one of the great enterprises
of the city of New York--was never again brought forward. The name of
Macy had attained far too fine a trade value to be easily dropped, even
if sentiment had not come into the reckoning. And sentiment still ruled
the big retail house in lower Sixth Avenue, sentiment demanded that the
name of one of New York's greatest merchant princes should be henceforth
perpetuated in the business which he had so solidly founded. And so that
name continues--in growing strength and prosperity.
III. Fourteenth Street Days
By 1883 the Macy store had rounded out its first quarter century of
existence. The big, comfortable, homely group of red brick buildings on
Sixth Avenue from Thirteenth to Fourteenth Streets had come to be as
much a real landmark of New York as the Grand Central Depot, Grace
Church, Booth's Theater, the Metropolitan Opera House or the equally new
Casino Theater in upper Broadway. Its founder had been dead for six
years. But the business marched steadily on--growing steadily both in
its scope and in its volume. It already was among the first, if not the
very first in New York, in the variety and the magnitude of its
operations. It employed more than fifteen hundred men and women, a great
growth since 1870 when an early payroll of the store had shown but one
hundred on its employment list.
Other stores had followed closely upon the heels of Macy's. Stewart's
had moved up Broadway from Chambers Street to its wonderful square iron
emporium between Ninth and Tenth Streets, where, after the death of the
man who had established it, it enjoyed varying success for a long time
until its final resuscitation by that great Philadelphia merchant, John
Wanamaker. Benjamin Altman had moved his store from its original
location on Third Avenue to Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street, Koch
was at Nineteenth Street, but Ehrich was still over on Eighth Avenue.
None of these had been an important merchant in the beginning. But all
of them, by 1883, were beginning to come into their own. The Sixth
Avenue shopping district of the 'eighties and the 'nineties was being
born. Mr. Macy's vision of more than twenty-five years years before was
being abundantly justified. The new elevated railroad, which formed the
backbone of Sixth Avenue and which had been completed about a decade
before, all the way from South Ferry to One Hundred and Fifty-fifth
Street, had proved a mighty factor in bringing shoppers into it. Mr.
Macy in 1858 might not have foreseen the coming of this remarkable
system of rapid transit--the first of its kind in any large city of the
world. But he foresaw the coming of both Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth
Street. There is no doubt of that. He had a habit of reiterating his
prophecy to all with whom he came in contact.