of thing. And glass grinding and engraving--which runs all the way from
the making of prescription lenses for spectacles or for milady's
_lorgnons_ up to the cutting of an entire dinner service of the most
exquisitely patterned glass or repairs to the bowl or pitcher that
Bridget or Selma has so carelessly broken--is the chief factor of a shop
that handles, as other parts of its day's job, jewelry and watch
repairs, electro-plating of gold, copper, silver, nickel, the printing
or engraving or stamping of stationery of every sort, to say nothing of
leather goods of every kind and description and a thousand lesser and
highly individual jobs, such as the regilding of a mirror or the
transformation of an ancient whale-oil lamp into a modern incandescent
one. It is small wonder that as a minimum seventy-five men are
constantly employed in this shop; more, as the exigencies of this season
or of that may demand them.
Yet this is but one of Macy's shops under that giant roof of Herald
Square. There are others in close proximity--like those for the making
of mattresses and bedding of every sort and variety and the
establishment which brings broken toys back into life again. To my own
Peter Pannish soul this last forever has the greatest fascination. Once,
long years ago, I went into a great store in a distant city and found up
under its roof a man whose sole task from one year's end to the other
was the making of repairs upon toy locomotives. How I envied that man
his job! And how the other day I envied the job of the Macy man who was
repainting dolls' houses, one fascinating suburban villa after another.
The doctor in the far corner of the room, whose patients ran all the way
from lovely dolls of the most delicate china and porcelain to Teddy
Bears who apparently had been badly worsted in some terrific nursery
struggle, was a man with a position in which he might have genuine
pride; but for the painting and re-arranging of those small houses a
man, with an imagination in his soul, might almost afford to pay for the
privilege of doing the work!
Five-thirty!
Again the doormen to their posts, two or three minutes in advance of the
exact hour set. The minute hand upon the face of the clock no sooner
reaches the exact bottom of its course, before a bell rings within the
store and the great doors shut--simultaneously, as in the morning they
had opened. But not permanently, of course. Dozens, hundreds, perhaps a
thousand or more shoppers still are left within the store. Each is to be
accorded a full opportunity to finish his or her transactions. There is
no hurry; no ostensible hurry, at any rate. It would not be
good-breeding to hasten the customer upon his way. And a canon of good
merchandising is good breeding.
Gradually, however, the late-stayers eliminate themselves. The big doors
open to let them out, but never again this day to let newcomers in. No
rule of the house is observed more inexorably. And so gradually the
store empties itself.
In the meantime certain departments have already ceased to function. The
salesfolk are dismissed for the night and go scurrying off. A few bring
out the dust-covers and these go out upon the stock. Counters are
emptied. The stock, wherever possible, is put away, and when not put
away is carefully covered. Nothing is left to chance nor to dust. System
reigns. And the section manager, the last to leave his department for
the night, makes sure that everything there is ship-shape against the
coming of another day.
Before he is gone--and he, in Macy's, is multiplied into ninety or a
hundred human units--the cleaning squads are out upon the floor, rolling
out their bin-like carts in orderly formation and proceeding upon the
debris like a miniature army. Four, five, six hours of hard work await
them. It will be midnight, perhaps later, before the store is absolutely
clean again and settled down to the monotonous presence of the watchman,
to await the arrival of another dawn.
In the meantime the Macy family is pouring forth into the side streets
through the doorways through which they entered before nine of the
morning. There is little restriction, no red-tape about their leaving.
Their brass discs--each individual and bearing the employee's
designating number--which they dropped in the morning have been returned
to them in the course of the day for use again upon the morrow.
The only formality about their leaving--if indeed it might be called a
formality--is the quick-fire inspection made by two store detectives who
stand either side of the descending file at the main employees' stair,
to see if any packages which are being carried out are lacking the
check-room stamp and vise.
These last are the store's protection against possible theft through its
inner walls. The workers who bring packages in, either in the morning or
at any later time in the progress of the day, are asked to take them to
a well-equipped check and storage room close by the lockers, where they
may regain them at night, stamped and vised, to go out into the open
once again. Any purchases that they may make during the day follow a
similar course. It is a definite and an orderly procedure. Any other
would be indefinite and to an extent disorderly.
This is the reason why an occasional package--lacking the official stamp
and vise of the check-room--is picked up by the keen-eyed detectives
while its transporter is asked to tarry for a moment in an ante-room. In
the course of an average evening there may be a half dozen of such
outlaw packages detected. Their holders are not thieves. There is not
even the implication that they are thieves. They are simply trying to
ignore a fair and open-minded rule which the store has made, not alone
for its own protection but for the protection of every man and woman in
its employ. Such is the explanation which the assistant store manager
makes to them before he dismisses them, at just a few minutes before
six.
"We believe in explaining things," he will tell you afterwards. "For we
believe that we gain the very best service from the Macy people by not
asking them to work in the dark. If we make a rule and its rulings
sometimes puzzle them--sometimes even seem a little arbitrary,
perhaps--we tell them why we have had to make the rule and almost
invariably find them satisfied and quite content."
The packages, themselves, are detained overnight. The store reserves the
right to make an inspection of them. Such inspection, even when it is
made, rarely ever shows the package to be illicit. It merely is
carelessness. And the thoughtless worker to whom it is returned in the
morning is merely asked not to be careless again, but to make a full and
co-operative use of the facilities which are provided for the comfort,
and the protection, of him and his fellows; which generally is all that
is necessary to be said.
By six the store is practically emptied of its workers. After that hour
any one leaving it must have a pass and be interviewed by the night
superintendent at the single door left open for exit. Night work in the
Macy store is little and far between these days--save possibly in the
Christmas season and even then it is held at a minimum; an astonishing
minimum when one comes to compare it with the Christmas seasons of, say,
a mere twenty years ago. The state law says that aside from that
fortnight of holiday turmoil, the women workers of the store, who are
considerably in the majority, shall not work more than fifty-four hours
or oftener than one night a week and then not later than nine o'clock.
In turn, the store, following the workings of the statute, designates
Thursday as its late employment night. If, because of some emergency, it
wishes to deviate from this, it must have a special permit.
As a matter of fact, however, Macy's anticipates the law; goes far ahead
of it. It finds its women workers not only willing to work the
occasional Thursday night shifts, but, with the practical advantages of
a full dinner furnished without cost and overpay to come into the
reckoning, for the most part extremely anxious. And it reminds the
solicitous legislators up at Albany that it was not a statute that
abolished the pernicious habit of keeping the stores open for business
evenings and late in the evening, but the progressive thought of the
store managers of New York, themselves. These last have yielded little
to the sentimentalists in real looking forward. Theirs have been the
practical problems--not the least of these that of the education of a
shopping public which seemingly had demanded that the big
department-stores of New York should be kept open evenings--some
evenings throughout the entire year--and all evenings in a certain
small and terrible season; and without consideration of the task this
custom imposed upon the patient folk who were serving them. Out of such
lack of consideration, out of such selfishness, if you please, was a
great practical and moral reform in merchandising evolved. Which was, in
itself, no little triumph.
II. Organization in a Modern Store
I like to think of modern business as a huge, great single machine; or
better still, a group of little machines gathered together and
functioning as one. It is a simile that I have used time and time again.
To feel that some single achievement of industry--of manufacturing or of
merchandising--is as well organized and as well balanced as the many
mechanisms that are laboring in its behalf, seems to bring the most
single complete picture of modern business of the sort that our press
has ofttimes been pleased to term "big business".
And sometimes I like to think of these "big businesses"--with their
hundreds and thousands of human units--as armies. At no time is this
last comparison more apt than when one comes to apply it to the modern
department-store, as we today know it in America. For, even if you wish
to grant an entire dissimilarity of purpose, one of these huge
institutions has more than one point of similarity with an army. Not
alone in numbers can this parallel be made, but quite as quickly in
organization. While, to return to our first simile, it, too, is a big
machine--humanized. Its parts are carefully co-ordinated so that the
whole will function with the least possible friction. Like an army it
is officered with its generalissimo, its under generals, its colonels,
its captains, its lieutenants, its sergeants and its corporals. The
difference is only in nomenclature. The structure is quite the same.
For, when you come to analyze, you will find the divisions of labor and
of authority quite corresponding to similar divisions in the army.
Officer, "non-com" and private--each contributes his more or less
important part; each is a necessary factor in the success of the
enterprise.
Like an army, the department-store of modern America is designed to move
constantly forward. The "big-chief" scans his balance sheets, the rise
and fall of the curves of his outgo and income averages, the
tremendously meaningful jagged red lines of his graphic charts, quite as
carefully as the army general keeps track of the movement of his forces
upon the maps which his topographists send him. He gathers his officers
roundabout him and plans the strategy of business with the same shrewd
foresight that must be observed by the successful military leader. He
must be a promoter of morale throughout his forces, even down to the
newest and the lowest-paid clerk. There must be constant liaison between
the general and the private in the ranks.
In considerable detail this parallel can be carried out. Soon, however,
it must come to an end. That is, it ends in so far as Macy's is
concerned. For the army at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street is neither
an army of offense nor of defense. Its sole position always is upon the
front line of service.
At the head of the organization there are the three brother partners who
inherited their original interest in the great business from their
father, the late Isidor Straus, who, with their mother, lost his life in
the supreme catastrophe of the sinking of the _Titanic_. In 1914 they
acquired Nathan Straus' interest by purchase. These men, Jesse Isidor,
the president, Percy S., the vice-president, and Herbert N., the
secretary and treasurer, are its triple head and front. While each has
trained himself to be a merchandise specialist of the highest order,
there is none that knows the details of Macy's better than his
brothers--they share equally in the supreme authority that directs the
business. Directly responsible to them, in turn, is its general manager,
its merchandise council and its advertising and financial departments.
As I write these paragraphs, the great chart of the Macy organization
lies upon my desk. It is a vast and fascinating thing. With the lines
extending upon it here and there and everywhere from the box which holds
the triple-head, branching and rebranching here and there and again, it
looks not unlike a giant map; a chart, if you prefer to have it so. And
so it is, a chart upon which the steersmen of so vast and so responsible
an enterprise safely pick their course upon a seemingly unending
journey.
"Government by draughting-board," sniffed an old-time business man to me
once, when I was trying to explain to him in some detail how a great
steel manufacturing plant of the Middle West attempted to accomplish
its huge job, economically and efficiently, by the use of graphic
charts. And he added: "I'd like to see _myself_ held down by blue-print
authority."
To which, after all this while, I should like to reply:
"I should like to see a concern, as big and as successful as Macy's,
operated without a careful charting of its always difficult path."
Yet, as a matter of hard fact, Macy's, any more than any other big and
well-planned business organism of today, never binds itself to go
blindly and unthinkingly upon the lines of the charts--and nowhere else.
The real trick of executive direction seems to be to know when to follow
these lines and when more or less to completely disregard them.
Rule-of-thumb can never again overcome the rules of averages, of
percentages or of economic laws. But the rule of wit and of human
understanding can ofttimes be used to temper this first group and
sometimes with astonishingly successful results.
A glance or two at this imposing organization chart lying before me
begins to show the many, many ramifications of the huge Macy business
tree. It shows, for instance, how, under the direction of the
merchandise council, are four large branches of store activity more or
less inter-related: the handling of Macy's own merchandise (meaning
particularly that which is either made in the store's own factories or
at least made under its direct supervision); the work of the large force
of buyers; the comparison department (an important phase of the
business to which we shall come in our own good time); and the foreign
offices.
In the financial department, the controller is the quite logical chief.
His general duties are fairly obvious. To help him in them, he has,
under his direction, the chief cashier, the salary office, the auditing
department, the depositors' account department--this last a most
distinctive Macy feature--and a statistical department.
Obvious, too, is the greater part of the work of the publicity
department. It includes in addition to the advertising manager--always
an important factor in the modern department-store and particularly so
in the case of Macy's--a display manager. It is the job of the first of
these men to tell the public of the merchandise being offered for sale
at the sign of the red star; the job of his compeer to see that it is
properly displayed to them.
And, finally, there is the general manager--last but not least.
Connected by an exceedingly direct and much-traveled line with the
general offices upon the seventh floor of the store are Mr. W. J. Wells,
the store's general manager, and his advisory council. For the G. M.,
big as he is always, has need of much advice. Upon his broad and
efficient shoulders are placed such a tremendous array of
responsibilities that one cannot but marvel at the sheer efficiency of
the man--to say nothing of his reserves of physical and mental
strength--who can hold down such a job. Yet, at Macy's, the man himself
disclaims any superhuman powers.
"I am merely the automatic governor to this big machine," he will tell
you, in his own simple, direct way. "In fact, if the machine always
functioned one hundred per cent. efficient, there really would be no
need either of me or of my job. It is because no machine that is built
of human cogs and cams and levers and pulleys may ever work at one
hundred per cent. efficiency that I, or some other man, must sit in this
office. It is our job to meet the unusual and the unforeseen. We take up
slack here and loosen there."
The translation of this is unmistakable. If the three men upon the high
seventh floor of the institution are its steersmen, this man, who has
his office at the rear of its broad mezzanine balcony, is at least its
chief engineer. And to assist him he has five assistant
engineers--assistant general managers, in reality. The habit of simile
leads one into odd designations of title. Each of these five assistant
general managers--we shall stand by the nomenclature of the store--in
turn has a large number of departments reporting to him. While in
addition to them and ranking as virtual assistant managers are the
superintendent of the detective bureau and that of the building, itself.
The general manager, himself, is charged with the general duty of
engaging, training and educating employees. He regulates salaries. He
controls the transfer and discharge of employees. He is charged with the
enforcement of all rules and regulations. He is the final authority to
decide whether or not merchandise is returnable, for refund, exchange or
credit. He also is the authority who adjusts all claims or
controversies with customers. And he is the one to whom employees may
appeal if they feel they are being treated unfairly by their superiors.
A man-sized job truly! And because no one man, short of a superhuman at
any rate, could ever perform all of its various and perplexing
functions, Mr. Wells has his five assistants. In the event of his
absence as well as that of any one of them the man below rises
temporarily into his immediate superior's job.
[Illustration: WHERE MILADY OF MANHATTAN SHOPS
The vast ground floor of Macy's is, in itself, a mark of much interest
and variety]
It is the major task of the first of these assistants to direct the work
of the floor superintendents--eight of these--and through them that of
the section managers and the actual sales forces; nearly two thousand
people all told. In other words, his job is the selling. To this great
force and to the countless problems that must arise in its day-by-day
direction there is added the oversight of the personal shoppers'
service. Which means in turn the furnishing of guides throughout the
departments to shoppers who ask for them; finding translators for folk
to whom the intricacies of our tongue are unsolved mysteries and, in
certain specific and necessary cases, the sending of merchandise with a
member of the sales force into the homes of Macy's patrons.
The second and the third assistant managers are the heads of non-selling
organizations within the store, the fourth and the fifth handle the
training and the educational departments, respectively. The second
assistant has, as his especial responsibility, the merchandise checkers,
the collectors, the stock clerks, the cashiers and the interior mail and
messenger service. The other non-selling assistant general manager
supervises the receiving department, the department of money orders and
adjustments, the supply department, the delivery, the receiving, the
time office, the manufacturing, and sundry other smaller specialties of
the store; small, however, only in a comparative sense. Taken by
themselves they quickly would be seen to be sizable indeed.
The tasks of most of these departments are fairly obvious from their
names. Some of the others we shall see in a bit of detail as we go
further into the store and its workings. In other chapters we shall
describe what the great delivery department is supposed to accomplish,
and actually does accomplish, the scope and plan and reach of the
departments of training and of employment, and some others, too. It
takes no great strain upon the imagination to conceive of the importance
of the detective bureau's work, nor that of the superintendent of
buildings.
So much, then, for a preliminary bird's-eye view of a mammoth machine,
not a machine for turning out shoes or typewriters or paper, but for
buying and selling all these things and many, many more. And as you read
in the earlier part of this book, the huge mechanism did not spring into
its being in a year, or in a decade, or even in a generation. It
represents slow, hard, steady growth; and slow, hard, steady growth it
is still having.
There are now one hundred and eighteen departments in Macy's and yet,
out of many thousands of separate and distinct items, there are some
things that the store does not sell. Some of these commodities are
handled by other great department-stores. But while Macy's may and does
follow a charted path, it is its own chart and its own path. It never
follows blindly the pathways of others. So, for instance, it does not
sell pianos. In this particular case, at least, the reason is not hard
to discover. Remember, all the while, that Macy's sells for cash and for
cash alone--always and forever; and then consider that in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred, pianos are sold upon the installment plan. The
installment plan is entirely outside of the Macy scheme of salesmanship.
It may or may not be a good plan. But to adopt it Macy's would either
have to change its selling policy or else dispose of so few pianos that
it would not be profitable to maintain a department for them. This is
the alpha and the omega of the piano, as far as Macy's is concerned. It
has no intention either of changing its deep-rooted and well-founded
selling policy, nor, on the other hand, of establishing a little-used
and possibly unprofitable department. Upon this decision it stands quite
content.
Yet assuredly Macy's is organized to sell nearly all of the necessities
of life--and an unusually large number of the luxuries in addition. From
hosiery to ice cream, from women's suits to artists' materials, from
eye-glasses to sausages, and from petticoats to ukeleles, the list of
the store's wares is almost without limit. Other furniture is not hedged
about by the same merchandising traditions and restrictions as are
pianos; there are in the upper floor of this great market-place pieces
of household furnishings whose prices run well into the hundreds and
even thousands of dollars, to say nothing of rare Oriental rugs, fine
paintings and other works of art.
These one hundred and eighteen departments have been arranged after long
study and experience and well thought out plans. In fact, so many
conflicting and intricate features have entered into their planning that
it is hardly possible within the space of these pages to give more than
the broad general policy of the department organizations of the store.
Yet it is another of these fairly obvious principles that upon its main
floor--where its space, square foot by square foot, is by far at its
highest value, and where there is a maximum of accessibility--should be
displayed the items that sell the most quickly and the most readily.
This follows the very reasonable theory that goods for which there is
the most popular demand should at all times be the most accessible.
Varying slightly in specific cases and conditions, as one ascends into
the five upper selling floors of the store, the merchandise falls more
and more into classifications that call for care and deliberation in the
purchasing. Thus, upon the main floor, one will find such articles as
umbrellas, books, candy, notions, and the like--to make but a few
instances out of many--while upon the second, there will be yardage
goods, linens, shoes and so forth.