to rent out or even to sell the privilege of many, if not all of its
little stores. Macy's--in recent years at least--has not followed this
policy. It has found that its own best organization comes from keeping
the department as a unit; a pretty distinct and important unit, right up
close to the very top of the business, where its three partners are
specialists in merchandising; and passing proud of that.
The foundation of all successful buying is built of the bricks of sales
knowledge laid in the mortar of good judgment. It is squared up by a
sixth sense that has no name--yet a qualification which, by its presence
or its absence, makes or unmakes a buyer's value. In its various
branches, however, this unnamed sense is required, to a varying degree,
perhaps, least of all in the purchasing of staple goods.
For the sake of a more convenient understanding, let us begin by
classifying the various needs of the insatiable Macy's into three major
divisions: We shall put down staples, as the first of these; luxuries,
as the second; and novelties, as the third. Under staples we shall
include notions, cotton goods (such as sheets, pillow-cases and muslins)
and, in general, the absolute necessities of life, including wearing
apparel of the commoner varieties, household articles and the like.
These are in constant purchase almost every day of the year. Take, for
instance, that heterogeneous collection of articles, grouped under the
generic and whimsical head of notions. There is thread of all kinds,
there are hooks-and-eyes, snap-fasteners, hair-nets, darners,
button-hooks, tape-measures and what all not more--far be it from me
even to attempt to mention the more than four thousand separate items
that must be constantly carried in the notion departments.
For all of these there is a huge daily demand, while a month's supply of
any of them is all that can, as a rule, be conveniently handled in the
store. It must be patent that, as there is never an equal demand for
these small but essential articles, the buyers must be placing constant
orders for them. So it is with everything else that people must
have--irrespective of tastes, wealth or the season of the year--and the
number of the list is legion.
Therefore, the buyer of staples does not depend so much upon the sixth
sense as upon common sense. He must have plenty for the latter, however,
and it is sure to be kept working on a fairly even basis throughout the
entire year.
In the category of the luxuries are included such articles as jewelry,
musical instruments, Oriental rugs, paintings, fine bric-a-brac and the
like. Clearly the buyer in this branch must possess real taste and
discrimination in addition to commercial ability, in order to be able to
purvey these properly to the public. He handles goods which have to be
bought by people who have already purchased the necessities of life--the
buying of luxuries involves the spending of the public's surplus and so
this division of the work is at all times attended with great or less
hazard.
But the real hazards, the real necessity for that sixth sense, which I
just mentioned, the hardest and most nerve-racking buyer's job, comes in
the purchase of those goods grouped under the common title of novelties.
As one of the members of the Macy's merchandise council once observed,
the departments devoted to staples sell what the people want, while
those devoted to novelties make the people want what they have to sell.
And this last is quite true of the luxuries, as well.
Here, incidentally, is a very curious fact about merchandise: A staple
is not a constant thing. In one department it is what everybody wants
and in another it becomes a novelty. For instance, a cotton pillow-case
selling for, let us say, a dollar, is a staple; while another
pillow-case, of linen this time, embroidered with an old English
initial, hand hemstitched and edged with lace--we hesitate to guess at
its cost--is a decided novelty, in the understanding of the store, at
any rate. It also may be classed as a luxury.
Styles, fads, exclusive designs and seasons determine the work of the
buyer of novelties. The job is one that requires quick decisions. The
staple buyer can "play safe," but the buyer of novelties who pursued the
policy soon would find himself in the rear of the procession. Nor can he
afford to make mistakes, for they may be costly indeed to the house that
he represents. There is, in consequence, a greater demand on his nerve,
his ingenuity and his imagination than you find in other classes of
buyers. He must circulate where there are people--at the theaters,
country clubs, restaurants, churches, in Fifth Avenue--and he must keep
his ear to the ground and both eyes wide open. Consequently, when it is
reported in the Sunday paper that the women of Paris have taken up the
fad of wearing jeweled nose-rings, he must see that New York's women of
fashion may have the same opportunity of expressing their individuality,
by visiting Macy's jewelry department.
This, of course, is rank exaggeration, but it indicates what the novelty
buyer aims at. And surprisingly often he hits the mark.
In such a huge establishment it is but natural that the reception hall
outside the buying offices should be crowded most of the time. Mahomet
oftimes goes to the mountain--or sends a representative to it to buy
some of its goods--yet more often the mountain comes to Mahomet. And so,
I am told, for five days a week--Saturdays being generally recognized as
a closed day for buying--an average of from four hundred to six hundred
and fifty salesmen a day visit the buying headquarters on the seventh
floor of the store. Taking into consideration the fact that the goods
purchased are paid for in cash within ten days of their delivery, these
headquarters are most popular with the emissaries of manufacturers and
wholesale houses. Added to this is the uniform policy of courtesy to
salesmen, which has been stated by the company in its precise fashion:
"We have held, as far as within our power, the precept of which our
late head, Isidor Straus, was a living personification--that business
may be conducted between merchants who are gentlemen, in a manner
profitable to both."
It is one thing to write a thing of this sort. It is another to live
strictly up to it, day in and day out. But that Macy's does live up to
this high-set principle of its behind-the-scenes conduct is evidenced by
the unsought testimony of a manufacturer who sought for the first time
to do business with it.
This man had made one of the mistakes into which all manufacturers are
apt to fall, sooner or later. He had overproduced. And while,
heretofore, his product had been chiefly, if not solely, sold in
high-priced novelty shops he now needed an establishment of great
turnover to help him out in his dilemma. Macy's came at once into his
mind. The old house is indeed advertised by its loving friends. He went
to it at once; by means of the special elevator, found his way, along
with several hundred other salesmen, to the sample and buying rooms upon
the seventh floor.
A young woman at the door received his card and, without delay, told him
that he could see the buyer of the department which would naturally
handle his product, upon the morrow; at any time before eleven, but
under no circumstances later than noon. Better still, she would make a
definite appointment for him for the next morning. Mr. Manufacturer
chose this last course. And at the very moment of the appointed time was
ushered into the buyer's little individual room. Contact was
established quickly. The buyer already knew of Mr. Manufacturer's line,
regretted that they had not done business together a long time before.
He inspected the proffered samples, quickly and with a shrewd and
practiced eye; finally called into the little room two members of the
salesforce from the department down upon the ground floor. They agreed
with him as to the salability of the product. He turned toward the
manufacturer.
"Please bring your stock to No. -- Madison Avenue next Tuesday
afternoon, at half-past two."
Why Madison Avenue? The manufacturer was perplexed as he descended to
the street once again. The curiosity was relieved on Tuesday, however,
when he and his abundant goods were ushered into a big and sunlit room.
"We shall not be subject to any interruption here," said Macy's buyer.
And so they were not. For two hours the buyer and two of his assistants
went carefully over the stock, then withdrew for a short conference
amongst themselves. When they returned they handed Mr. Manufacturer a
card. It read after this fashion:
CASH
The entire lot $____
"The figure on that card, with the word 'cash' heavily underscored was
just one hundred dollars in excess of my minimum," said the manufacturer
afterwards, in discussing the incident. "I paused a moment and then
said: 'Gentlemen, I mean to accept your offer. You have figured well, as
your offer is just sufficient to buy the goods. R. H. Macy & Company
have secured this merchandise of unusual quality and I congratulate
you.'"
At the beginning of this chapter we mentioned another form of the
store's buying--where Mahomet goes to the mountain. This, being
translated into plain English, means that Macy's must and does maintain
elaborate permanent office organizations in Paris, in London, in Belfast
and in Berlin. These in turn are but centers for other shopping
work--shopping that may lead, as we have already seen, as far as the
distant Bagdad.
For instance, from his office in the Cite Paradis in Paris, the head of
the French-buying organization of the store controls the purchase of all
goods for it, not only in France, but in Belgium and Switzerland as
well. He virtually combs these busy and ingenious manufacturing nations
for their latest specialties; from France, _les derniers cris_ in
fashionable gowns, millinery, perfumes and novelties of every
description; from Belgium, fine laces and gloves; and from Switzerland,
watches. These items, however, are merely typical; there are hundreds of
others.
A young American woman, of remarkable taste and gifted with a genuine
genius for buying, is upon the Paris staff and is engaged practically
the entire year round in visiting exhibitions of every sort and variety,
in hunting the retail shops, great and small, of the French capital and
at all times acting upon her own initiative as a free-lance buyer. A job
surely to be coveted by any ambitious young woman who feels that she
understands and can translate the constantly changing tastes of her
countrywomen into the merchandise needs of a store whose chief task is
always to serve them.
For reasons that are not necessary to be set down here, the Berlin
office of Macy's has been in _statu quo_ for some years past, although
it is just now reopening. The London branch is steadily on the search
for the clothing, haberdashery and leather specialties which are the
pride of the British workman, while from right across the Irish sea, at
13 Donegal Square, North, Belfast, come the fine Irish linens that so
long have been a distinguished merchandise feature of the store's stock.
So it is, then, that forever and a day, Macy's is engaged in bringing
the cream of European merchandise to New York--goods of nearly every
kind that can either be made better abroad or cannot be duplicated at
all in this country. Importing is indeed a large branch upon the Macy
tree.
And in this branch romance oftimes dwelleth. The picture of the caravan
toiling up the banks of the Euphrates is no idle dream at all. Upon the
world maps of the merchandise executives of Macy's it is an outpost of
trading as unsentimental as Lawrence, Massachusetts, or Norristown,
Pennsylvania. Yet the buyer who goes to the old Bagdad from the new has
a real task set for him. Obviously he must not only have a knowledge of
his market and a keen sense of values, but he must also be a resourceful
traveler; a merchant who can adapt himself to the ways of the people
with whom he trades. His judgment, discretion and integrity must be
above reproach, for often he is far away and out of touch with
headquarters for long months at a time.
Take such a buying trip as the Oriental rug-buyer of Macy's recently
made into the Orient and back again. It lasted eight months. In that
time he traveled more than thirty thousand miles--by steamship,
motor-car, railroad, horseback and on foot. The rug region of Persia is
a long way, indeed, from Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street and to reach
it he went to London and Paris, then to Venice, where he took a steamer
for Bombay, upon the west coast of India. Thence he proceeded by another
steamer up the Persian Gulf to the city of Basra, which is at the
confluence of those two ancient rivers, the Tigris and the
Euphrates--between which the earliest Biblical history is supposed to
have been made. Basra today is one of the world's great rug-shipping
centers.
Then he went to Bagdad itself--the fabled city of Haroun-el-Raschid and
the Arabian Nights--from whence he started into the very heart of
Persia. He was not content, however, to remain idly there and let the
rugs be brought to him. He went much further. Through Kermanshah, the
city whose name is given to the rugs which come from Kerman, seven
hundred miles to the southeast, to Hamadan, one of the main
marketing-centers of the rug-producing country--that, briefly, was the
beginning of his itinerary. He went carefully through Persia, picking up
rugs here and there, having them baled and sent to Bagdad by mules or
camels and shipped thence to New York; and he established warehouses to
which rug-dealers brought their wares. The light of the Red Star shone
in the East.
Roads in Persia leave much indeed to be desired, and as the chief means
of travel, aside from beasts of burden, is by Ford cars, a buyer who
covers much of its territory has a rather unenviable job. Gasoline in
those parts costs four dollars a gallon, while if you hire a jitney you
pay for it at the rate of a dollar a mile.
On his return trip to New York this buyer went back once again to India
and north as far as the border of Afghanistan to investigate the
condition of the rug market in that region. At ancient Siringar, in the
Vale of Cashmere, he bought marvelous felt rugs made in the mysterious
land of Thibet. And yet all the way throughout this long journey he was
buying goods for only one department of the great store that he
represented.
It used to be impressive to me when the hardware dealer of the small
town in which I was reared would boast of the number of items that he
held upon the shelves of his own center of merchandising. There were
more than two thousand of them! He told me that with such an evident
pride, as a Chicago man speaks of the population of his town, or one
from Los Angeles, of his climate. And yet such a stock as that wonderful
one that was told to my youthful imagination, is more than duplicated in
Macy's--and is but one of one hundred and seventeen others. And the
responsibility of buying these millions of articles is scarcely less
great than that of selling them.
IV. Displaying and Selling the Goods
With Macy's goods once purchased, the next problem becomes that of their
transport to the store in Herald Square. Obviously their reception must
rank second only to their purchase. And when this is accomplished, as we
have just seen, in every corner of a far-flung world--Pennsylvania and
Massachusetts and Thibet and Korea and South Africa, to say nothing of a
thousand other places--their orderly receiving becomes, of itself, a
mechanism of considerable size. Almost equally obvious it is, too, that
the store, no matter how carefully and fore-visionedly and
scientifically its buyers may plan, cannot always dispose of its
merchandise at precisely the same rate at which it comes underneath its
roof. It cannot afford to gain a reputation for not carrying in stock
the items either that it advertises for sale or that it has educated its
patrons to expect upon its counters. Which means that alongside of and
intertwined with the orderly business of merchandise reception there
must be warehousing--reservoir facilities, if you please.
In concrete form, these last of Macy's are not merely rooms upon the
extreme upper floors on the main store in Herald Square--a space which
in recent years, however, has shrunk to proportionately small
dimensions because of the vast growth of the business and the
increasing demands of the selling departments upon the building--but
four structures entirely outside of the parent plant: the Tivoli
Building on the north side of Thirty-fifth Street, just west of Broadway
(which, as we saw in the historical section of this book was originally
the notorious music hall of the same name until Macy's purchased it for
its merchandising plans), the Hussey Building, in the same street, but
just west of the store, a third also in Thirty-fifth, but close to
Seventh Avenue and a fourth in Twenty-eighth Street between Seventh and
Eighth Avenues. So can a great store spread itself, even in its actual
physical structure, far beyond the bounds that even the most imaginative
of its customers might ordinarily call to mind.
It is in the rear of the selfsame red-brick building at the westerly
edge of Herald Square--that same main structure that we have already
begun to study in many of its fascinating details--that we find the core
of the receiving department of the Macy store. It is a hollow core. A
tunnel-like roadway, two hundred feet in length bores its way through
the building, from Thirty-fifth Street to Thirty-fourth. Through this
cavernous place, lighted at all hours by numerous electric arcs, there
passes, the entire working-day, a seemingly endless procession of
motor-trucks, wagons and other carriers. They enter at the north end and
before they emerge at the south they have discharged their cargoes. A
corps of men is kept constantly busy, checking off the merchandise as
it is unloaded. Husky porters, with hand trucks, seize cases, barrels
and miscellaneous packages of every sort and, presto! they are whirled
into huge freight elevators which presently depart for upper and unknown
floors. There are three of these, in practically continuous operation.
In addition to them packages brought by hand--generally from local
wholesalers and in response to emergency orders--are carried up into the
offices of the receiving department upon an endless carrier.
It is a source of wonder to the observer to see the way in which these
men of Macy's work. The poise. The confidence. The system. It is
terrifying even to think of the mess that would be the result of a day,
or even an hour, of inexperience or carelessness. In fact, it would
hardly take ten minutes so to jam that long receiving platform that
straightening it out again would be a matter of days. But upon it every
man knows just what to do; and every man does it, and does it fast. And
system wins once again. It generally does win.
For these incoming goods receipts are made out in triplicate--one for
the controller, one as a record for the receiving office and the third
for the delivery agent; the second of these acts as a sort of herald of
the actual arrival of the merchandise so that within sixty seconds or
thereabouts of the actual appearance of the goods under the house's main
roof the man who is responsible for them may be advised.
Every article purchased anywhere by R. H. Macy & Company, either for
their own use or for resale, is received through this department,
although there are a few other points than the tunnel-like interior
street from Thirty-fourth Street to Thirty-fifth where they are
received. The four warehouses that we have just seen have their
individual receiving facilities: the coal that goes to heat and light
and drive the big main building is poured through chutes under the
Thirty-fourth Street pavement, while direct to the company's stables and
garages go the fodder for its vehicles--hay for the horses of flesh and
blood, and gasoline and oil for those of steel and iron; all the other
miniature mountains of their incidental materials into the bargain. But
even these are checked in at the main receiving department; and
triplicate receipts issued upon their arrival.
So, then, come in these goods--by hand, express, by parcel post and
freight. The most of them have had their transport charges prepaid; a
certain small proportion of them comes marked "collect." An especial
provision must be made for the cash payment of these charges. The big
machine of modern industry must indeed have many odd cams and levers
adjusted to it. It must be designed not alone for the usual, but for the
unusual, and in a multitude of ways.
These, then, are the reception chutes of the Macy machine; the porters,
who even while hastening their trucks toward the elevators are making a
cursory examination of the arrival condition of the merchandise, are in
themselves small automatic arms of inspection. For while some of these
packages have come from nearby--perhaps not half a block
distant--others will have come from halfway around the wide world. And
the possibility of damage to the contents of the carrier is lurking
always in the short-distance package, quite as much as in its brother,
that has attained the distinction of being a globe-trotter. The crates
from the Middle West, those stout and honest looking Yankee boxes from
New England, this group of barrels from the heart of new
Czecho-Slovakia, and that of zinc-lined cases from France--the
_Lorraine_ has touched at her North River pier but two or three days
since--those great bales and bundles from the Orient, with the seemingly
meaningless (and extremely meaningful) symbols splashed upon their rough
sides, all look sturdy enough, as if they had survived well the
vicissitudes of modern travel. Yet one can never tell.
Which means that the personnel of the order checking department up on
the seventh floor must not only carefully verify the shipment as to
quality and to price but as to the condition in which it actually is
received. The hurried cursory examination of the platform porters
becomes an unhurried and painstaking investigation in this last
instance. The cases are not necessarily opened within the seventh floor
headquarters of the order checking department. As in the case of the
actual physical receipt, the unpacking is carried forward at the point
of greatest convenience to the merchandise department to be served. But
the results and records are kept at the one central headquarters.
And the skilled and expert merchandise checkers from the selfsame
headquarters are the men and women who oversee the
unpacking--invariably. They pass the responsibility of their stamp and
signature upon their receipts before the merchandise is turned over to
the department manager, who himself, or through his responsibility,
purchased it. Nothing is left to guesswork, or to chance.
Now we see the full responsibility settled once again upon the broad
shoulders--let us hope indeed that they are broad--of the buyer. With a
full knowledge of the price that he paid for them, of market conditions,
and of the prices of Macy's competitors he determines the prices at
which his merchandise is to be sold. Clerks, known as markers, quickly
attach these prices by small tags to the goods themselves.
From the marking-rooms, where everything to be sold within this
market-place is plainly and unequivocally priced, the merchandise goes
without further delay either direct to the counters of the selling
floors, or into the "reserves"--the warehouses that extend all the way
from Twenty-eighth Street to north of Thirty-fifth, and from Broadway to
Eighth Avenue. The stage is set. The show is ready. The performance may
now begin.
A trip through the hinterland of the Macy store is like a visit behind
the scenes of a modern theater. You see there just the way in which the
drama of selling actually is staged, from the settings to the
properties. You rub shoulders with the actors and actresses, just off
stage; with the electrician, the stage-manager, the carpenter and the
stage-hands. And always your ear is waiting to hear outside the
orchestra and the applause of the audience.