corner not often shown to the outer world, from which there constantly
emerge noises which blend and combine to give the effect of a staccato
rumble. Thud, thud, t-h-u-u-d, thud, thudity, thud, thud. Then a sound
of air, as in a Gargantuan sigh. Thudity, thud, and so on, _ad
infinitum_. These sounds seemingly are quite unending. If your curiosity
draws you toward the door from which these sounds emerge and you finally
are permitted to open it and go within, you will find a company of young
women sitting along both sides of three sets of moving belts, quickly
picking brass cylinders from the belts as they pass them. Except for the
fact that there is another tube room on the fourth floor (for the upper
floor selling departments) this basement place might truly be called the
heart of the store, for it is these brass cylinders that contain the
life-blood of the business, the cash which the customers pay for their
purchases. Call the tube room the pulse of the store and the analogy is
better--certainly their throbbing is a close index of its condition.
Alert cashiers pick up the carriers from the upper belt as they pass,
deftly make the required change, and drop them to the lower belt, on
which they are conveyed to other young women who despatch them to the
departments whence they came. This continues for approximately eight
hours each working day. The cash carriers do considerable traveling in
the course of a year. One of them might easily go from the new Bagdad to
the old. Yes, it might. If you still scoff let us look at the system
together and do a little figuring upon our own account.
Throughout the store there are two hundred and fifty cash stations--the
outer terminals of the line at one of whose common hearts we now stand.
Each of these stations is connected with one or the other of the common
hearts by two separate lines of tubing, one for sending and the other
for receiving the carriers. There is a total of 125,000 feet of this
tubing, or nearly twenty-four miles. Five thousand cash carriers are in
use and the average number of round-trips made per day by all of them is
150,000. Each round-trip averages two hundred and fifty feet. The
average distance traveled each day by this host of travelers then comes
to the astonishing total of 37,500,000 feet--7,155 miles. Now to your
atlases and find how far the new Bagdad is from the old. And if that
distance does not give you pause, consider that the peak-load of the
system was carried on a day when its mileage ran to 12,120--an
equivalent of one-half the distance around the world--in a little over
eight hours.
Truly it would seem that money goes far at Macy's.
V. Distributing the Goods
When milady of Manhattan finishes her purchases in Macy's, snaps her
purse together once again and goes out of the store, the transaction is
ended, at least as far as she herself is concerned. But not so for
Macy's. Particularly not so when she has given orders that the goods be
"sent," either to her own home or to the home of some friend. In such
cases the largest part of the store's responsibility still is ahead of
it. It must see to it that the package--or packages--shall be carried to
the proper destination, quickly, promptly, correctly. Which means that
the great business machine of Herald Square has another great function
to perform.
There is, in the sub-basement of the Herald Square store, where the
greatest portion of its own great transportation system is situated, an
ancient two-wheeled cart, somewhat faded and battered, yet still a red
delivery wagon and showing clearly the name of the house it served, R.
H. Macy & Company. It is a treasured relic of other days, which now and
then again, at great intervals, is shown to the populace in the
all-too-rare parades of the huge wagon equipment of the store today.
The gentleman who gives the lecture which accompanies any public
showing of this ancient equipage is Mr. James Woods, who, as we have
already seen, has been with the store for nearly half a century and who
has risen in its service to the important post of assistant
superintendent of the delivery department. Mr. Woods regards the cart
with tender affection, since it was he who once was the human horse who
strode between its shafts. That was back in 1873, long years before the
store had moved north from the once tree-shaded Fourteenth Street. Mr.
Macy, himself, was still very much in charge of the enterprise and was
passing proud of his delivery "fleet"--consisting of three horse-drawn
wagons, and young Jimmie Woods with the cart. A good many prosperous New
Yorkers then had their residences within a dozen blocks or less of the
old store, and young Jimmie's legs--and the cart--could and did serve
them, easily and expeditiously.
That was almost the beginning of the Macy delivery department. In fact
it had been but five years before that Mr. Macy had acquired the first
horse-drawn rig for this purpose. From that beginning the growth was
steady although slow. Ten years after Mr. Woods first came to it--in
1883--there were but fifteen wagons. In 1902, when the great trek was
made north to Herald Square, there were a hundred. Today there are more
than two hundred and fifty, of which by far the larger number are motor
driven. These last range all the way from the big five-ton motor trucks
which, as we shall presently see, are used primarily for carrying
merchandise between the store and its outlying distributing stations,
down to the small one-ton truck, which is used at its greatest advantage
in city street distribution. And an astonishing number of horse-drawn
vehicles remain. That is, astonishing to the uninitiated layman, who
perhaps has been led to believe that the motor truck in this, its heyday
of perfection, could hardly be surpassed for any form of carrying. As a
matter of fact, however, the department-stores as well as the express
companies, skilled in the multiple distribution of small packages, have,
after a careful and intensive study of the motor trucks--which has
resulted in their ordering many, many hundreds of them for certain of
their necessities--discovered that for certain forms of delivery the
horse and wagon still remains unsurpassed. The time that a delivery
wagon remains standing becomes an economic factor in its use. If it
moved all the time it undoubtedly would be as cheap and certainly more
efficient to use a small automobile truck. But when there are fairly
lengthy stops and close together, where perhaps the vehicle is idle for
four minutes for every one that it is actually in operation, the factor
of having an expensive machine idle as against an inexpensive one comes
into play.
Business organizations reckon these things not alone from sentiment, but
from hard-headed facts. Yet they are not entirely free from sentiment,
even in such seemingly purely commercial matters as delivery. The very
condition and upkeep of the vehicles of a high-grade department-store
show this. "Spic-and-span" is hardly the phrase by which to describe
them. Fresh paint and gold striping--the smooth sides so cleaned and
polished, that one might see his face reflected mirror-like upon them,
the horses to the last state of perfection--this is the Macy standard of
delivery. A Macy truck and wagon is designed to be one of the store's
best advertisements.
A skillful trucking contractor from the lower west side of New York went
to a department-store owner a dozen years or more ago and said:
"Mr. A----, after a little study of your delivery service, I am
convinced that if you would turn it over to me, I could save you more
than fifty per cent. in its operation."
Mr. A---- was a pretty hard-headed business man, "hard-boiled" is the
word that might well be used to describe him. He turned quickly to the
contractor.
"You interest me," said he. "How would you propose to do it?"
"At the outset, by making the wagon equipment a little less elaborate.
It could be just as efficient without so much varnish and brass and
gold-stripe."
Mr. A---- shook his head negatively.
"Oh, no," he said, "we know that much ourselves. If we were to do that,
we should lose fifty per cent. of our advertisement upon the streets of
New York."
We have left milady's package where she left it, in the hands of the
salesclerk who sold it to her. The purchaser does not see it thereafter,
not at least until it has come to her home. With an astonishing celerity
and according to a carefully set-down program and practice it is wrapped
right within the floor upon which the selling department is situated,
and then dropped into a chute which leads with a straight, swift run
into that nether world of Macy's--the basement headquarters of the
delivery department. In reality this chute is a carrier, so designed as
to carry the small individual packages with safety and order, as well as
with celerity.
There are fourteen of these conveyors, coming down from all the selling
floors save that of furniture which has its own special delivery
organization on the ninth floor. Together they pour their almost
constant stream of merchandise upon the so-called "revolving-ring" in
the very center of the basement floor. This "revolving-ring," in purpose
very much like the great and slowly revolving disc-like wooden wheels
used in the freight stations of the express companies for a similar
service, is, in reality, much larger than they. It is a
"square-ring"--if I may use that paradoxical phrase--built of four
slowly moving conveyor belts upon which a package may travel an
indefinite number of round-trips. At various points upon the outer edge
of this moving square the conveyor chutes drop their merchandise. Near
the center are the wide-open mouths of other conveyors, which lead to
distant corners of the basement.
The nimble-fingered and nimble-witted young men who stand within the
"revolving-ring" feed the packages from it into these last conveyors. To
each individual package is affixed a duplicate portion of the leaf of
the salesbook. On it the salesclerk has written, or printed, the address
to which the merchandise is to go, the cost, whether or not it is
collect on delivery (known hereafter in this telling as C. O. D.) and
other essential information. It is the addresses, however, which attract
the eyes of the genii of the "revolving-ring." In their minds these fall
into four great categories: City, meaning those portions of Manhattan
Island south of Seventy-second Street on the east side and Ninety-ninth
Street on the west; Harlem and the Bronx, the incorporated city of New
York north of those two streets; Brooklyn and New
Jersey--self-explanatory; and Suburban: all the rest of the territory
within the far-flung limits of Macy's own generously wide delivery
service. While for those points that are unfortunate enough to lie just
outside of it--Boston or Philadelphia or Kamchatka or Manila (There
hardly is an address to stagger the Macy delivery department)--the
packages go direct to the shipping room, in its own corner of the
basement.
Here these last are checked and wrapped for long-distance shipment. They
are checked against the payment or the non-payment of transportation
charges; the store has very definite rules of its own. A paid purchase
of but $2.50 is entitled to free delivery within any of the Eastern
States, of $5 and over to any of the Middle States as well, of $10 and
over to any corner of the whole United States. Freight and express
prepayments are arranged upon a somewhat similar basis. The majority of
the long-distance shipments go by parcel post, however. Still, in the
course of a twelvemonth, there are enough to go both by express and
freight to make a pretty considerable transportation bill in themselves.
Again we have neglected that precious package of milady's. It may be
only an extra pair of corset-laces--in which case the saleswoman must
have suggested that madam herself transport it to her habitat--or it may
be an eight or ten-yard piece of heavy silk for her new evening gown, or
the evening gown itself. In any case it receives the same care and
attention. We have already seen how it is packed, sent through the
conveyor-chute down into the basement and then upon the "revolving-ring"
before the nimble eyes of the men with nimble hands and wits as well.
Milady lives in West One Hundred and Fourth Street. The sorter's eyes
catch that much from the address slip, torn originally from the
salesclerk's book and pasted upon the package's outer wrappings.
"Harlem" his mind reports back to his eyes. Into the chute-entrance
labeled "Harlem and The Bronx" goes the package.
"Harlem and The Bronx" is a sizable room for itself. The further end of
the second conveyor to receive milady's precious package rests upon a
table in its very center. Roundabout the table are small compartments or
bins, each about the size of a small packing case; each numbered and
corresponding to a definite wagon route or run. Run No. 87 (the number
is purely fictitious) takes in West One Hundred and Fourth Street. Into
compartment No. 87 goes milady's packages. But not, of course, until the
clerical young man technically known as the sheet-writer has made a
record of it. Into his records, also, go all the other packages destined
that day for that particular room. If there should be, as sometimes
happens, an overplus of packages for the single run, then it is the
business of one of the assistant superintendents of delivery to meet the
emergency either by stretching momentarily the runs of the adjoining
routes or by sending a special wagon up from the main store. Experience
and judgment must cut the cloth to fit the case.
Under any ordinary procedure milady's package will go out early in the
morning of the day following her purchase. That, at least, is the
store's ordinary guarantee of delivery. As a matter of fact, it does far
better than this. On ordinary days, when weather and street conditions
in Manhattan have not gone in conditions of near-impassability, there
are at least two regular deliveries to every part of the island south of
One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street, with a single one at least to every
other part of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, to say nothing of the
downtown portions of Jersey City and Hoboken. Easily said, this thing.
But when one comes to realize how tremendously widespread the
metropolitan district of Greater New York is these days, the performance
of it becomes a transportation marvel, a masterpiece of organization.
I shall not bore you with a description of the printed forms, the checks
and counter checks that accompany the delivery of milady's package. It
is enough to say that they are both complete and necessary. The
complications of C. O. D. add greatly to their perplexities. For,
discourage it as they may and do, the department-store owners of New
York never have been able to wean milady from the joys of this method
of shopping. When she says "C. O. D." in Macy's the salesclerk
immediately and courteously replies: "Have you tried having a
depositor's account, madam?" A good many of them have, and all who have
have liked the method. Yet the C. O. D. still has its great appeal. And
out of all the deliveries from the big store in Herald Square more than
half of them are collect-on-delivery. This means, in turn, a good deal
of complication for the delivery department. Its drivers have to be
cashiers, in miniature. When they report at the main store at half-past
seven in the morning, each is furnished with five dollars in change; a
sum which is doubled in the case of the suburban drivers. Moreover, for
the correct handling of the forms, a double amount of care and
understanding is required. One does not wonder that the department-store
proprietors discourage the C. O. D.
Yet it all requires a high type of wagon representative. Hardly less
than the salesclerk does the wagon driver of the store have it in his
power to make or lose friends for his house. His is no small opportunity
for real salesmanship. The big stores realize this, and select these men
with great care and discernment. They know that the man who shouts
"Macy's" up the areaway or elevator-shaft once or twice a week is apt to
become the same sort of good family friend and ally as the iceman or the
butcher's boy. The man knows that, too: particularly in the vicinity of
Christmas week. His own trials are many and varied. Apartment house
superintendents and janitors, with prejudices of their own, are rarely
co-operative, generally obstructive, in fact. Some people--even store
patrons--are naturally mean. They take out all their meanness upon the
department-store man who, because of his very position, is unable to
strike back.
Yet the job has its compensations, aside from the warm remembrances of
the holiday season. People, in the main, are decent after all. If Mrs.
Jinks, who lives in Albemarle Road, Flatbush, is out at the matinee or
the movies for the afternoon, Mrs. Blinks, who lives next door, will
take in her packages. The Macy man has been long enough on the route to
know that by this time. Such knowledge is a part of his stock in trade.
He must not only know the regular patrons of the store, but all of their
neighbors. While by the correct and courteous handling of both he may
not only retain trade for it but bring new customers to its doors.
Let us now suppose that milady does not live in either Manhattan,
Brooklyn or the Bronx, but in one of those smart suburbs: Forest Hills,
New Rochelle, Englewood or the Oranges, to pick four or five out of
many. She still is well within the limits of Macy's own delivery
service. If she lives in the first of these--Forest Hills--she will be
served, not direct from the Herald Square establishment, but from the
little Long Island community of Queens. Fifteen wagon and motor truck
routes run from the Macy sub-station there, which in turn is fed by the
merchandise coming out over the great Queensborough bridge, each
evening, on heavy five-ton trucks. And, to go back even further, these
have been filled from the super-sized compartments at the end of the
conveyor-chute marked "Suburban."
Similarly, if she dwell in New Rochelle, she will be served by one of
the fifteen motor trucks running out from the sub-station at Woodlawn,
remembered by travelers upon the trains to Boston chiefly as the place
of the enormous cemetery. It serves the great suburban territory north
of the direct delivery routes out from the main store--a line drawn
through Kingsbridge and Pelham Avenue--out as far as Ossining, Mt. Kisco
and Stamford.
Englewood and the New Jersey territory roundabout are served by Macy's
Hackensack sub-station, with nine more routes; while the Oranges, mighty
Newark, Montclair and that immediate vicinage draws its merchandise
through a fourth sub-station, right in the heart of Newark, itself, and
operating ten regular motor truck routes. The fifth and last
all-the-year sub-station is at West New Brighton, Staten Island. It
serves that far-flung and least populated of New York's five boroughs,
Richmond.
In the summer months another sub-station is added to the list, at
Seabright, down on the New Jersey coast, and serving all those populous
resorts from the Atlantic Highlands on the north to Spring Lake on the
south. This is an expensive feature of Macy service, and one for which
the store receives no extra compensation. It is one of the many
expensive things that must be charged to profit-and-loss or the somewhat
indefinite "_overhead_"--indefinite enough when one comes to consider
its ramifications, but always fairly definite in its drain upon the
daily financial balances of the store.
At each of these sub-stations there are, in addition to the fairly
obvious necessary facilities for re-sorting the merchandise, complete
garage facilities for the wagons and trucks running out from them;
these, of course, are in addition to the store's main stables and
garages in West Nineteenth Street and also in West Thirty-eighth,
Manhattan. Together all of these form a very considerable fleet upon
wheels, with a personnel in keeping. For the delivery routes alone, and
taking no account of the sizable force employed in the upkeep of
vehicles and horses, there are employed, in the city service of the
store, one hundred and ninety drivers and chauffeurs, with one hundred
and eighty-six helpers, and in the suburban service, seventy-four
drivers and eighty-six helpers.
Through the hands of these there pours a constant and a terrific stream
of merchandise. The conveying system in the basement of the Herald
Square store has a generous maximum carrying capacity of five thousand
packages an hour--a capacity which sometimes is actually reached toward
the close of an exceptionally busy day, say toward the end of the
pre-Christmas season. Twenty-five thousand packages is an average day's
work for that basement room; upon occasion it has gone well over
forty-one thousand. It should be borne in mind, moreover, that a package
does not always represent a single purchase; in fact, it rarely does.
Inside of one assembled package--generally assembled, as we saw in a
previous chapter, at the store's transfer desk--there may be all the way
from two to ten separate parcels. You may take your own guess as to the
average number.
Here, then, is the great and complicated system in its simplest form.
Its ramifications are many and astonishing. For instance, milady is apt
at times to change her mind. Yes, she is. And send the package back.
Even though not as often in Macy's as in the charge account stores. Here
is another decided benefit in the cash system--not alone to the store,
but, because of its habit of passing on its economies, to its patrons as
well. Yet in the course of a year a considerable number of packages must
come back. Despite a thorough educational system and constant oversight
and admonition there is bound to be a percentage of incorrect address
slips. These and other causes produce a certain definite return flow of
merchandise; which must have its own forms and safeguards, for the
protection both of the store and its customer. They all make detail, but
extremely necessary detail.
In the basement there is a store room whose broad shelves hold a variety
of merchandise, bought and paid for, but never delivered. The store
makes at least two attempts to deliver every article given to its
delivery department. That department is unusually clever with telephone
books, club lists and other less used avenues of finding recalcitrant
addresses. But there come times when even its resourcefulness is
entirely baffled. Then the undelivered goods must go to the store room
until some properly accredited human being comes up somewhere, sometime
to demand them. In an astonishing number of cases the some one does not
come up sometime or somewhere. In such a case after a fair length of
time the goods themselves go back to stock. But the record of the
transaction stays accessible in the store's files, so that its bureau of
investigation, at any future time, may order a duplicate of the lost
shipment out of the stock--out of the open market if the stock then
fails to hold it--in order that Macy's may keep full faith with its
patrons.
Such a holdover is, of course, to be entirely distinguished from those
which are held in advance of delivery; in certain cases up to thirty
days without advance payment, in others up to sixty upon partial payment
and in still others up to six months after full payment. This last,
however, is a merchandising procedure quite common to most retail
establishments.
One feature of the delivery department remains for our consideration;
the branch of it which is situated upon the ninth floor and which, oddly
enough, handles the heaviest merchandise shipped out of the
store--furniture. There are, of course, heavy shipments that go out of
the basements--hundreds of them on an average that are entirely too
heavy for the conveyor-chutes and the "revolving-ring." A notable one of
these is an electric washing-machine, which, crated, will weigh slightly
in excess of two hundred pounds. Shipments such as these go to the
basement on hand trucks and by the freight elevators. There they are
boxed and crated; often a considerable job. As a rule the expert packers
of the delivery department can put even a fairly sizable or unwieldy
purchase into boxing within twelve or fifteen minutes; an elaborate and
fragile bit of statuary has been known to take a full hour and a half
before it was safely prepared for wagon shipment.