job a sizable one indeed. The boxing of a divan or a dining-room table
is no easy task whatsoever. And in cases where the delivery is to be
made within the limits of Macy service it is often avoided entirely. The
freight elevators of the store are of the largest size ever designed; so
big that a heavy motor truck is no particular strain upon their
individual capacity. One of these trucks can be and is driven straight
to and from the ninth floor. After it has reached the department the
placing of fine furniture in its cavernous interior is merely a nicety
of planning and arrangement, a skillful use of ropes and blankets and
padding. The truck may run to any point within forty or fifty miles of
the store at less cost than crating; even though crating be done at
cost, itself.
So spread the tentacles of Macy's, those long arms of distribution that
keep the store from ever being a merely abstract thing. The bright red
and yellow wagons and trucks--each bearing its good-luck symbol of the
red star--carry Herald Square to the far limits of a far-flung city. The
men who ride them are upon the outposts of salesmanship. Yet through
system and through organization they are forever closely connected with
it. The blood that courses through your finger-tips comes straight from
your heart. The life-blood of understanding, of enthusiasm, of morale,
that Macy's outriders bring with them is the life-blood of the humanized
machine that functions so steadily there in the heart of Manhattan.
VI. The Macy Family
In the bazaars of ancient Bagdad, the human factor was not only the
great but the sole dominating influence. The ancient Bagdadians,
including those commuters and suburbanites, far and near, who came
cameling into town at more or less frequent intervals, did business, not
with a machine, not with a system, but with men. Which, being freely
translated, meant bargaining. They not merely bargained, but haggled,
and haggled at great length. Prices? There were none. The price was what
you made it--you and the merchant with whom you finally came to
agreement; if finally you did come to agreement.
In the great bazaars of the modern Bagdad one does not need to bargain
or to haggle. One is doing business primarily with a system. Prices are
fixed, and firmly fixed. This is so generally understood and accepted a
rule today that it would be a mere waste of time to discuss it at
further length, save possibly to recall once again the large part which
Rowland Hussey Macy and the men who followed him played in giving a
Gibraltar-like firmness to this solid modern business principle.
Yet even in these same modern, scientifically organized bazaars of
today, the system rarely ever can be better than the men who direct it.
Four thousand years of business progress between the two Bagdads have
not taken from man his God-given power to make or break the best of
systems. And Macy's, with its own business system organized, carefully
developed and upbuilded through sixty-three long years, is still
dependent to no little degree upon the faith and loyalty and interest of
its men and women; that same thing which in the days of the war just
past we first learned to know by that new name--morale.
Under the sign of the Red Star there are at all times these days not
less than five thousand workers; in the Christmas season this pay-roll
list runs quickly to seven thousand or over. Then it is that the Macy
family takes its most impressive dimensions. Seven thousand souls! It is
the population of a good sized town! It is four good regiments--it is
the New York Hippodrome with every one of its seats filled and eighteen
hundred folk left standing up!
Yet even the all-the-year minimum of five thousand men and
women--roughly speaking, one-third men and two-thirds women--is an
impressive array. It is a human force which only gains impressiveness
when one finds that all but three hundred of it are employed beneath a
single roof. The small outside group chiefly comprises those in the
delivery stations.
To bring action, foresight, co-operation, correlation--and finally
morale--into such a force is a thing not gained by merely talking or
thinking about it, but by long study, experimentation and great
continued effort. Which means, in turn, that Macy's, among several
other things, is a responsibility. For, as we shall presently see, there
are any number of problems in addition to those of buying and selling;
problems in the solving of which unceasing demands are made upon the
store's time, money and heart. It is, in the last analysis a matter of
mere good business at that. Yet at Macy's it has been considerably more.
And the store's satisfaction in realizing that it was a very early and a
very advanced pioneer in developing personnel--and morale--as necessary
factors in modern merchandising is a very large one indeed.
A machine or a family--or a department-store--is only as good as its
component parts, and by the fact that there is a strict interdependence
between the whole and its parts, the success of Macy's must mean that
the rank and file of its employees maintain a high average of
intelligence, initiative and loyalty. That these qualities are
successfully co-ordinated in Macy's is due to real leadership, and it is
to this same leadership that we may look for the basis of the store's
morale.
Little things indicate. And indicate clearly. Here on the wall of the
passageway at the head of the main employee's stair is a placard which
reads:
"Once each month three prizes are given to the employees who make the
best suggestions for the betterment of store service or conditions.
Don't hesitate to try for a prize, even if your suggestion does not
appear important. We need your ideas and like to have as many as
possible presented each month. Write plainly and drop your suggestions
in the boxes furnished for this purpose. The first prize is $10.00, the
second $5.00, and the third $2.00."
Here is only a single one of the many evidences of Macy co-operation
with the employees. Yet it illustrates clearly the house's policy of
making its workers feel an interest in and beyond the mere amount of
money that they draw at the end of the week. Not a few of these prizes
are awarded for suggestions as to procedure in technical matters
relating to the details of the business. Some of them result in the
saving of time--and consequently money--and others in the improvement of
working conditions. For example: ten dollars was awarded to the man who
suggested that the doors of fitting-rooms be equipped with signals to
show whether or not they are occupied; five dollars went to the one who
made the suggestion that the fire-axe and hook standing in the corner of
the customers' stairway be placed on the wall in a suitable case so that
children could not play with them; two dollars to her who advanced the
very reasonable idea that a scratch-pad in the 'phone booths would
prevent memoranda and art manifestations being made upon the walls. Here
are a few suggestions that were proffered and acted upon. The entire
list runs to a considerable length.
There is another notice upon the big bulletin board at the head of the
employees' stairs--a sort of town-crier affair with temporary and
permanent notices of interest to the store's workers--which tells the
working force that when vacancies occur within the big store they will
be promptly posted on this and other bulletin boards. The workers are
advised to apply for any position which they may feel they are competent
to fill. Ambition is not curbed in Macy's. On the contrary, it is
stimulated to every possible extent. The employee is restricted only by
his own limitations, if he has them. It is a firmly-fixed house policy
to promote, wherever it is at all possible, from its own ranks. Among
its high-salaried men and women are not a few who have worked their way
up from the bottom. In fact, among these six or eight of the best paid
men in the store, is one who boasts that he first came to New York
fifteen years ago, with but a suitcase and eleven dollars in his pocket.
The employment department must have been very much on the job when it
hired this man. It generally is very much on its job.
Obviously, the hiring of workers for an enterprise as huge as Macy's
cannot be conducted on any hit-and-miss plan. We have gone far enough
with the store in these pages to see that hit-and-miss does not figure
at any time or place in its varied functionings--and nowhere less than
in its employment department. The hiring of new workers for the store is
indeed a branch of the business machine that receives constant and great
care and systematic attention. A store must employ the right sort of
people in order to be a good store. This is fairly axiomatic these days.
These workers are gathered in a variety of ways--by volunteer
applications, by newspaper advertisements (in New York and outside of
it), by outside free employment agencies, by circular appeals generally
to educational institutions, and, best of all, through the solicitation
of its regular employees. There is no appeal for a worker that, in my
opinion, can compare with the suggestion made by an employee that the
place of his or her employment is a good place for his or her friends,
as well.
I am warmly concurred with in this opinion by the store's employment
manager, a big, upstanding man, who in his Harvard days was a famous
football player. The rules of that fine game he has brought to the
understanding of his present problem.
"One of the most desirable class of applicants is that brought by our
own employees," he says, frankly, "as in hiring these people we have a
feeling of security; especially if they have been brought in by some of
the old and most loyal employees. It has been our experience that such
applicants enter more readily into the spirit of their work and develop
more rapidly than those obtained from other sources. We advertise in the
classified columns of the newspapers only when it is absolutely
necessary. Our regular daily advertisements keep the store constantly
before the public eye--and generally that is enough.
"During the recent war period, however, we had no scruples about
advertising, as nearly every other line of endeavor was in the same boat
as we. Never before have the newspapers carried so much classified
advertising. Yet when all is said and done, besides the moral
undesirability of this source of supply, we found it also very expensive
indeed.
"Some people believe that the function of an employment department is
merely to keep in touch with the labor market and engage employees," he
continued. "This is erroneous. The duty of this employment department is
to raise the standard of efficiency of the whole working force by the
proper selection, placing, following up and promotion of employees and
so bringing about a condition that will result in their rendering as
nearly as possible one hundred per cent. service to the store. That is
the real reason why employment departments such as this first came into
existence. Business some years ago awoke to the realization of the fact
that its indiscriminate handling of the entire labor problem was causing
a tremendous economic waste, not alone to the employee and to society,
but to itself. It then began for the first time to deal with the problem
of its personnel in a scientific and practical way."
The market for workers--like pretty nearly every other sort of
market--is, as we have just seen, subject to fluctuations; there are
seasons when the employment manager--ranking as the store's fourth
assistant general manager--must look sharply about him for the
maintenance of its ranks, other seasons when long files of would-be
workers present themselves each morning at his department doors. For the
five or six years of the World War period the first set of conditions
prevailed. It was difficult for any department-store, ranked by the
Washington authorities in war days as a non-essential industry, always
to maintain its full working force, to say nothing of its morale.
Recently the pendulum has swung in the other direction. America is not
exempt from the labor conditions which are prevailing in the other great
nations of the world. And there are plenty of people who would work in
Macy's. Yet the store has refused to use this situation as a club over
its workers. Throughout the darkest days of the business depression it
told them that it had no intention either of reducing its force of
workers (beyond the usual lay-off of extra Christmas people) or of
reducing their individual salaries. Which was a considerable help to its
_Esprit de corps_.
Yet even in the hardest days of labor shortage Macy's never ceased to be
most particular as to the quality of its help. Applicants for positions
underneath its roof were scrutinized with great care to make sure as to
their desirability as additions to the organization. And before they
finally were accepted and turned over to the training school, they were
examined, with as much thoroughness as if there were hundreds of others
in the file behind them, from whom the store might pick and choose.
All this is part and parcel of the definite management policy of the
employment department, just as it is part of its policy to make sure
that the prospective member of the Macy family has more than one arrow
to his or her quiver. Alternate capabilities are assets not to be
scorned. And there is an obvious store flexibility in being able to use
its human units in a variety of endeavor that the management can hardly
afford to ignore. And it does not.
There is a function of the employment department of the modern business
machine that Macy's recognizes as second in importance only to that of
engaging its workers. I am referring to that moment when they may leave
its employ, either from choice or otherwise. If "otherwise"--in the
colloquial phrasing of the store being "laid-off"--there is the greatest
of care and discretion used.
"Remember the Golden Rule," says its general manager to his assistants,
and says it again and again. "Do unto others as you would have them do
unto you. And remember that there is never a time when this Golden Rule
is more necessary or applicable in business than in the moment of
discharge."
Translated into the terms of hard fact this means that in Macy's no
buyer, no department head, no department manager has the power to
dismiss one of his workers. He may recommend the "lay-off" but only the
general manager himself may actually accomplish the act. In which case
he first refers the case to one of his five assistants, for personal
investigation and recommendation.
When the saleswoman--or man, as the case may be--leaves of her own
volition the matter becomes, in certain senses, more serious. Why is she
dissatisfied? Are the conditions of labor more onerous at Macy's than in
the other stores of the city, the remuneration less satisfactory? Macy's
does not intend that either of these causes shall obtain beneath its
roof. So the retiring employee, before she may leave its pay-roll, is
carefully examined as to her reasons for going. The last impressions of
the store must be quite as good as the earliest ones--even upon the
minds of its workers. And a careful system of observation and of record
has been upbuilded to make sure that this is being obtained; which may
often lead to valuable opportunities for the correction of store system,
particularly in the relationship between Macy's and its employees.
We come now face to face with the training department--another
individual organization strong enough and important enough to demand as
its head an officer of the rank and title of assistant general manager.
But before we come to consider it in some of the many aspects of its
workings--before we come to see how in these recent years education has
come to be the hand-maiden of merchandising, let us consider the actual
experience of a young woman who recently entered the employment of the
store. She was a college woman--a good many of the store people are
these days. The mass of young women who come trooping out of our
colleges each June are apt to find their employment bents trending more
or less to a common course and in great cycles. Yesterday the cycle was
teaching; the day before, literature or the sciences; today it is
merchandising. The great department-stores of our metropolitan cities in
America are, as we already know, today paying their executives and
sub-executives salaries more than commensurate with the earnings of
those in other lines of industry and well ahead of those in the learned
professions. Moreover, they have brought their hours of employment down
to a point at least approaching those of other business organizations.
Their appeal thus has become measurably greater. And they are reaping
the reward--in the attraction of a higher grade of executive young
women.
[Illustration: THE SCIENCE OF MODERN SALESMANSHIP
Education places the saleswoman of today at highest efficiency.
A Macy schoolroom]
This young woman was of that type. And here is how she came to
Macy's--told in her own words:
"Not at all long, long ago, I went rather hesitatingly into the rooms
labeled 'employment office' at Macy's. 'Hesitatingly' because, if you
have ever gone around very much looking for a job, you know that
'Welcome' is not always written on the door-mat that receives you. But
it is at Macy's--and a woman, who made me feel that she was my friend by
the warmth of her smile, talked with me and after filling out the usual
blanks I was told when to report for work. They were mighty decent, too,
about trying to place me selling the kind of merchandise that _I_ wanted
to sell--and that means a lot!
"The Monday morning that I came to work was, of course, rather
hard--it's not easy to go into any strange and new place and be crazy
about it right at first! There were a lot of us--all new girls--and it
was fun to see what they did to us. We went from the employment office,
where there is a good sign reading 'Say "we" not "I" and "ours" not
"my",' to our locker room (which, by the way, is the best of any of the
places I have ever worked in) and then up to the training department for
a little first time; after which they sent us to our respective
departments. We felt rather like ping-pong balls, being knocked hither
and thither, and though we didn't know why we were doing any of these
things we trusted that those holding the ping-pong bat did.
"While we were waiting up there in the training department, we had a
chance to get to know each other a little--two or three of us were
charmingly Irish--and time to note the people busy about that
department. Nice efficient-looking people they were--and of course we
labeled and cubby-holed them. One man, we all decided, could well be a
matinee idol and another might have hailed from down Greenwich Village
way.
"At last we parted and went down through the store to our own
departments--and on the way any importance which we may have felt was
quickly submerged in seeing what a distressingly small part we were of
the large Macy organization. Even so, we later found out how many, many
other 'we's' like each of us could make a deal of trouble for it, should
we fail to carry on our work correctly. A talk we had from the store
manager, a little later on, made me feel directly responsible to the
poor fellows who are the Macy delivery men. If I were not careful to
write the address clearly in my salesbook, the delivery man would get in
trouble--and all because of my handwriting! Funny, how we were all
linked up together.
"Well, to go back, I got to my department feeling decidedly unimportant,
and was put to work behind a counter which sold women's and children's
woolen gloves and women's kid gloves. That was the first counter I had
ever sold from. In other stores I have sold from what are known as
'open departments'; the counter trade was a revelation to me. Did you
ever notice the lack of space behind the counters in the stores? Well,
with the Christmas rush and all the extra salesgirls, it is lucky indeed
that some of us have a sense of humor.
"I had not been behind the counter for two whole minutes before a
customer came along and asked for something. I tried to look wise and
answer. It was all terribly new. The customers are always so plentiful
in Macy's that a new girl hardly has time to have the old girls tell her
about the stock. Moreover, our counter was very near the store's main
entrance--which meant that we were an informal but very busy little
information bureau on our own account--not only about Macy's but
apparently anything else in the city of New York.
"Of course, I didn't have a salesbook that day; I didn't receive one
until after I had had some training and was beginning to know something
about the Macy system. However, customers could not see the
'new-and-green' written on my face, so I waited on them thick and fast;
even through that first morning. And a wild time I had of it--gym was
never so exhausting as stooping down to look for a certain pair of
gloves which must be a certain color combined with a certain size, plus
a certain style and so on. Some people must stay up nights figuring
along the lines of permutations and combinations, so as to work out some
unheard of ones for the things they ask for in Macy's. The other girls
were mighty nice to me, though, and as helpful as could be. And our
having to almost walk upon one another and squeezing past and bumping so
often--why, you all get clubby, mighty soon. At the end of that first
day I was rather wrecked, though happy--for in my desire to find things
for customers speedily I had, in bending down, burst through the knee of
one stocking, broken a corset-stay and ripped loose a garter! Henceforth
I managed to dress in a manner prepared for doing gymnastic stunts, such
as deep-knee-bending and leap-frog.
"My first lesson on the store system came on my first day in the
store--and then one every day for an hour, during the whole first week.
I liked that--for then I knew how things were supposed to be done. They
even took us out into departments that were not busy early in the
morning and had us make out certain kinds of sales right behind the
counter, and carry the whole thing through--all that was lacking being
the _real_ customer. It gave us confidence and showed us things that we
thought we knew, but that, when it came right down to it, we didn't know
at all. The training department also gave us pamphlets and notices about
how to use the telephones and telling us to do certain things, as well
as how our salary and commission were to be figured. Also one leaflet
told us about Macy's underselling policy, and what we should do in case
a customer reported merchandise as being cheaper somewhere else--and,
although I had heard before of this policy of Macy's, I came to believe
in it faithfully, after I had read the booklet.
"When you're new in a department the 'higher up' man can do much to
make you feel glad that you are there. My section manager and buyer were
both fine. The buyer told us in a talk she gave us all about how she'd
been with Macy's for twenty-five years; that she had worked for several
years, when she first began, at six dollars a week. She made us feel
that there surely must be a chance for every one of us--that a firm that
is worth staying with that long must be pretty fine indeed--and that it
was just up to us individually, whether or not we would go ahead. As for
our section manager, he was always so nice in the way he handled any
transaction with us--giving us an extended lunch-hour or signing any
sales checks that needed his 'O. K.' In many stores the section managers
are so disagreeable about doing their work that the salesgirls hate to
have them 'O. K.' things--but I have found it quite the opposite at
Macy's. And when he had the time and saw any of us looking glum or tired
our man would talk to us and succeed in cheering us up.
"There are many things, too, that I discovered Macy's doing for its
employees--all sorts of clubs and parties. One of the most useful of the
first of these I found to be the umbrella club. All I had to do one day
when it began unexpectedly to rain was to go up to the training
department, deposit fifty cents and receive an umbrella. If I left
Macy's within the month, I would get my fifty cents back. Of course, I
was to return the umbrella the very first clear day but any time
thereafter that I needed one I could go upstairs and get it.