relief periods a day in the store in addition to your lunch time. You
can go to the dressing rooms and wash up a bit and then go to the
recreation room, where there are plenty of large, comfy chairs, a piano,
books and the like. The room is a veritable social center all the day
long--I always found lots of friends there, no matter at what time I
took my relief periods. And you go back to your work refreshed and 'full
of pep' once again. Another place where you have a chance to see your
friends is the employees' lunchroom--and it certainly is a popular
place. Despite the clatter and rush, the Macy folks have a good time in
their cafeteria; the crowds that eat there every day prove the
wholesomeness of its food. It is good home cooking and, as far as its
cheapness is concerned--well, I've eaten veritable dinners there at the
noon hour, day after day, and never had my check total more than
twenty-five cents; with thirteen or fifteen nearer the average.
"One morning we all came early to the store--to a courtesy rally.
Thousands of us--yes, literally thousands of us--gathered on the main
floor, on the central stair and everywhere roundabout it, and we sang
songs about smiling; and other optimistic things. Then, after good
addresses by Mr. Straus and Mr. Spillman, we all sang again and, in
response to an inquiry from one of the store executives, all shouted
that we would try to carry on with the new Macy slogan of 'A smile with
every package' and 'a thank you as goodbye.'"
Frank testimony, indeed. And honest.
To bring this atmosphere about the worker in the store may no more be
the result of hit-and-miss than the right sort of hiring. In the modern
marts of the new Bagdad the creation of morale, not merely the retention
of a good industrial relationship between a store and its workers but a
constant bettering of it, has come to be as important a problem as that
of the buying or the delivering of its merchandise, or even its problems
of making its public constantly acquainted with its offerings and
advantages.
The work of such a department--in Macy's the department of
training--divides itself quite logically and clearly into two great
avenues; the one educational, the other recreational. Each takes hold of
the newcomer to the store almost from the very moment that he or she
enters upon its lists of employment. The new salesgirl's name is hardly
upon the rolls of the department to which she is assigned before a
member of the store's reception committee is upon her heels and steering
her straight through all the maze of fresh experiences that necessarily
must await the novitiate. She is told all about her time disc of
brass--the individual coin that bears her distinctive number (built up
of her department number plus her own serial one) which she must drop
into its allotted slot at the employees' entrance when she comes to it
in the morning and which she must see is returned to her before the day
is done in order that she may have it to use again upon the morrow; how,
going from the locker room to her department at the day's beginning, she
must sign its own time-roll, which then becomes accountable for her
comings and goings through the rest of the day; how she can go and when
she must return; how she is paid--her salary, her quota, her
commissions, her bonuses.
All of this might sound complicated, indeed, to the new girl, were it
not for the kindness of her assigned "committeeman." Complications in
the hands of a woman who has been through the mill, herself, and who has
come to see how they are really not complications at all, but cogs in
the grinding wheels of a great and systematic machine, are easily
explained. The new girl catches on. The simple but accurate
psychological tests through which she was put before she was accepted
for Macy's assure this. She catches on and within a year--perhaps within
a space of but a few months--she, herself, is on the reception committee
and helping other new girls through the maze of first employment.
The new girl catches on--
There lies before me, as I write these paragraphs, a neatly typewritten
loose-leaf memorandum book. It is the work of a girl who has yet to
round out her first year in Macy's and it is a work that all must
produce before they may hope for very definite advancement.
This typewritten book is, in itself, a book of the Macy store. Its pages
are a brief, succinct and thorough account of the store's organization,
its selling policies--including, of course, the stressed under-selling
policy--and its methods. Yet it is much more, too. It is, if you please,
a manual of salesmanship. Under a heading, "Steps in an Ideal Sale,"
these are not only enumerated but are given relative values in
percentages. Thus we see that "attracting attention" is twenty per
cent.; "arousing interest," twenty; "creating desire," fifteen; "closing
sale," twenty; "introducing new merchandise," ten; and "securing good
will," fifteen. Under each of these sub-heads, the salesclerk has
collected a group of points necessary to their attainment. Thus, under
"attracting attention" one finds "facial expression" and under it, in
turn, "pleasant and expectant."
All of these things have been taught the salesgirl author of this
book--the volume, itself, is the result of her notes at her lecture
classes. When she is taught "attracting attention" she is told that
alongside of "facial expression" there comes "tone of voice," and under
this last there are five distinct classifications: "audible, distinct,
sincere, rhythmical, suited to customer." Truly the science of
salesmanship goes to far lengths these days. From time to time the store
has engaged a professional teacher of elocution to take up and carry
forward this last function of its work. Here is this saleswoman being
taught that "swell" is a word forever to be avoided over the counter,
"smart," "stylish," "fashionable," "original," and some others being
substituted. Similarly "elegant," "grand," "nifty," "classy," "cheap,"
"awfully" and "terribly" are under the ban, appropriate synonyms being
suggested to replace them. "Flat" is not to be used, when "apartment" is
meant. The entire list of words to be avoided in a Macy sales
conversation runs to a considerable length.
This particular saleswoman was trained to textile salesmanship.
Consequently, although the first half of her book, which treats of the
store's methods and policies, is common to those that are being prepared
by her fellows in all the other selling departments, the second half is
the result of the special training that was given her in the department
of training along the lines of her own merchandise. Not only did she
spend long hours of the firm's time in its classroom upon the third
floor of the store and surrounded by cabinets in which were displayed
textile materials of every sort and in every stage of development, but
she was given a printed booklet which told her much about her
merchandise, its history, its production fields and the details of its
manufacture.
From it she evolved her own history of textiles, setting down with
accuracy the four fundamental cloths--cotton, linen, silk and wool--and
not alone tracing their development and manufacture, but by means of
carefully hand-made diagrams, pointing out the difference between the
different textures and weavings. "Warp" and "weft" and "twill" have come
to be more than mere words to her. They are a part of her business
capital, which she can--and does--turn to the good account of the store.
So she is to her compeer of twenty-five years ago--selling dress-goods
in the old Macy store down on Fourteenth Street--as the electric light
of today is to the old-fashioned lamps of that day and generation.
Back of this little black-bound notebook there is system--organization
if you would read it that way. Education, of a truth, has become the
handmaiden of merchandising. And the store's school has become one of
its ranking functions.
As teachers in this school there is a specially trained corps of men and
women who do nothing but instruct and then follow up their pupils to see
that they put into practice the things that they have learned. The
educational work consists of individual instruction, informal classes
and practical demonstrations. And the result of it all is not merely to
make the employee valuable to the house, but to lend interest to
merchandising, itself, and to lift the salesperson out of the mere
mechanical process of taking orders for goods.
The moment that a new employee comes into the Macy store his or her
instruction in its system, organization and salesmanship begins. We have
just seen how one typical new saleswoman began receiving her training
from the first day of her employment. She was no exception to an
inflexible rule. The training is given invariably. It does not matter
whether the applicant has had experience in other large
department-stores. Even a former Macy employee, accepting re-employment,
must go through the department of training for, like everything that
grows, the store system changes steadily from year to year and from
month to month.
A school such as this must have teachers. It is futile to add that they
must be specially trained and thoroughly competent in every way to
fulfill the unusual task set before them. And this, of itself, has been
a problem, not alone with Macy's, but with the other large
department-stores of New York. They have co-operated to solve it, with
the direct result that some two or three years ago retail store training
became a practical factor in the city's educational system. Under the
enthusiastic aid of Doctor Lee Galloway, its head, the successful and
rapidly expanding business division of New York University created the
school of retail selling, bearing the name of and affiliated with the
parent institution. The merchants of New York raised a fund of $100,000
for the establishment and promotion of this enterprise and from it last
June came its first graduating class--young men and women qualified to
teach store training in the great bazaars of our modern Bagdad.
The purposes of this school are set forth succinctly in its first
manual, which has come off the press. Its object is "to dignify retail
selling through education in the following ways: To train teachers in
retail selling for public high schools and for retail stores, to train
employees of retail stores for executive positions and to do special
research work for the department managers of retail stores."
In accordance with the first of these expressed avenues of its endeavors
the Board of Estimate of the city of New York already has begun to move
in full co-operation. A high school in the lower west side of
Manhattan--the Haaren High School at Hubert and Collister Streets--has
been designated as training center for this work. Girls are there being
taught retail selling. Nearly one hundred already are entered in the
course and within a few short months the larger stores of the city will
begin to benefit by this highly practical educational work.
That this experiment will prove successful seems now to be well beyond
the shadows of doubt. Yet such success will be in no small measure due
to the individual efforts of Dr. Michael H. Lucey, principal of the
Julia Richman High School--in West Thirteenth Street, just back of
Macy's original store--who has devoted great energies to its launching.
Convinced, from the outset, of the real necessity of a training course
in retail selling in the city schools, Dr. Lucey makes no secret of his
dubious fears at the beginning of the experiment:
"I honestly didn't see how we were going to do it," he says, in frankly
discussing the entire matter, "the tradition in favor of an office
career rather than a selling one in a store has so long ruled in the
high schools of the city. There are several reasons for this--the most
important one, in my mind, the feeling in the average high school girl's
head that less education having been required in past years for the girl
behind the counter than for the girl behind the typewriter, she lost a
certain definite sort of caste, if she followed the first of these
callings. Of course, that is utter rubbish. I have no hesitancy today in
telling my girls that if they are looking for a genuine career retail
selling is the thing for them. In office work, if they are very good,
they may get up to forty or even fifty dollars a week but there they
are pretty nearly sure to come to a standstill."
The skilled educator shakes his head as he says this.
"You see the difficulty is that so many girls coming out of schools such
as these look upon business not as a boy would look at it, as a career
with indefinite and permanent possibilities, but rather as a bridge
between schooling and matrimony--a bridge of but four, or five, or six
years. And when they are frank with me--and they often are--and tell me
of this bridge that is in their minds, I am frank to advise office work.
It offers better immediate returns--yet in the long run none that are
even comparable with those of a high-grade department-store."
Following the successful plan of the University of Cincinnati in its
technical engineering courses, the students down at Haaren are grouped
into working pairs, which means that, in practice and working in
alternation, each goes to school every other week. In the week that one
is in the classroom, her partner is in one of the city stores studying
retail selling at first hand. When, at the end of six days, she returns
to her schoolroom she has many questions derived from her actual
practice to put to her instructor. So the practice and the principles of
this new hard-headed science are kept hand in hand with its actual
workings.
Nor is this all: some six or seven hundred young women--and young men,
too--are also making a special study of retail selling in the city's
evening schools. A single course at the DeWitt Clinton High School is
quite typical of these. Four evenings a week, for two hours each
evening, a huge class is being taught--in an even more detailed way than
is possible under a department-store roof--the principles and
manufacture of textiles. In these classes a goodly number of the Macy
family are enrolled. Another goodly enrollment goes into the special
lectures given by a museum instructor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
on certain evenings and Sunday afternoons.
Truly, indeed, education has become the handmaiden of merchandising.
As teachers in Macy's department of training there are enrolled today
only those men and women who have received a thorough normal school
education in this great new science of retailing. They do nothing but
instruct the store's workers and then follow up to make sure that these
are putting into practice the principles in which they have just been
instructed. Except for the training of the future executives the school
time is taken entirely from regular business hours and so, at the
expense of the house, itself. This schooling--under the Macy roof,
please remember--consists of individual instruction, informal classes
and practical demonstration.
Specialized training under the roof includes instruction under the
direct supervision of the Board of Education in fundamental school
subjects to those classed as "juniors" and "delinquent seniors"; a
junior salesmanship course given to all employees promoted from the
non-selling divisions of the store to its selling divisions; a senior
salesmanship class--including the study of textiles and non-textiles,
and covering three busy months; the instruction of special groups of
salesclerks to be transferred for special sales; "demonstration sales,"
in which teacher and pupil "play store," with the teacher impersonating
various types of customers; the executive course to prepare employees
for high executive positions of different rank and order; and the
specialized instruction for dictaphone and comptometer operators,
correspondence and file clerks and the like.
In the limited space of this book, I shall have no opportunity to carry
you further into the details of this fascinating department of the
modern store. The saleswoman's little black book that we saw but a few
minutes ago ought to show it more clearly to your eyes than any
elaborate presentments of schedules and curriculums. The result's the
thing. And Macy's has the results. It has already achieved them. Not
only has it lifted retail selling from the hard and rutty road of cold
commercialism but it has lifted the individual seller, himself--which,
to my way of thinking, is to be accounted a good deal of a triumph. In
such a triumph society at large shares--and shares not a little.
It is house policy--sound policy--to encourage employees to look out not
only for the store's interest, but for their own. An ambitious salesman
is indeed an asset; and there are ways of keeping him ambitious. There
is, for instance, the system of bonuses for punctuality, which takes the
final form of extra holidays in the summertime. A week's holiday with
pay is given without fail to each and every employee of eight months'
standing. But a record of good attendance and punctuality for fifty long
weeks brings another week of vacation, also with full pay.
Department-stores not so long ago used to penalize their workers for
tardiness. The new Macy plan works best, however.
The list of those bonus possibilities is long. There is, of course,
chief amongst them, the bonus which takes the concrete form of a sales
commission. The salesclerk is set a moderate quota for his or her week's
work. On sales that reach above this figure he or she is paid a
percentage commission. And, lest you may be tempted to dismiss this
statement with a mere shrug of the shoulders, as a perfunctory thing
perhaps, permit me to tell you that but last year a retail salesman in
the furniture department earned in excess of $6,000 in wages and
commissions.
One other thing before we are done with this main chapter on the Macy
family and starting up another which shall show the super-household at
its play; it is a thing closely associated both with department-store
employment and training: this "special squad" which has become so
distinctive a feature of the big red-brick selling enterprise in Herald
Square. Concretely, it is a group of college graduates--the heads of the
firm are themselves college men and have none of the contempt for
education that has become so blatant a thing in the minds of so many
"self-made business captains" of today--who desire to enter upon this
fascinating and comparatively new field of department-store service.
As one of the executives of the department of training himself says,
"Many of these young grads come in here with the rattle of their
brand-new diplomas so loud in their ears that for quite a while they
can't hear anything else."
Yet they are good material--as a rule, uncommonly good material. So Dr.
Michael Lucey says, and Dr. Lucey knows. As a supplement to his
educational work in the commercial high schools he entered Macy's last
summer and spent the two months of his vacation in the special squad,
studying the store from a variety of intimate and personal angles. On
his first day in it, the distinguished educator sold clothing--men's
clothing--and he sold to his first customer, an accomplishment which he
notes with no little pride. His pride at the moment was large. But the
next moment was destined to take a fall. A floor manager down the aisle
espied the new clerk.
"Don't let those trousers sweep the floor," he admonished.
And the educator had his first taste of store discipline.
Sooner or later all these young men out of college get that first taste.
It does not harm them. And it is not very long before they begin to
observe that, after all, there are still a few things about which they
know practically nothing. After which their real education begins.
A department-store is, among other things, a great melting pot. An
Englishman who came into Macy's special squad last year inquired just
what work might be expected of him. He was told.
"Manual labor," he protested, "I can't think of it. I wear the silver
badge."
Which meant that he was one of the King's own--a pensioner of the late
war. The store executive who first handled this bit of human raw
material possessed a deal of real tact; most of them do. He smiled
gently upon the Britisher.
"After all," he suggested, "you know you don't have to tell your King
that you had to use your two good hands in hard work."
The Englishman saw the point. He laughed, shook hands and went to work.
In six months he was an executive, himself. It's a way that they have at
Macy's. And here is part of the way.
Manual labor is demanded invariably of those who enlist in the special
squad. It has a regular system through which each of its workers must
pass. First he is given the history and development of the store and of
its policies. This work is followed by a week on the receiving platform
and then a good stiff session in the marking-room. The college boy
follows the merchandise along a little further. He proceeds for a while
to sell it--then does the work of a section manager. After which there
come, in logical sequence, the delivery department, the bureau of
investigation, the comptroller's office, the tube system, an intensive
study of the departments of employment and of training. These are not
only studied but written reports are made upon them. After which he
should have a pretty fair idea of the store and the things for which it
stands.
The course is only varied in slight detail for the woman college
graduate. Macy's has naught but the highest regard for the gentler
sex--not alone as its patrons but as members of its staff--yesterday,
today and tomorrow. A woman may not be able to handle heavy cases upon
the receiving platform. But there are other sorts of cases that she may
handle--and frequently with a tact and diplomacy not often shown by the
more oppressed sex. I might cite a hundred instances from within the
store where she has shown both--and initiative as well. But I shall give
only one--where initiative played the largest part. Some few months ago
a young woman who has climbed high in the store organization, to the
important post of buyer of a most important line of muslin wearing
apparel, found herself in France, but a few hours before the steamer
upon which she was booked to sail to the United States was to depart
from Southampton. To take a steamer across the Channel and then catch
her boat was quite out of the question. She did the next best thing. She
hopped on an aeroplane and flew from Paris to London; seemingly in
almost less time than it here takes to tell it. She caught her boat. Her
instructions were to catch the boat. And long since she had acquired the
Macy habit of obeying orders.
Upon this, again, a whole volume might be written--upon the thoroughness
of an organization which really organizes, a training department that
really trains, a system which really systematizes. And all under the
title of a family group--in which affection and tact and understanding
come into play quite as often as discipline and energy and initiative.
VII. The Family at Play
In the business machine of yesterday there were no adjustments for play.
It prided itself upon its efficiency. And in the next breath it
proclaimed that such efficiency left no room whatsoever for such
foolishness as recreation. Today we know much better. We know that
play--healthy, uniform play in a decent amount--is one of the very
finest of tonics for the human frame. And so count it as one of the very
highest factors in our modern schemes of efficiency.