the minimum weekly wage of the woman employee in Macy's today is $14.00;
and the average pay--apart from that of the executives and
sub-executives--the men and women who, in the store's own nomenclature,
are classed as "specials" and exempted from the time-disc record of
their comings and their goings--is $25.00.
Have I now answered your question fairly? If still you wobble and are
uncertain, permit me to call your attention to the service records of
the store. They speak more eloquently than aught else can of the loyalty
and the interest of its workers. Qualities such as these are not
generated under bad working practices of any sort.
The records tell--and tell accurately, as well as eloquently. A Macy man
was recently retired on a pension--the store's list of pensioners runs
to a considerable length--after a round half-century of service. Others
will soon follow in his footsteps. There are today upon the rolls
ninety-two men and women who have been with it for more than
twenty-five years. In the delivery department alone there are
twenty-three men who have records of twenty years or more; and of these
there are three who have been there more than forty years. Three hundred
members of the Macy family have records of fifteen years or over,
fifteen hundred have been with it upwards of five years and--despite the
recent after-the-war difficulties of maintaining labor morale and
organization--only about one-quarter of the force have come within the
twelvemonth. The labor turnover in Macy's is low indeed--and constantly
is growing lower.
These figures, it seems to me, are the surest indication that the
store's workers are treated fairly. Moreover, they alone show clearly
the workings of its announced policy to give its own people every
possible opportunity to grow within its ranks. In fact, no man or woman
can stand still long at Macy's and continue to hold his or her job.
Progress is a very necessary requisite there. And in order that progress
may be recognized, steadily and fairly, system comes in once again to
stabilize a very natural phase of human development. As the Macy
employee shows new capabilities or additional industry, recommendations
for increases in his remuneration are made by his department manager to
a salary committee, appointed for this sole purpose. Periodically this
committee receives a list of all the store folk who have not received an
increase for a period of six months. The list is carefully reviewed and,
whenever and wherever it can be justified, the pay envelope of the
employee is fattened.
Macy's is, after all, a very human institution. The machine may be
steel-like, but it is not steel. It is flesh and blood and human
understanding. I sometimes think of it as a country town, rather than as
a family--one of those nice, old-fashioned sorts of country towns, where
most of the residents know one another, where there is an efficient
governing body and where the community spirit is one of the strongest
factors in its progress. Being human it is fallible, being fallible it
still has something for which to work; and in fulfilling this obligation
of work it is carrying out its destiny.
_Tomorrow_
I. In Which Macy's Prepares to Build Anew
Yesterday, when Milady of Manhattan went for her shopping along the
tree-lined reaches of Fourteenth Street, and found her way into that
perennially fascinating shop at the corner of Sixth Avenue which
specialized in its ribbons and its gloves and its rare exotic imported
perfumes, she dreamed but little, if indeed she dreamed at all, of a
Macy's that some day should stand intrenched at Herald Square and
embrace a whole block-front of Broadway. Today Milady, finding her way
into that small triangular "Square" in the very heart of
Manhattan--still on the sharp lookout for ribbons and gloves and rare
exotic perfumes--and Heaven only knows what else beside--may little
dream of the changes that a tomorrow--
Tomorrow--what business has a book such as this to be talking of
tomorrow; a vague, fantastic thing that only fools may seek to interpret
in advance?
We have seen between these covers quite a number of things--some of them
passing odd things--yet classified among the factors of good business,
according to all of its modern definitions. And to them we shall now add
another--the understanding and the correct interpretation of tomorrow. I
think that when I depicted Mr. Macy standing with his daughter,
Florence, at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway half a
century ago and explaining how there would be the business center of New
York fifty years hence, I called attention to the sharp commercial fact
that a great machine of modern business goes ahead quite as much upon
the vision and the foresight of the men that guide it as upon their
prudence. Which means in still another way, the proper understanding of
tomorrows. And that understanding today is quite as much an asset of
Macy's as its real estate, its cash balances in the banks, or the
millions of dollars standing in the stock upon its shelves.
More than a decade ago the big store in Herald Square first began to
feel its own growing pains. The fact that ten years before that it had
been planned as the largest single department-store building in the
United States, if not in the entire world, availed nothing when business
came in even greater measure than the most far-sighted of its planners
had dared to dream. Within three or four years after the time that the
caravans of trucks and drays had moved Macy's the mile uptown from the
old store to the new, changes were under way in the new building,
changes seeking to make an economy of space here, another economy
there--everywhere that an odd corner could be utilized to the better
advantage of the store and its patrons, it was at once so used. Finally
it became necessary to abandon the exhibition hall that was originally
located on the ninth floor and thrust that great space into one of the
larger non-selling departments of the enterprise; and two or three
years later an entire extra floor was added atop of the big
building--adding a goodly ten per cent. to its million square feet of
floor space already existing.
Yet even these changes could not solve the final problem. Macy's still
refused to stay put. Its growth was relentless, unending. Each fresh
provision made for its expansion was quickly swallowed up, with the
result that the proprietors of the store finally faced the inevitable:
the need of making a real addition to their plant, not a series of
picayune little extensions, but one fine, sweeping move which should be
as distinct a step forward in Macy progress as the mighty hegira that
occurred when the store moved north from Fourteenth Street to
Thirty-fourth--a little more than eighteen years ago.
And, facing the inevitable, Macy's quickly made up its mind. It never
has been noted for any particular hesitancy. It decided to step ahead.
Forecasting tomorrow in New York is not, after all, so vast a task as it
might seem to be at a careless first glance. That is, if you do not put
your tomorrow too far ahead--say more than ten or a dozen years at the
most. I am perfectly willing to sit in these beginning days of 1922 and
to assert that to attempt to forecast 1952 or even 1942 is not a
particularly alluring pastime--if one has any real desire for accuracy.
But 1932 is not so difficult. It is the business of skilled experts to
interpret 1932 in 1922; a business which incidentally is rendered vastly
easier in New York today than it was ten years ago by two hard and
settled facts--the one, the wonderfully efficient new zoning plan of the
city, and the other, the construction of the Pennsylvania Railroad
Station on Seventh and Eighth Avenues, from Thirty-first to Thirty-third
Streets.
The first of these factors should hold the strictly commercial
development of the city--save for local outlying hubs or centers--south
of Fifty-ninth Street. The block-a-year uptown movement of Manhattan for
whole decades past has finally been halted; and halted effectually.
Central Park has of course proved no little barrier in fixing
Fifty-ninth Street as the arbitrary point of stoppage. But the zoning
law, protecting the fine residence streets north of that point, and the
Pennsylvania Station are also factors not to be overlooked.
True it is that at the very moment that these paragraphs are being
written whole groups of new business buildings are being opened, in
Fifty-seventh, Fifty-eighth and Fifty-ninth Streets, in the center of
Manhattan. But other and bigger buildings are going up in the
cross-streets far to the south of these. Count that much for the
Pennsylvania Station. For it, and it alone, has proved the salvation of
Thirty-fourth Street. Macy's, Altman's, McCreery's, the Waldorf-Astoria,
the Hotel McAlpin--none of these alone nor all of them together--might
have been able to save Thirty-fourth Street from becoming another
Fourteenth, or another Twenty-third--a dull, wide thoroughfare given
almost entirely in its later days to wholesale trade of one sort or
another.
The Pennsylvania Station could do, and did do, the trick. Opened in
1910--but eight years after Macy's came first to Thirty-fourth Street
and that brisk thoroughfare of today was in the very youth of its
prosperity--the traffic which it handled day by day and month by month
at that time was more than doubled in 1920. Not only has the business of
the parent road that occupies it practically doubled in that decade, but
the inclusion of the important through trains of the Baltimore & Ohio
and the Lehigh Valley Railroads, to say nothing of the traffic of the
huge suburban Long Island system increasing by leaps and bounds each
twelvemonth, has begun at last to tax the facilities of a structure
seemingly far too big ever to be severely taxed. In recent months the
cementing of a closer traffic alliance between the New Haven and the
Pennsylvania systems renders it a foregone conclusion that more and more
of the through trains from New England will be brought to the big
white-pillared station in Seventh Avenue.
You cannot down a street on which there stands a city gateway,
particularly if the city gateway be one through which there sweeps all
the way from fifty to sixty thousand folk a day. Thirty-fourth Street
cannot be downed. Remember that, if you will. It will not be compelled
to share the rather bitter fate of its former wide-set compeers just to
the south. This much is known today.
And being known, it settles forever even the possibility of Macy's
moving uptown once again. It, too, is fixed. It has cast its die with
the street called Thirty-fourth and with Thirty-fourth it is going to
remain. So Macy's buys the realty to the west of its present building
and prepares thereon to erect, in connection with its present edifice, a
great new store building--in ground space one hundred and twenty-five by
two hundred feet--in height, nineteen full floors above the street (and
two basements beneath)--in all, some 500,000 square feet of floor-space
or close to fifty per cent. added to the 1,100,000 square feet of the
present store.
Offhand, it would seem to be a comparatively easy matter for the
proprietors of a store, such as Macy's, to go to their architect and say
to him:
"Here is a fine plot, one hundred and twenty-five feet by two hundred.
We want you to design and build for us upon it a modern retail
building--high enough to provide all necessary facilities and scientific
enough to bring it not merely abreast of other stores across the land,
but a good long jump ahead of them."
After which the architect would call for his young men and their
draughting-boards and proceed, upon white paper, to erect his
department-store.
But his problem in this case is not white paper--at least white paper
undefiled. The real problem is a perfectly good store building at the
east end of the Macy plot--a building far too good and far too modern to
be "scrapped"--in any recognized sense of the word. It was built to last
all the way from half a century to a full century and its owners have
not the slightest intention of pulling it down. It must remain the chief
front of the enlarged Macy store. The caryatides upon either side of
its main doors, the red star that surmounts them, must continue to look
down into busy Broadway, as they have been looking for nearly two
decades past.
It happens, too, that the store itself was never designed for extensions
toward the west. In the conception of its original architect there was a
distinct section set out at the west end of the present building for
purely service and non-selling purposes. These included, upon the
ground-floor, the great tunnel and merchandise unloading docks for
incoming trucks, similar ones for the outgoing merchandise, freight
elevators a-plenty; and in between them and through them a truly vast
variety of working provision, shops, offices, school and comfort rooms,
and the like. A good feature, this section--which occupies almost the
exact site of the former Koster & Bial Theater--but tremendously in the
way when one comes to consider the extension of the store toward the
west.
A final factor of this particular reconstruction problem--and perhaps
the greatest of all--lies in the fact that it must be carried forward
while the store is doing its regular business. Even when the peak load
of its traffic is reached--those fearfully hard weeks that immediately
precede the Christmas holiday--the workaday routine of Macy's must not
be seriously disturbed. Which complicates vastly the architect's
problem. It is one thing to design and to erect a store building whose
tenant does not approach the structure with his wares for sale until the
merchant has given his final release, and another--infinitely
harder--thing to build, and build efficiently, as business goes forward
all the while. The machine as it grinds must be rebuilded. And all the
while it must lose none of its efficiency.
Yet, when all is said and done, an architect's life is made up of a
number of things of this sort. And the associated architects of the new
Macy store--Messrs. Robert D. Kohn and William S. Holden--have not
permitted the overwhelming problem of its reconstruction to fill them
with anything even remotely approaching a state of panic. For that is
not an architect's way.
They have, from the beginning, come toward the big problem quietly,
sanely and efficiently. At the very beginning and in company with two of
the officers of the corporation they went upon an extended trip through
the more modern department-stores across the land. Here, there,
everywhere, they found features worth noting and collating. When they
were done with their journeys they had, as a foundation for their
studies upon the new Macy store, a sort of standardized practice of most
of its fellows across the land.
This preliminary completed, the engineering member of the partnership,
Mr. Holden, began an intensive study of the fundamental factors of the
business machine that he was to enlarge. To begin with there was its
traffic--divided, as we have seen in earlier chapters, into three great
and fairly distinct avenues: the merchandise, the shoppers who come to
purchase it, and the employees who wait upon their needs.
It is fairly essential that these three streams of traffic be kept
separate, save at such points where, for the conduct of the business,
they must be brought together.
Here, then, was a real opportunity for study. Mr. Holden began with the
traffic streams of the shoppers.
Obviously, and despite the growing importance and activity of the
Pennsylvania Station, to say nothing of the west side subway, which runs
down Seventh Avenue in front of it, the main traffic streams of shoppers
must continue to come into Macy's from Broadway. The star of Broadway is
even more firmly set in the heavens of New York than that of
Thirty-fourth Street.
These main traffic streams within the store are, then, roughly speaking,
three in number; one comes from the northeast corner--at Thirty-fifth
Street--another from the southeast corner at Thirty-fourth Street--the
third still shows a decided fondness for the impressive center doors
upon Broadway. Within the store they unite and then separate into a
variety of smaller currents. A goodly portion of these violate all the
similes of streams and proceed upstairs at the rate of about 10,300 folk
an hour at the busiest times of busy days. And there are an
astonishingly large number of these times. Of these 10,300, about 7,400
will ascend upon the great escalator, which reaches up into the sixth,
or last selling floor, of the present store.
When this escalator was first built, eighteen years ago, it was looked
upon as hardly less than a transportation marvel. Every similar device
that had preceded it was known as a single-file moving-stairway, with
the capacity estimated at sixty persons a minute, or 3,600 an hour. By
making its escalator double-file, Macy's not only slightly more than
doubled its capacity but rendered it the full equivalent of at least
twenty-five passenger elevators of the largest size.
The man whose business it is to have a sort of first-hand acquaintance
with 1932 said that by that year Macy's would need to take close to
twenty thousand folk an hour to its upper floors. He was not only
estimating upon the growth of New York, but upon the growth of the store
itself.
"You will have to add another of the double escalators," said he, "that
will bring your lifting capacity upon the two moving stairways up to
almost fifteen thousand persons an hour."
An elevator of modern size and speed in a department-store with seven or
eight selling floors ought to lift two hundred and forty persons an
hour. This, as you can quickly find out for yourself, means that there
will be needed for the new store but twenty passenger elevators to make
good that deficit between increased escalator capacity and the total
number of folk to be carried upstairs. And this, in itself, is a most
moderate increase. The store already has fourteen modern passenger
elevators. Credit this much, if you will, to the escalator.
So it goes, then, that the new Macy's will have a second double-file
escalator on the opposite side of the main aisle, which is the store's
own Broadway, and in the same relative relation to it. It will run as
far as the fourth floor which in the new scheme of Macy things is to be
devoted to the important business of toy selling.
What goes up must come down. Shoppers are no exception to this old
rule. If you still think that they are, stand late some busy afternoon
at the main stair of Macy's and watch them descend. They frequently come
at the rate of one hundred to the minute. And yet this is but a single
stair!
It is neither practical nor modern greatly to increase stairway capacity
in remodeling Macy's and so the question of a descending escalator
thrusts itself upon the architects' attention. Despite a certain
old-fashioned prejudice against it on the part of some old-fashioned New
Yorkers, a descending escalator is not only practicable but entirely
safe. Otherwise Macy's would not even consider its installation. The
store planning experts went out to Chicago a few months ago, however,
and into a great retail establishment there which boasts twelve selling
floors. Escalators were its one salvation--descending, as well as
ascending. The Macy party saw old ladies, women with children in their
arms--everyone who walked, save only those walking upon crutches, using
this quick and constant method of descent. They found the same devices
in Boston--in subway stations as well as department-stores--and being
used with equal facility. Straightway they decided that the New York
shopper was neither more timid nor more reluctant to use a new idea than
was her Boston or her Chicago sister. A descending escalator was placed
in the plans for the new Macy's--for the use of the store's patrons.
Still another ascending and descending escalator; this time for the
store's own family. Remember that here is a second stream, whose prompt
and efficient handling is quite as important as that of the shoppers.
The broad stair in Thirty-fourth Street at which the majority of the
family arrives, between eight-thirty and eight-forty-five of the
business morning, is frequently choked with the rush of incoming
employees. It will never be choked once the new Macy's is done. For then
the workers will be handled in great volume upon a double escalator, not
merely double-file, but double in the sense that ascent and descent are
handled simultaneously and in compact space, very much as the double
stairways that are installed in modern school-houses and industrial
plants.
In the enlarged building the locker rooms and the other facilities of
the arrival of the store's employees will be placed upon the second
floor and the first and second mezzanines; retained from the present
plan, but very greatly enlarged. The Macy worker comes to them by means
of the escalator, quickly and easily, and in a similar fashion ascends
or descends to his or her department. It sounds simple and easy but it
is not quite so easy when one comes to plan for a maximum of 8,800
employees--in 1932.
A third traffic stream remains for our consideration--and the
architect's. In many respects it is the most difficult. Human beings, to
a large extent at least, can move themselves. Goods cannot. Yet
obviously the great stream of merchandise into the building and then out
again must never be permitted to clog its arteries--not for a day, nor
even for an hour. This means that there must be not only plenty of
channels and conduits for it, but ample reservoir space as well. Which,
being translated, means of course generous warehousing rooms, of one
sort or another.
Perhaps it would be well before we come to the ingenious plans for
making this inanimate stream most animate indeed, to consider the
general plan of Macy's as it will be after its structural renaissance.
The exterior of the present great building will remain practically
unchanged. Just back of it and to the west of it on the new plot, one
hundred and twenty-five feet in depth in both Thirty-fourth and
Thirty-fifth Streets, and extending the full two hundred feet between
them, will be erected a new steel and concrete building, harmonizing in
its facade and of the most modern type of construction; as we have
already seen, nineteen stories in height with two sub-basements in
addition. The first ten stories of this structure, at the exact floor
levels of the old, will be thrown into the existing building and the
lower seven of them used for selling purposes. The uppermost three
stories of the combined building--covering the entire Macy site--will be
used, as we shall see in a moment or two, for the reception and the
warehousing of the merchandise, and other non-selling activities of the
store.
The nine stories of the new addition which will rise tower-like above
the parent building are destined to be used entirely for non-selling
functions. Thus from the architects' plans we see the executive and
financial offices, including that of advertising upon the thirteenth and
the fifteenth floors of this super-cupola; and the store's own great
laundry upon the high nineteenth. The department of training and the
bureau of planning, with an assembly room, will share the sixteenth. The
more purely recreational features, however, the Men's Club and the
Community Club and the lounging rooms and library, are placed as low as
the accessible eighth floor. The general manager's and employment
offices will be as low as the second mezzanine--for obvious reasons of
convenience.
None of these departments will be hampered for a long time to come, as
they have been hampered for a number of years past, by a fearful lack of
elbow room. The new plans have provided for abundant facilities of this
and every other sort. The employees' cafeterias also are to go into the
new section--also upon the eighth, or public restaurant floor. They will
be greatly enlarged over their present capacity.