the street; a separate and distinct entrance there. The purpose of this
last quickly becomes evident. There are many occasions--nights and
Sundays even--when some or all of the recreation facilities are in use
far beyond the regular store hours. Access to them, entirely free and
separate from the store itself, is an enormous working convenience, and
the new Macy's has been planned to be filled with working conveniences.
The elevator as well as the escalator will play a vastly important part
in the fabrication of the new Macy's. The one has by no means been
overshadowed by the growing importance of the other. There are to be in
all fifty-six elevators, of one type or another, in the reconstructed
building. Of all these none is more interesting than the ingenious lifts
by which whole motor trucks, laden as well as empty, are carried into
the structure, up eleven floors to the merchandising reception rooms and
down into the basement and sub-basement for filling for the city
delivery.
Now are we back again to the handling of that merchandise stream which
we first began to consider but a moment ago. At the beginning we can
make assertion that in the entire history of retail selling no more
ingenious scheme has been devised for the orderly and rapid movement of
goods in and out of a department-store.
This flow is kept normal and downward by the simple process of first
taking the loaded incoming trucks up to the eleventh floor of the
building for unloading. In the present store--as well as in a good many
other stores--a great amount of immensely valuable ground floor space is
given over to the various functions of receiving and distributing
merchandise. We have seen long ago how a modern store values this ground
floor space. For instance, in relation to the value of, let us say, the
third floor, it is about as ten to one.
Neither does Macy's propose to clutter the sidewalk frontage of even the
least important of its frontage streets--Thirty-fifth Street--by long
lines of motor trucks or drays, receiving or discharging goods. In fact
this sort of thing has become practically impossible in the really
important cities of the America of today. If municipal ordinance
permits it, public sentiment rarely does. And the keen merchant of
today--to say nothing of tomorrow--never ignores public sentiment.
So, to the eleventh floor the motor trucks must go--on two huge
high-speed freight elevators which open directly into Thirty-fifth
Street. Our horseless age makes this possible. The modern architect,
planning for the congested heart of the island of Manhattan, can indeed
and reverently thank God for the coming of the gasoline engine and the
electric storage battery--to say nothing of the engineers who helped to
make them possible.
Upon that eleventh floor there will extend, for the full width of the
building, a giant quay, or high-level platform, with its stout floor at
the exact level of the floors of the standardized motor trucks of Macy's
(the comparatively small proportion of "foreign" or outside vehicles
that bring merchandise to the store are to be unloaded at the
Thirty-fifth Street doorways and not admitted within the building). The
unloading under the present well-developed system is a short matter; the
trucks may quickly be despatched back to the street once again; while
the refuse and debris of the packers goes to appropriate bins behind
them.
Through chutes and sliding-ways the merchandise descends a single floor
to the great tenth story--extending through both the present building
and the new one to come. Here it will be quickly classified and placed
upon a conveyor which moves at the level of and between the two sides of
a double table some five or six hundred feet in length which will
extend the greater part of the length of the enlarged store. From this
center table--the backbone of the whole scheme of this particular
distribution--will extend in parallel aisles at right angles to it,
whole hundreds of bins and shelves and compartments. The entire
arrangement will resemble nothing so much as a huge double gridiron,
with many tiny interstices.
Now do you begin to see the operation of this scheme? If not, let me
endeavor to make it more clear to you. This miniature and silent city,
whose straight and regular streets are lined in turn with miniature
apartment houses of merchandise, is zoned--into six great zones. Every
selling department of the store--118 in the present one--is assigned to
one or the other of these zones. There it keeps its reserve stock. It
is, in truth, a reservoir.
Now, see the plan function! The men's shoe department is out of a
certain small part of its highly diversified stock. It sends a
requisition up to its representative upon the tenth floor. It is a
matter of minutes--almost of seconds--to locate the necessary cartons in
the simplified and scientifically arranged compartments and shelves; a
matter certainly of mere seconds to despatch them down to the selling
department.
For this, the second thrust of the goods-stream through the new Macy's,
especial provisions have been made by the installation of six so-called
utility units. Three of these are placed at equal intervals along the
Thirty-fourth Street wall of the enlarged building; the other three at
equal intervals upon its Thirty-fifth Street edge. Each unit consists of
one elevator (large enough to hold two of the rolling-carts,
standardized for the floor movement of merchandise through the aisles of
the selling departments of the store), one small dummy elevator (for the
handling of single packages of unusual size or type), and a spiral chute
(this last for the despatch of sold goods).
The selling-floor location of these utility units determines the zoning
system of the warehouses on the tenth. There is a zone to each unit.
While from that zone the requisitioned merchandise descends to the
selling department which has asked for it by its own unit--which always
is closest to it. Haul is reduced to a minimum. And system becomes
simplicity.
With the actual selling of the goods in the store that is to come we
have no concern at this moment. It is quite enough to say that the
methods and the ideals that have brought Macy selling up to its present
point are to be continued there, in the main at least, although
broadened and advanced as future necessity may dictate. But with the
despatch of the goods once sold in the new store we have an intimate and
personal interest.
We have bought our pair of shoes. The financial end of the transaction
is concluded. We have asked--as most of us ask--to have them delivered.
Now follow their movement:
The clerk takes them to the packer. This, however, is but a mere detail.
It is their future course that interests us. And if we had eyes properly
X-rayed and farseeing we might observe that from the hands of the
packer they will go presently to the spiral descending chute of the
nearest utility unit.
Now we shall indeed need our new X-ray eyes. They follow the package for
us--down the chute--with its gradients and curvatures so cleverly
devised as to bring our purchase to the basement in just the right time
and in just the right order--and into and upon the next stage of its
progress.
Steadily moving conveyor-belts along each outer wall of the building
receive the constant droppage of the packages from the six spirals of
the utility units. Together these two long belts converge upon a
terminal, the revolving-table, in the terminology of the present store.
And here our packages receive fresh personal attention.
In the chapter upon Macy's delivery department we paid a careful
attention to this revolving-table--which really is not a table at all
and does not revolve. We saw it, then, as the very heart of the complex
clearing-house of Macy distributions. It is, however, in itself a
wonderfully simple thing, and yet when it was first installed it was
regarded as nothing less than a triumph of efficiency.
Fortunately we do progress in this gray old world. Today we see how the
revolving-table can be improved. For one thing, today we see it cramped
and inelastic--no more than eight men may work at it at a single shift.
Yet when it was built no one in Macy's dreamed that more than eight men
would ever be required to work at it at a single time. And even in
times of great emergency, but eight!
At the revolving-table in the new store, not eight but forty men may
work simultaneously--when necessity dictates. The change has been
effected by the simple process of elongating the "table." If a
revolving-ring may be changed from round to square--and this was the
very thing that Macy's accomplished in its present basement--why not
from square to oblong? There is no negative answer to this question. And
oblong it will become. And a present handling capacity of forty thousand
packages a day can be increased to all the way from seventy-five
thousand to ninety thousand.
Yet the main principle changes not. It is only in detail that one sees
one's shoes traveling outward on a different path in 1931 from that of
1921. The great conveyors that lead from the revolving-table of today to
the various delivery classifications as they are now made, will so lead
in the new arrangement of things to such classifications as may then be
made: only they will no longer be revolving-tables, but will in due time
become the moving backbone of very long tables in the basement
mezzanine, similar to the one which we saw extending the full length of
the great tenth floor. And from those long tables, running the entire
width of the building and up just under the basement ceiling, the
sheet-writers will recognize their individual group of packages (by
means of the clearly written numerals upon them), lift them off the
slowly moving belt and make record of them, for the delivery
department's own protection. After which, it is but the twist of the
wrist to thrust them into the bins, separately assigned to each driver's
run.
So go our shoes, or come, if you prefer to have it that way. Rapidly,
orderly, systematically. System never departs from their handling. Even
in the driver's own little compartment-bin there are four levels, or
shelves, and each is inclined gently and floored with rollers so that he
can pick out the packages for his run with greater facility. And in
placing the packages upon each of these levels, the sheet-writer, well
trained to his job, begins a rough process of assortment by streets.
Now we are come to wagon delivery, itself. Now we shall see why Macy's
will not have to clutter Thirty-fourth Street with a long row of its
delivery trucks. The length of such a row may easily be estimated when
one realizes that sixty electric trucks will stand simultaneously at
sixty loading stations in the new basement, with a reserve or reservoir
space there for twenty-two more. Moreover, this basement will serve as a
garage at night and on Sundays for these trucks. There is no fire risk
whatsoever in the storage of an electrically driven motor vehicle. So
the new Macy basement will not only be able to store this considerable
fleet but to charge its batteries and make necessary light repairs upon
it from time to time.
Access to and from this basement--and the sub-basement--is by means of
elevators; not only the two which we have seen reaching aloft to the
eleventh floor, but two more just beside them for sole service between
the level and the two basements. As a matter of operating expediency it
will be easy indeed to arrange in the early morning rush, or at any
other time when emergency may so demand, to operate all four elevators
in exclusive service between the street and basements. With such a
battery Macy's can perform a genuine rapid-fire of discharging
merchandise.
To the mind of the novice there immediately flashes the thought: why not
use ramps--long, sloping driveways--from the street level to the
basement? Long ago the architects of the new building asked themselves
that very question. It was, in this particular case at least, rather
hard to answer. The main basement of Macy's is very high. To install a
ramp--double-tracked, of course, for vehicles both ascending and
descending--of any easy practical grade would therefore have required a
great deal of valuable floor-space. So, for the moment, they dismissed
the ramp idea for motor trucks and held to that of elevators. The Boston
Store in Chicago solved the problem. It is the same store that has
successfully installed descending escalators, floor upon floor.
Out of the sub-basement of that Chicago store the Macy investigators saw
thirty-two cars come, all inside of eight minutes; and all upon
elevators. That settled the question for the big shop in Herald Square.
Elevators it should have for this service, and elevators it will have,
even for the big five-ton trucks that go into the deep sub-basement for
the hampers for suburban delivery as well as large special packages.
Furniture, however, as in the present store, will be both sold and
packed and shipped from an upper floor of its own, the large truck
elevators to the eleventh floor being also used for this purpose.
The sub-basement of the new plan is in so many respects a replica of the
main basement delivery service that it requires no special description
here. It, too, has been designed, not only amply large enough for the
present needs of Macy's, but for that mythical traffic of 1932, which we
now know is really not mythical at all, but a matter of rather exact
scientific reckoning.
Architects' drawings are indeed fascinating things; doubly fascinating
when one comes to consider all the infinite thought and labor and
patience which have entered into their fabrication. I shall not,
however, carry you further into the details of the plans for the new
Macy's. You now have seen enough to give you at least a fair idea of the
main structure for the enlarged store. You have seen how carefully and
how ingeniously the great main traffic streams through the huge edifice
are to be carried--to be brought together, when they needs must be
brought together, and kept apart when properly they should be kept
apart. Add, in your own mind, to this fundamental structure, all of the
refinements which you expect to find in the modern retail establishment
today and you may begin to depict for yourself the Macy's that is to
come--to construct for yourself at least a partial vision of the year
1932 in Herald Square.
II. L'Envoi
Yesterday Milady of Manhattan in her hoopskirt and crinoline; today
Milady in thick furs above her knees and thin silk stockings and
high-heeled pumps below them: tomorrow....
Why will you persist in dragging in tomorrow? Is it not enough to know
that tomorrow Milady of the great metropolis of the Americas will still
be shopping? You may set tomorrow a year hence, twenty years hence,
fifty years in the misty future that is to come upon us and still make
that statement in perfect safety. And twenty years, fifty years, a
hundred years hence, even, Macy's should still be in Herald Square ready
to wait upon her needs and upon the needs of her men and children, too.
To forecast far into the future is indeed dangerous. Only rash men
undertake it. We know that 1932 is one thing, but that 1952 or even 1942
is quite another one. A savant of uptown Manhattan, who has a nice
facility for handling census figures, not long ago predicted that by
1950 little old New York would hold within its boundaries sixteen
million people. He may know. I don't. And you are privileged to take
your guess--with one man's guess almost if not quite as good as
another's.
A New York of sixteen million souls is an alluring picture, if a
bewildering one, withal. It is a fairly bewildering town with its six
million of today. But I have not the slightest doubt that Rowland Hussey
Macy said the selfsame thing of the New York of six hundred and fifty
thousand souls, to which he first came, away back there in 1858.
And the Macy's of 1952, serving its fair and goodly portion of those
sixteen million souls, is indeed an alluring picture, which you may best
construct for yourself. The store, itself, does well when it plans so
definitely for 1932. Nevertheless, before you finally close the pages of
this book, I should like to have it record a final picture upon your
mind. It is the picture of a really great store. It runs from Broadway
to Seventh Avenue, perhaps all the way to Eighth. It begins at
Thirty-fourth Street and runs north--one, two, possibly even three or
four blocks, or goodly portions of them. It employs ten, twelve, fifteen
thousand workers. There are a thousand motor trucks in its delivery
service--and a hundred aeroplanes as well. It has sixteen sub-stations,
instead of six. Its own delivery limits run north to Peekskill and east
to Bridgeport and to Huntington and west and south through at least half
of New Jersey.
Yet, above all this new enterprise there still towers the high addition
which 1923 saw completed and added to the edifice, with the huge and
flaming word "MACY'S" emblazoned by white electricity upon the blackened
skies of night, visible all the way from Seventh Avenue to the thickly
peopled range of the Orange mountains.
"Macy's," whistles the small boy upon the North River ferryboat, who
has traveled afar with his geography book. "Macy's! That's a regular
Gibraltar of a store!"
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Romance of a Great Store, by Edward Hungerford