The Romance of a Great Store Part 10

It is one thing to write a thing of this sort. It is another to live strictly up to it, day in and day out. But that Macy's does live up to this high-set principle of its behind-the-scenes conduct is evidenced by the unsought testimony of a manufacturer who sought for the first time to do business with it.

This man had made one of the mistakes into which all manufacturers are apt to fall, sooner or later. He had overproduced. And while, heretofore, his product had been chiefly, if not solely, sold in high-priced novelty shops he now needed an establishment of great turnover to help him out in his dilemma. Macy's came at once into his mind. The old house is indeed advertised by its loving friends. He went to it at once; by means of the special elevator, found his way, along with several hundred other salesmen, to the sample and buying rooms upon the seventh floor.

A young woman at the door received his card and, without delay, told him that he could see the buyer of the department which would naturally handle his product, upon the morrow; at any time before eleven, but under no circ.u.mstances later than noon. Better still, she would make a definite appointment for him for the next morning. Mr. Manufacturer chose this last course. And at the very moment of the appointed time was ushered into the buyer's little individual room. Contact was established quickly. The buyer already knew of Mr. Manufacturer's line, regretted that they had not done business together a long time before.

He inspected the proffered samples, quickly and with a shrewd and practiced eye; finally called into the little room two members of the salesforce from the department down upon the ground floor. They agreed with him as to the salability of the product. He turned toward the manufacturer.

"Please bring your stock to No. -- Madison Avenue next Tuesday afternoon, at half-past two."

Why Madison Avenue? The manufacturer was perplexed as he descended to the street once again. The curiosity was relieved on Tuesday, however, when he and his abundant goods were ushered into a big and sunlit room.

"We shall not be subject to any interruption here," said Macy's buyer.

And so they were not. For two hours the buyer and two of his a.s.sistants went carefully over the stock, then withdrew for a short conference amongst themselves. When they returned they handed Mr. Manufacturer a card. It read after this fashion:

CASH

The entire lot $____

"The figure on that card, with the word 'cash' heavily underscored was just one hundred dollars in excess of my minimum," said the manufacturer afterwards, in discussing the incident. "I paused a moment and then said: 'Gentlemen, I mean to accept your offer. You have figured well, as your offer is just sufficient to buy the goods. R. H. Macy & Company have secured this merchandise of unusual quality and I congratulate you.'"

At the beginning of this chapter we mentioned another form of the store's buying--where Mahomet goes to the mountain. This, being translated into plain English, means that Macy's must and does maintain elaborate permanent office organizations in Paris, in London, in Belfast and in Berlin. These in turn are but centers for other shopping work--shopping that may lead, as we have already seen, as far as the distant Bagdad.

For instance, from his office in the Cite Paradis in Paris, the head of the French-buying organization of the store controls the purchase of all goods for it, not only in France, but in Belgium and Switzerland as well. He virtually combs these busy and ingenious manufacturing nations for their latest specialties; from France, _les derniers cris_ in fashionable gowns, millinery, perfumes and novelties of every description; from Belgium, fine laces and gloves; and from Switzerland, watches. These items, however, are merely typical; there are hundreds of others.

A young American woman, of remarkable taste and gifted with a genuine genius for buying, is upon the Paris staff and is engaged practically the entire year round in visiting exhibitions of every sort and variety, in hunting the retail shops, great and small, of the French capital and at all times acting upon her own initiative as a free-lance buyer. A job surely to be coveted by any ambitious young woman who feels that she understands and can translate the constantly changing tastes of her countrywomen into the merchandise needs of a store whose chief task is always to serve them.

For reasons that are not necessary to be set down here, the Berlin office of Macy's has been in _statu quo_ for some years past, although it is just now reopening. The London branch is steadily on the search for the clothing, haberdashery and leather specialties which are the pride of the British workman, while from right across the Irish sea, at 13 Donegal Square, North, Belfast, come the fine Irish linens that so long have been a distinguished merchandise feature of the store's stock.

So it is, then, that forever and a day, Macy's is engaged in bringing the cream of European merchandise to New York--goods of nearly every kind that can either be made better abroad or cannot be duplicated at all in this country. Importing is indeed a large branch upon the Macy tree.

And in this branch romance oftimes dwelleth. The picture of the caravan toiling up the banks of the Euphrates is no idle dream at all. Upon the world maps of the merchandise executives of Macy's it is an outpost of trading as unsentimental as Lawrence, Ma.s.sachusetts, or Norristown, Pennsylvania. Yet the buyer who goes to the old Bagdad from the new has a real task set for him. Obviously he must not only have a knowledge of his market and a keen sense of values, but he must also be a resourceful traveler; a merchant who can adapt himself to the ways of the people with whom he trades. His judgment, discretion and integrity must be above reproach, for often he is far away and out of touch with headquarters for long months at a time.

Take such a buying trip as the Oriental rug-buyer of Macy's recently made into the Orient and back again. It lasted eight months. In that time he traveled more than thirty thousand miles--by steamship, motor-car, railroad, horseback and on foot. The rug region of Persia is a long way, indeed, from Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street and to reach it he went to London and Paris, then to Venice, where he took a steamer for Bombay, upon the west coast of India. Thence he proceeded by another steamer up the Persian Gulf to the city of Basra, which is at the confluence of those two ancient rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates--between which the earliest Biblical history is supposed to have been made. Basra today is one of the world's great rug-shipping centers.

Then he went to Bagdad itself--the fabled city of Haroun-el-Raschid and the Arabian Nights--from whence he started into the very heart of Persia. He was not content, however, to remain idly there and let the rugs be brought to him. He went much further. Through Kermanshah, the city whose name is given to the rugs which come from Kerman, seven hundred miles to the southeast, to Hamadan, one of the main marketing-centers of the rug-producing country--that, briefly, was the beginning of his itinerary. He went carefully through Persia, picking up rugs here and there, having them baled and sent to Bagdad by mules or camels and shipped thence to New York; and he established warehouses to which rug-dealers brought their wares. The light of the Red Star shone in the East.

Roads in Persia leave much indeed to be desired, and as the chief means of travel, aside from beasts of burden, is by Ford cars, a buyer who covers much of its territory has a rather unenviable job. Gasoline in those parts costs four dollars a gallon, while if you hire a jitney you pay for it at the rate of a dollar a mile.

On his return trip to New York this buyer went back once again to India and north as far as the border of Afghanistan to investigate the condition of the rug market in that region. At ancient Siringar, in the Vale of Cashmere, he bought marvelous felt rugs made in the mysterious land of Thibet. And yet all the way throughout this long journey he was buying goods for only one department of the great store that he represented.

It used to be impressive to me when the hardware dealer of the small town in which I was reared would boast of the number of items that he held upon the shelves of his own center of merchandising. There were more than two thousand of them! He told me that with such an evident pride, as a Chicago man speaks of the population of his town, or one from Los Angeles, of his climate. And yet such a stock as that wonderful one that was told to my youthful imagination, is more than duplicated in Macy's--and is but one of one hundred and seventeen others. And the responsibility of buying these millions of articles is scarcely less great than that of selling them.

IV. Displaying and Selling the Goods

With Macy's goods once purchased, the next problem becomes that of their transport to the store in Herald Square. Obviously their reception must rank second only to their purchase. And when this is accomplished, as we have just seen, in every corner of a far-flung world--Pennsylvania and Ma.s.sachusetts and Thibet and Korea and South Africa, to say nothing of a thousand other places--their orderly receiving becomes, of itself, a mechanism of considerable size. Almost equally obvious it is, too, that the store, no matter how carefully and fore-visionedly and scientifically its buyers may plan, cannot always dispose of its merchandise at precisely the same rate at which it comes underneath its roof. It cannot afford to gain a reputation for not carrying in stock the items either that it advertises for sale or that it has educated its patrons to expect upon its counters. Which means that alongside of and intertwined with the orderly business of merchandise reception there must be warehousing--reservoir facilities, if you please.

In concrete form, these last of Macy's are not merely rooms upon the extreme upper floors on the main store in Herald Square--a s.p.a.ce which in recent years, however, has shrunk to proportionately small dimensions because of the vast growth of the business and the increasing demands of the selling departments upon the building--but four structures entirely outside of the parent plant: the Tivoli Building on the north side of Thirty-fifth Street, just west of Broadway (which, as we saw in the historical section of this book was originally the notorious music hall of the same name until Macy's purchased it for its merchandising plans), the Hussey Building, in the same street, but just west of the store, a third also in Thirty-fifth, but close to Seventh Avenue and a fourth in Twenty-eighth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. So can a great store spread itself, even in its actual physical structure, far beyond the bounds that even the most imaginative of its customers might ordinarily call to mind.

It is in the rear of the selfsame red-brick building at the westerly edge of Herald Square--that same main structure that we have already begun to study in many of its fascinating details--that we find the core of the receiving department of the Macy store. It is a hollow core. A tunnel-like roadway, two hundred feet in length bores its way through the building, from Thirty-fifth Street to Thirty-fourth. Through this cavernous place, lighted at all hours by numerous electric arcs, there pa.s.ses, the entire working-day, a seemingly endless procession of motor-trucks, wagons and other carriers. They enter at the north end and before they emerge at the south they have discharged their cargoes. A corps of men is kept constantly busy, checking off the merchandise as it is unloaded. Husky porters, with hand trucks, seize cases, barrels and miscellaneous packages of every sort and, presto! they are whirled into huge freight elevators which presently depart for upper and unknown floors. There are three of these, in practically continuous operation.

In addition to them packages brought by hand--generally from local wholesalers and in response to emergency orders--are carried up into the offices of the receiving department upon an endless carrier.

It is a source of wonder to the observer to see the way in which these men of Macy's work. The poise. The confidence. The system. It is terrifying even to think of the mess that would be the result of a day, or even an hour, of inexperience or carelessness. In fact, it would hardly take ten minutes so to jam that long receiving platform that straightening it out again would be a matter of days. But upon it every man knows just what to do; and every man does it, and does it fast. And system wins once again. It generally does win.

For these incoming goods receipts are made out in triplicate--one for the controller, one as a record for the receiving office and the third for the delivery agent; the second of these acts as a sort of herald of the actual arrival of the merchandise so that within sixty seconds or thereabouts of the actual appearance of the goods under the house's main roof the man who is responsible for them may be advised.

Every article purchased anywhere by R. H. Macy & Company, either for their own use or for resale, is received through this department, although there are a few other points than the tunnel-like interior street from Thirty-fourth Street to Thirty-fifth where they are received. The four warehouses that we have just seen have their individual receiving facilities: the coal that goes to heat and light and drive the big main building is poured through chutes under the Thirty-fourth Street pavement, while direct to the company's stables and garages go the fodder for its vehicles--hay for the horses of flesh and blood, and gasoline and oil for those of steel and iron; all the other miniature mountains of their incidental materials into the bargain. But even these are checked in at the main receiving department; and triplicate receipts issued upon their arrival.

So, then, come in these goods--by hand, express, by parcel post and freight. The most of them have had their transport charges prepaid; a certain small proportion of them comes marked "collect." An especial provision must be made for the cash payment of these charges. The big machine of modern industry must indeed have many odd cams and levers adjusted to it. It must be designed not alone for the usual, but for the unusual, and in a mult.i.tude of ways.

These, then, are the reception chutes of the Macy machine; the porters, who even while hastening their trucks toward the elevators are making a cursory examination of the arrival condition of the merchandise, are in themselves small automatic arms of inspection. For while some of these packages have come from nearby--perhaps not half a block distant--others will have come from halfway around the wide world. And the possibility of damage to the contents of the carrier is lurking always in the short-distance package, quite as much as in its brother, that has attained the distinction of being a globe-trotter. The crates from the Middle West, those stout and honest looking Yankee boxes from New England, this group of barrels from the heart of new Czecho-Slovakia, and that of zinc-lined cases from France--the _Lorraine_ has touched at her North River pier but two or three days since--those great bales and bundles from the Orient, with the seemingly meaningless (and extremely meaningful) symbols splashed upon their rough sides, all look st.u.r.dy enough, as if they had survived well the vicissitudes of modern travel. Yet one can never tell.

Which means that the personnel of the order checking department up on the seventh floor must not only carefully verify the shipment as to quality and to price but as to the condition in which it actually is received. The hurried cursory examination of the platform porters becomes an unhurried and painstaking investigation in this last instance. The cases are not necessarily opened within the seventh floor headquarters of the order checking department. As in the case of the actual physical receipt, the unpacking is carried forward at the point of greatest convenience to the merchandise department to be served. But the results and records are kept at the one central headquarters.

And the skilled and expert merchandise checkers from the selfsame headquarters are the men and women who oversee the unpacking--invariably. They pa.s.s the responsibility of their stamp and signature upon their receipts before the merchandise is turned over to the department manager, who himself, or through his responsibility, purchased it. Nothing is left to guesswork, or to chance.

Now we see the full responsibility settled once again upon the broad shoulders--let us hope indeed that they are broad--of the buyer. With a full knowledge of the price that he paid for them, of market conditions, and of the prices of Macy's compet.i.tors he determines the prices at which his merchandise is to be sold. Clerks, known as markers, quickly attach these prices by small tags to the goods themselves.

From the marking-rooms, where everything to be sold within this market-place is plainly and unequivocally priced, the merchandise goes without further delay either direct to the counters of the selling floors, or into the "reserves"--the warehouses that extend all the way from Twenty-eighth Street to north of Thirty-fifth, and from Broadway to Eighth Avenue. The stage is set. The show is ready. The performance may now begin.

A trip through the hinterland of the Macy store is like a visit behind the scenes of a modern theater. You see there just the way in which the drama of selling actually is staged, from the settings to the properties. You rub shoulders with the actors and actresses, just off stage; with the electrician, the stage-manager, the carpenter and the stage-hands. And always your ear is waiting to hear outside the orchestra and the applause of the audience.

Into that ear there comes the almost rhythmic thud of automatic machines; a sort of continuous drone. You turn quickly and find beside you a row of ticket-printers, the little electric presses in which are made the price-tags that you find pinned or pasted or tied on every piece of Macy merchandise you buy. Miles of thin cardboard are fed into one side of these machines and come out the other; in proper-sized units, with the selling price of the article to be tagged plainly printed on them. Where the article is subject to Federal tax, this is also included as a separate item and the total given. One of these machines combines the operation of printing the price and attaching the ticket to the garment. It is detail--necessary detail, detail upon a vast scale.

Here, then, is the receiving department of this great single retailing machine of modern business. It keeps over three hundred human units constantly upon the move--and, mind you, all that these people are doing is merely making the merchandise ready to sell. The next step is the final one before actual sale; the display of proffered goods--upon the counters and within the plate-gla.s.s windows along the street frontages.

This, in the modern department-store, is considered a feature of the utmost importance, and nowhere more so than at Macy's. Sixty-four years of salesmanship experience, in the course of which it has been the originator of many daring and successful display experiments, has shown the house their full value.

Yet, even in Macy's, there are certain reservations to the strong house policy of attractive display. Certain fundamentals are stressed. The invitation to buy is forever put in the goods themselves rather than in the background against which they are shown. It requires no especial astuteness to see from this fact alone an enormous expense is saved; the benefit of which, according to the now well understood Macy plan, is pa.s.sed on to buyer. Other stores spend many thousands of dollars in building and decorating special rooms and sections for merchandising which are far out of the ordinary. To give an air of extreme exclusiveness, _chic_, Parisian atmosphere--call it what you may--elaborate part.i.tions are put up and expensive decorators given carte-blanche. The result is beautiful, almost invariably. Shopping in such surroundings becomes a peculiar delight--particularly to the woman patron. But milady pays. In the expressive, if not elegant, old phrase she "pays through the nose."

That some New York shoppers may like to pay this way is not for a moment to be doubted, but that the majority do, Macy's stoutly refuses to believe. While the house has not hesitated to install certain very lovely "special" rooms--_vide_ the _salon_ for the display of its imported frocks--the main thought in the construction of its present home in Herald Square was to build a retail market-place which would afford honest, efficient, comfortable marketing at the lowest possible prices. This meant that it would be inadvisable, to say the least, to give the store the atmosphere of either a palace or a _boudoir_. This is a policy that has continued until this day.

None the less, Macy goods are displayed with the taste that makes them most desirable to the customer; psychological forethought, in a word.

Novelties, of course, take precedence over staples--the articles that make the customer stop and investigate. Except under unusual conditions, the demand for staples does not have to be stimulated, and ordinarily no especial attempt is made to give them more than ordinary display. One underlying factor in the successful display of goods is to preserve harmonious color relations between them and, so far as possible, this harmony pervades the entire floor. The buying public would not tolerate a store where they heard profanity among the employees; and at Macy's they do not have to endure colors that swear at one another.

Held in high esteem by the public as well as by the store itself are the display windows which line the entire ground-floor frontage of the building on Broadway and on Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth Streets. Here merchandise is arranged by master window dressers under the general direction of the advertising department, for if the front windows of a house such as this are not advertising, what, then, is? Especially when the art of window dressing has come in recent years to be a finely developed art of its own. For many years before it left Fourteenth Street Macy's had a fame not merely nation-wide but fairly world-wide for its window displays--we already have referred to the wondrous Christmas pageants that it formerly held as a part of them. In this it was again a pioneer, blazing a new commercial path for its compet.i.tors to follow.