The Romance of a Great Store Part 17

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 munic.i.p.al 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 G.o.d 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 cla.s.sified 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 a.s.signed 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 fa.r.s.eeing 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 bas.e.m.e.nt--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 cla.s.sifications as they are now made, will so lead in the new arrangement of things to such cla.s.sifications 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.signed 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 a.s.sortment 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 bas.e.m.e.nt, with a reserve or reservoir s.p.a.ce there for twenty-two more. Moreover, this bas.e.m.e.nt 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 bas.e.m.e.nt--and the sub-bas.e.m.e.nt--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 bas.e.m.e.nts. 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 bas.e.m.e.nts. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt? 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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-s.p.a.ce. 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-bas.e.m.e.nt 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-bas.e.m.e.nt 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-bas.e.m.e.nt of the new plan is in so many respects a replica of the main bas.e.m.e.nt 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