The Romance of a Great Store Part 6

"Oh no," said he, "Macy's never quits. We shall have to find others--even if we train them ourselves. It is only the material for training that worries me. American young men of today are not overfond of painstaking work of this sort."

I knew instantly what he meant. As a nation we are made up of "shortcut"

experts. Perseverance, patience, a tedious attention to uninteresting detail, have seemingly but little appeal to the average young man who is looking forward to a real career for himself. To be an executive--no matter by what name or t.i.tle--and in as short a time as is humanly possible is apparently the only object that he sees ahead of him. A laudable ambition to be sure. But one shudders at the mere thought of a land which should be composed entirely of executives and wishes that we might develop more definitely a cla.s.s of artisan workers, such as came to us forty, thirty, even twenty-five years ago.

The oldest of these men--the man with thirty Macy years to his credit--was chasing a hunting scene upon a great gla.s.s bowl as I bent over his desk. It was more than artisanship, that task; it was artistry.

A real work of real art even though at the moment these elaborate cut-gla.s.s designs have lost a little in public favor. In their own time and order they will come back again, however. And the workmanship that made them possible will be restored to its own former high favor.

But even today there are large demands in Macy's for precisely this sort of thing. And gla.s.s grinding and engraving--which runs all the way from the making of prescription lenses for spectacles or for milady's _lorgnons_ up to the cutting of an entire dinner service of the most exquisitely patterned gla.s.s or repairs to the bowl or pitcher that Bridget or Selma has so carelessly broken--is the chief factor of a shop that handles, as other parts of its day's job, jewelry and watch repairs, electro-plating of gold, copper, silver, nickel, the printing or engraving or stamping of stationery of every sort, to say nothing of leather goods of every kind and description and a thousand lesser and highly individual jobs, such as the regilding of a mirror or the transformation of an ancient whale-oil lamp into a modern incandescent one. It is small wonder that as a minimum seventy-five men are constantly employed in this shop; more, as the exigencies of this season or of that may demand them.

Yet this is but one of Macy's shops under that giant roof of Herald Square. There are others in close proximity--like those for the making of mattresses and bedding of every sort and variety and the establishment which brings broken toys back into life again. To my own Peter Pannish soul this last forever has the greatest fascination. Once, long years ago, I went into a great store in a distant city and found up under its roof a man whose sole task from one year's end to the other was the making of repairs upon toy locomotives. How I envied that man his job! And how the other day I envied the job of the Macy man who was repainting dolls' houses, one fascinating suburban villa after another.

The doctor in the far corner of the room, whose patients ran all the way from lovely dolls of the most delicate china and porcelain to Teddy Bears who apparently had been badly worsted in some terrific nursery struggle, was a man with a position in which he might have genuine pride; but for the painting and re-arranging of those small houses a man, with an imagination in his soul, might almost afford to pay for the privilege of doing the work!

Five-thirty!

Again the doormen to their posts, two or three minutes in advance of the exact hour set. The minute hand upon the face of the clock no sooner reaches the exact bottom of its course, before a bell rings within the store and the great doors shut--simultaneously, as in the morning they had opened. But not permanently, of course. Dozens, hundreds, perhaps a thousand or more shoppers still are left within the store. Each is to be accorded a full opportunity to finish his or her transactions. There is no hurry; no ostensible hurry, at any rate. It would not be good-breeding to hasten the customer upon his way. And a canon of good merchandising is good breeding.

Gradually, however, the late-stayers eliminate themselves. The big doors open to let them out, but never again this day to let newcomers in. No rule of the house is observed more inexorably. And so gradually the store empties itself.

In the meantime certain departments have already ceased to function. The salesfolk are dismissed for the night and go scurrying off. A few bring out the dust-covers and these go out upon the stock. Counters are emptied. The stock, wherever possible, is put away, and when not put away is carefully covered. Nothing is left to chance nor to dust. System reigns. And the section manager, the last to leave his department for the night, makes sure that everything there is ship-shape against the coming of another day.

Before he is gone--and he, in Macy's, is multiplied into ninety or a hundred human units--the cleaning squads are out upon the floor, rolling out their bin-like carts in orderly formation and proceeding upon the debris like a miniature army. Four, five, six hours of hard work await them. It will be midnight, perhaps later, before the store is absolutely clean again and settled down to the monotonous presence of the watchman, to await the arrival of another dawn.

In the meantime the Macy family is pouring forth into the side streets through the doorways through which they entered before nine of the morning. There is little restriction, no red-tape about their leaving.

Their bra.s.s discs--each individual and bearing the employee's designating number--which they dropped in the morning have been returned to them in the course of the day for use again upon the morrow.

The only formality about their leaving--if indeed it might be called a formality--is the quick-fire inspection made by two store detectives who stand either side of the descending file at the main employees' stair, to see if any packages which are being carried out are lacking the check-room stamp and vise.

These last are the store's protection against possible theft through its inner walls. The workers who bring packages in, either in the morning or at any later time in the progress of the day, are asked to take them to a well-equipped check and storage room close by the lockers, where they may regain them at night, stamped and vised, to go out into the open once again. Any purchases that they may make during the day follow a similar course. It is a definite and an orderly procedure. Any other would be indefinite and to an extent disorderly.

This is the reason why an occasional package--lacking the official stamp and vise of the check-room--is picked up by the keen-eyed detectives while its transporter is asked to tarry for a moment in an ante-room. In the course of an average evening there may be a half dozen of such outlaw packages detected. Their holders are not thieves. There is not even the implication that they are thieves. They are simply trying to ignore a fair and open-minded rule which the store has made, not alone for its own protection but for the protection of every man and woman in its employ. Such is the explanation which the a.s.sistant store manager makes to them before he dismisses them, at just a few minutes before six.

"We believe in explaining things," he will tell you afterwards. "For we believe that we gain the very best service from the Macy people by not asking them to work in the dark. If we make a rule and its rulings sometimes puzzle them--sometimes even seem a little arbitrary, perhaps--we tell them why we have had to make the rule and almost invariably find them satisfied and quite content."

The packages, themselves, are detained overnight. The store reserves the right to make an inspection of them. Such inspection, even when it is made, rarely ever shows the package to be illicit. It merely is carelessness. And the thoughtless worker to whom it is returned in the morning is merely asked not to be careless again, but to make a full and co-operative use of the facilities which are provided for the comfort, and the protection, of him and his fellows; which generally is all that is necessary to be said.

By six the store is practically emptied of its workers. After that hour any one leaving it must have a pa.s.s and be interviewed by the night superintendent at the single door left open for exit. Night work in the Macy store is little and far between these days--save possibly in the Christmas season and even then it is held at a minimum; an astonishing minimum when one comes to compare it with the Christmas seasons of, say, a mere twenty years ago. The state law says that aside from that fortnight of holiday turmoil, the women workers of the store, who are considerably in the majority, shall not work more than fifty-four hours or oftener than one night a week and then not later than nine o'clock.

In turn, the store, following the workings of the statute, designates Thursday as its late employment night. If, because of some emergency, it wishes to deviate from this, it must have a special permit.

As a matter of fact, however, Macy's antic.i.p.ates the law; goes far ahead of it. It finds its women workers not only willing to work the occasional Thursday night shifts, but, with the practical advantages of a full dinner furnished without cost and overpay to come into the reckoning, for the most part extremely anxious. And it reminds the solicitous legislators up at Albany that it was not a statute that abolished the pernicious habit of keeping the stores open for business evenings and late in the evening, but the progressive thought of the store managers of New York, themselves. These last have yielded little to the sentimentalists in real looking forward. Theirs have been the practical problems--not the least of these that of the education of a shopping public which seemingly had demanded that the big department-stores of New York should be kept open evenings--some evenings throughout the entire year--and all evenings in a certain small and terrible season; and without consideration of the task this custom imposed upon the patient folk who were serving them. Out of such lack of consideration, out of such selfishness, if you please, was a great practical and moral reform in merchandising evolved. Which was, in itself, no little triumph.

II. Organization in a Modern Store

I like to think of modern business as a huge, great single machine; or better still, a group of little machines gathered together and functioning as one. It is a simile that I have used time and time again.

To feel that some single achievement of industry--of manufacturing or of merchandising--is as well organized and as well balanced as the many mechanisms that are laboring in its behalf, seems to bring the most single complete picture of modern business of the sort that our press has ofttimes been pleased to term "big business".

And sometimes I like to think of these "big businesses"--with their hundreds and thousands of human units--as armies. At no time is this last comparison more apt than when one comes to apply it to the modern department-store, as we today know it in America. For, even if you wish to grant an entire dissimilarity of purpose, one of these huge inst.i.tutions has more than one point of similarity with an army. Not alone in numbers can this parallel be made, but quite as quickly in organization. While, to return to our first simile, it, too, is a big machine--humanized. Its parts are carefully co-ordinated so that the whole will function with the least possible friction. Like an army it is officered with its generalissimo, its under generals, its colonels, its captains, its lieutenants, its sergeants and its corporals. The difference is only in nomenclature. The structure is quite the same.

For, when you come to a.n.a.lyze, you will find the divisions of labor and of authority quite corresponding to similar divisions in the army.

Officer, "non-com" and private--each contributes his more or less important part; each is a necessary factor in the success of the enterprise.

Like an army, the department-store of modern America is designed to move constantly forward. The "big-chief" scans his balance sheets, the rise and fall of the curves of his outgo and income averages, the tremendously meaningful jagged red lines of his graphic charts, quite as carefully as the army general keeps track of the movement of his forces upon the maps which his topographists send him. He gathers his officers roundabout him and plans the strategy of business with the same shrewd foresight that must be observed by the successful military leader. He must be a promoter of morale throughout his forces, even down to the newest and the lowest-paid clerk. There must be constant liaison between the general and the private in the ranks.

In considerable detail this parallel can be carried out. Soon, however, it must come to an end. That is, it ends in so far as Macy's is concerned. For the army at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street is neither an army of offense nor of defense. Its sole position always is upon the front line of service.

At the head of the organization there are the three brother partners who inherited their original interest in the great business from their father, the late Isidor Straus, who, with their mother, lost his life in the supreme catastrophe of the sinking of the _t.i.tanic_. In 1914 they acquired Nathan Straus' interest by purchase. These men, Jesse Isidor, the president, Percy S., the vice-president, and Herbert N., the secretary and treasurer, are its triple head and front. While each has trained himself to be a merchandise specialist of the highest order, there is none that knows the details of Macy's better than his brothers--they share equally in the supreme authority that directs the business. Directly responsible to them, in turn, is its general manager, its merchandise council and its advertising and financial departments.

As I write these paragraphs, the great chart of the Macy organization lies upon my desk. It is a vast and fascinating thing. With the lines extending upon it here and there and everywhere from the box which holds the triple-head, branching and rebranching here and there and again, it looks not unlike a giant map; a chart, if you prefer to have it so. And so it is, a chart upon which the steersmen of so vast and so responsible an enterprise safely pick their course upon a seemingly unending journey.

"Government by draughting-board," sniffed an old-time business man to me once, when I was trying to explain to him in some detail how a great steel manufacturing plant of the Middle West attempted to accomplish its huge job, economically and efficiently, by the use of graphic charts. And he added: "I'd like to see _myself_ held down by blue-print authority."

To which, after all this while, I should like to reply:

"I should like to see a concern, as big and as successful as Macy's, operated without a careful charting of its always difficult path."

Yet, as a matter of hard fact, Macy's, any more than any other big and well-planned business organism of today, never binds itself to go blindly and unthinkingly upon the lines of the charts--and nowhere else.

The real trick of executive direction seems to be to know when to follow these lines and when more or less to completely disregard them.

Rule-of-thumb can never again overcome the rules of averages, of percentages or of economic laws. But the rule of wit and of human understanding can ofttimes be used to temper this first group and sometimes with astonishingly successful results.

A glance or two at this imposing organization chart lying before me begins to show the many, many ramifications of the huge Macy business tree. It shows, for instance, how, under the direction of the merchandise council, are four large branches of store activity more or less inter-related: the handling of Macy's own merchandise (meaning particularly that which is either made in the store's own factories or at least made under its direct supervision); the work of the large force of buyers; the comparison department (an important phase of the business to which we shall come in our own good time); and the foreign offices.

In the financial department, the controller is the quite logical chief.

His general duties are fairly obvious. To help him in them, he has, under his direction, the chief cashier, the salary office, the auditing department, the depositors' account department--this last a most distinctive Macy feature--and a statistical department.

Obvious, too, is the greater part of the work of the publicity department. It includes in addition to the advertising manager--always an important factor in the modern department-store and particularly so in the case of Macy's--a display manager. It is the job of the first of these men to tell the public of the merchandise being offered for sale at the sign of the red star; the job of his compeer to see that it is properly displayed to them.

And, finally, there is the general manager--last but not least.

Connected by an exceedingly direct and much-traveled line with the general offices upon the seventh floor of the store are Mr. W. J. Wells, the store's general manager, and his advisory council. For the G. M., big as he is always, has need of much advice. Upon his broad and efficient shoulders are placed such a tremendous array of responsibilities that one cannot but marvel at the sheer efficiency of the man--to say nothing of his reserves of physical and mental strength--who can hold down such a job. Yet, at Macy's, the man himself disclaims any superhuman powers.

"I am merely the automatic governor to this big machine," he will tell you, in his own simple, direct way. "In fact, if the machine always functioned one hundred per cent. efficient, there really would be no need either of me or of my job. It is because no machine that is built of human cogs and cams and levers and pulleys may ever work at one hundred per cent. efficiency that I, or some other man, must sit in this office. It is our job to meet the unusual and the unforeseen. We take up slack here and loosen there."

The translation of this is unmistakable. If the three men upon the high seventh floor of the inst.i.tution are its steersmen, this man, who has his office at the rear of its broad mezzanine balcony, is at least its chief engineer. And to a.s.sist him he has five a.s.sistant engineers--a.s.sistant general managers, in reality. The habit of simile leads one into odd designations of t.i.tle. Each of these five a.s.sistant general managers--we shall stand by the nomenclature of the store--in turn has a large number of departments reporting to him. While in addition to them and ranking as virtual a.s.sistant managers are the superintendent of the detective bureau and that of the building, itself.

The general manager, himself, is charged with the general duty of engaging, training and educating employees. He regulates salaries. He controls the transfer and discharge of employees. He is charged with the enforcement of all rules and regulations. He is the final authority to decide whether or not merchandise is returnable, for refund, exchange or credit. He also is the authority who adjusts all claims or controversies with customers. And he is the one to whom employees may appeal if they feel they are being treated unfairly by their superiors.

A man-sized job truly! And because no one man, short of a superhuman at any rate, could ever perform all of its various and perplexing functions, Mr. Wells has his five a.s.sistants. In the event of his absence as well as that of any one of them the man below rises temporarily into his immediate superior's job.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHERE MILADY OF MANHATTAN SHOPS

The vast ground floor of Macy's is, in itself, a mark of much interest and variety]

It is the major task of the first of these a.s.sistants to direct the work of the floor superintendents--eight of these--and through them that of the section managers and the actual sales forces; nearly two thousand people all told. In other words, his job is the selling. To this great force and to the countless problems that must arise in its day-by-day direction there is added the oversight of the personal shoppers'

service. Which means in turn the furnishing of guides throughout the departments to shoppers who ask for them; finding translators for folk to whom the intricacies of our tongue are unsolved mysteries and, in certain specific and necessary cases, the sending of merchandise with a member of the sales force into the homes of Macy's patrons.