The Romance of a Great Store Part 9

Of course this complaint was trivial, the sum involved small, and Macy's must quickly have realized that the man who wrote the letter was not particularly serious. Yet that made no difference. The matter was adjusted; even though the process of adjustment involved a shopper's trip to Newark and considerable clerical work--in all several times the cost of the tiny bank. Yet the matter _was_ adjusted and all the toy-banks of that kind were at once reduced in price, to say nothing of a satisfied patron made for the store.

There is another sort of complaint that, at times, keeps the comparison department pretty busy. Women frequently will stop at a counter in the store, examine an article and then exclaim:

"Hm-m--$6.74 for that! Why, I saw the same thing today at Jinx, Bobb & Company's for $5.90."

A mere pa.s.sing comment which, in the old days of merchandising, might easily have been ignored. In Macy's it is not ignored. The clerk who hears this remark makes a note of it and sends through to the comparison department what is technically known as a customer's complaint.

Immediate investigation is made, the prices checked up, and, if the casual shopper is right, Macy's prices are at once readjusted to the six per cent. below the compet.i.tor's charges. It has been found, however, that nearly ninety per cent. of this sort of complaints are incorrect.

Two articles, in separate stores, may look so nearly alike that a casual inspection will not reveal any difference, and, therefore, competing goods must often be subjected to expert examination and even to a.n.a.lysis. A magnifying gla.s.s is used to count the threads in a fabric; woolens are boiled in chemical solutions to determine whether there is any adulteration; and cotton goods, such as sheets and pillow cases, are weighed, washed and weighed again to ascertain to what extent they are loaded. For Macy's is just to itself, as well as to the public.

As has been indicated already, there are some things that the store as a matter of policy does not sell--pianos, chief of all. But that does not mean that there is, in the minds of its managers, the slightest excuse for its shelves not holding the things that it ought to sell. A large difference, this, and one which is constantly being checked by members of the shopping staff of the comparison department--going through its floors and inquiring in the various departments for goods for which there is little ordinary demand, and so a considerable likelihood of their not being found in stock. If an article requested is not found in stock, the shopper immediately buys something else--so as to get the number of the salesclerk. Then a report is made to the department buyer in order that he may see whether or not the clerk has followed up the inquiry.

Incidentally, the shopper's report upon this entire transaction takes into account all the details regarding the manner in which the sales are handled and even notes the speed with which the parcel is wrapped and the change returned. It is not a spying system, but part of the store's honest effort to keep its efficiency at the highest notch. Naturally the shoppers of its comparison department are not known as such to its salesforce--for this reason the personnel of the corps must be under constant change--and it is equally evident that their anonymity is carefully preserved in their dealings with other stores. They are all well-bred young women, ranging in type from the flapper to the matron, and each is so carefully trained to act her part that it is quite impossible to distinguish them from the store's bona fide shoppers.

Another of their duties is to report upon the speed of Macy deliveries.

Once a month, at a certain prearranged time of day, a similar purchase is made at each of the largest stores in the city, including Macy's.

These are all ordered sent to the same address and a record is made of the length of time it takes each to arrive. In the report that is finally made of the test details are included showing the manner in which all the packages are wrapped in order that Macy service may at all times be held up at least to the standard of its compet.i.tors.

In the highly scientific machine of modern business, the test is as valuable as in other machines. I have stood in a great sugar refinery and watched the workmen from time to time draw off tiny phials of the sweetish fluid in order that they might show under laboratory examination that the machine was functioning at its highest point. And so are the tiny phials of Macy service drawn from the machine. If they show that, even in the slightest degree, the great machine of retail merchandising is functioning below its highest efficiency, it becomes the immediate business of the management to correct the loss.

"I tell my people not to come to me with reports that everything is going well," says its general manager, "I only want to know when things begin to slip. Then it is my job to set them straight once again."

One thing more, before we are quite done with this sketch of the organization of a great merchandising inst.i.tution. It is, in this case, a most important thing:

With the credit system in force in nearly, if not quite, every other large store in the New York metropolitan district, Macy's for years has had to encounter a considerable sentiment against its policy of doing a cash business only. For there always has been a desirable cla.s.s of trade represented by customers who, for one reason or another, find it most inconvenient to pay their bills monthly--people whose means and credit are unimpeachable. At one time it looked as if R. H. Macy & Company would either have to forego their custom or else make exceptions to their long established rule. The former they could do; the latter they would not. But--

Out of this very need for furnishing customers with the convenience of some sort of a charge account grew a great Macy specialty--the depositors' account department which, while making no concessions to the store's rock-ribbed principle of selling for cash, solved a very great problem in its touch with its public. It turned the costly credit privilege into an a.s.set both for the customer and for the store. The very thought was revolutionary! What, ask a customer to pay in advance; to have money on deposit with R. H. Macy & Company, private bankers, to pay for normal purchases for a whole thirty days to come! It couldn't be done. New York would never, never stand for it. Every one outside of the store was sure that it never could be done. And a good many inside, as well. Yet the thing deemed impossible has come to pa.s.s. The idea was sound. The plan today is successful, even beyond the dreams of its promoters. With fifteen thousand depositors, its total deposits--money placed into the store to be drawn against solely for merchandise purchases--have reached as high as $2,750,000 at a single time.

Interest at four per cent. annually is paid upon these deposits, so that the customer's money does not lie idle in the Macy till. Moreover, the money may be withdrawn at any time, and without previous notice being given. Further than this, it has been a custom--not, however, to be considered invariable--to pay a bonus of two per cent. on net sales charged to the depositors' account department throughout the year.

Compare the thrill of receiving a bonus check from your department-store, instead of a bill for dead horses!

It has been estimated that in some of New York's most representative and most elegant department-stores something like eighty-five per cent. of all retail transactions are upon the credit accounts. a.s.suming even that all of these accounts are promptly collectible--or collectible at all--the expense of the machinery of their collection becomes no small item in store management cost. This item Macy's saves--entirely and completely. And so, to no small extent, the store justifies itself in that other rigid rule--the pricing of its merchandise at a uniform rating of six per cent. less than that of its compet.i.tors. Upon this thought, alone, a whole book might be written.

III. Buying to Sell

Up the broad valley of the Euphrates a caravan comes toiling upon its way. It is fearfully hot; frightfully dusty. For it has come to mid-September; the rains are long weeks gone; and with the crops harvested, even the sails of the great mills that pump the irrigation ca.n.a.ls full are stilled. The time of great heat and of little work. But still the caravan--the long, attenuated file of horses and camels must press on.

Ahead is Bagdad, that self-same ancient Bagdad which three thousand years ago was the commercial capital of the world. Through the heat waves and the blinding dust, the trained eyes of the Moslem can see the sun touching the gilded minarets and towers of her great mosques. Bagdad ahead. And at Bagdad the market-places which have stood unchanged for tens of centuries. Save that in recent years there have come to them these Americans--these shrewd agents of a little known folk, these rug-buyers of a far-away land of which they spin such fascinating tales.

Tales far too fascinating ever to be believable. Yet Allah keeps his own accounting.

In the foyer of a lovely new home in newest New York a Persian rug is being spread for the first time. Its owner dilates with pride upon his purchase; shows those roundabout him the symbolism of its rarely delicate design; even to the tiny fault purposely woven into the creation by its maker to show in his humble fashion that only Allah may be faultless.

A great French city; this Lyons, by the bank of the lovely Rhone. For two centuries or even more its tireless looms have spun the rarest silk fabrics of the world. Nearby there is a little French village. Were I to put its name upon these pages, it would mean nothing to you. Yet out from it there comes a lace, so rare, so delicate, that one well may marvel at the human patience and the human ingenuity that conceived it.

The silk comes to America, straight to the chief city of the Americas; so do the laces; and so in a short time will come once again the wondrous cotton weaves of Lille and of Cambrai--and will come as a tragic reminder of the five fearful years that were.

In the hot depths of a South African mine, negroes, stripped to their very waists, are toiling to bring forth the rarest precious stones that the world has ever known. In the fearfully cold blasts of the far North, facing monotonous glaring miles of lonely ice and snow, trappers are after the seal and the mink. Why? In order that milady, of New York, may sweep into her red-lined box at the Opera, a queen in dress, as well as in looks and in poise.

From the mine and from the ice-floes to her neck and back a mighty process has been undergone. The great multiplex machine of merchandising has accomplished the process. A thousand other ones as well. Herald Square sits not alone between the East River and the North, between the Battery and the Harlem, between five populous boroughs of the great New York, not alone between the four million other folk who dwell within fifty miles of her ancient City Hall, but between the shoe factories of Lynn, the cotton mills of Lowell and of the Carolinas, the woolen factories of the Scots and the nearer ones of Lawrence, the paper mills of the Berkshires, the porcelain kilns of Pennsylvania, between a thousand other manufacturing industries, both very great and very small, as well. Into Herald Square--into the red-brick edifice upon the westerly side of Herald Square and reaching all the way on Broadway from Thirty-fourth to Thirty-fifth Streets--all of these pour a goodly portion of their products. In turn, these are poured by the big red-brick store into the pockets and the homes of its tens of thousands of patrons.

A mighty business this; and, as we shall presently see, a business made up of many little businesses. Merchandising, financing, transportation; each has played its own great part in the bringing of that silk sock upon your foot or the felt that you wear upon your head. Each has co-operated; each has correlated its effort. There are few accidents in modern business. Rule-o'-thumb has stepped out of its back-door. In its place have come cool calculation, steady planning, scientific investigation. If modern merchandising has tricks, these are they. And they are the tricks that win.

In our last chapter we pictured R. H. Macy & Company as a machine of salesmanship. Now I should like to change the film upon the screen. I should like to show you Macy's as a machine of buying. Obviously one cannot sell, without first buying. Buying must at all times precede selling, while to meet compet.i.tion and still sell goods at a profit, the keenest sort of shrewd merchandising must be used in purchasing. Your buyer must be no less a salesman than he who stands behind the retail counters and, what is more to the point, he must constantly keep his finger upon the pulse of the market. Which means, in turn, that he must not for a day or an hour lose his touch with manufacturing and financial conditions--to say nothing of the changeable public taste.

For the one hundred and eighteen different departments of the Macy's of today there are now sixty-nine buyers; the majority of them women. This last is not surprising when one comes to consider that by far the larger percentage of the department-store's customers are of the gentler s.e.x.

Women know how to buy for women--or should know. How foolish indeed would be the merchant prince of the New York of this day who would not instantly say "yes" to the a.s.sertion that feminine taste in buying is the one thing with which his store absolutely could not dispense. So the woman buyer in our city stores is so much an accepted fact as to call today for little special comment, save possibly to add that in no store outside of Macy's has she come more completely into her own. The buyer's job covets her. And she covets the buyer's job. Well she may. For it is a job well worth coveting--in independence, in opportunity and in salary.

In almost every case a buyer comes to the job from retail experience--although occasionally a knowledge of wholesale selling develops the required skill. In nine cases out of ten, however, he or she rises to the important little office on the seventh floor from the salesforce upon the retail floors beneath. From salesclerk he--or as we have just learned, usually she--is promoted to "head of stock," which is the t.i.tle of the head clerk in a department having three or four or more clerks. This promotion comes from a superior knowledge of the stock, yet not from that alone: the clerk must have executive ability. An agreeable temperament is also a necessary ingredient to the potion of promotion.

To the position of a.s.sistant buyer is the next and logical promotion for the ambitious and successful "head of stock." After this should come the step to the big job--which steadily grows bigger--of buyer, or as the Macy store prefers to call it, department manager.

Department managers do no actual selling. They now have graduated from that. Yet none the less are they salesmen--in more than a little truth, super-salesmen. For not only must they know what to buy--and how to buy it at the most favorable price--but they are equally responsible for knowing what to do with their purchases, once made. They are the merchants of the departments; accountable for the saleability of their stock. It is very much their concern whether those departments show a profit or a loss. Little stores within a big store. A big store made up of more than a hundred little stores.

As we have seen, it is not an uncommon custom for some department-stores to rent out or even to sell the privilege of many, if not all of its little stores. Macy's--in recent years at least--has not followed this policy. It has found that its own best organization comes from keeping the department as a unit; a pretty distinct and important unit, right up close to the very top of the business, where its three partners are specialists in merchandising; and pa.s.sing proud of that.

The foundation of all successful buying is built of the bricks of sales knowledge laid in the mortar of good judgment. It is squared up by a sixth sense that has no name--yet a qualification which, by its presence or its absence, makes or unmakes a buyer's value. In its various branches, however, this unnamed sense is required, to a varying degree, perhaps, least of all in the purchasing of staple goods.

For the sake of a more convenient understanding, let us begin by cla.s.sifying the various needs of the insatiable Macy's into three major divisions: We shall put down staples, as the first of these; luxuries, as the second; and novelties, as the third. Under staples we shall include notions, cotton goods (such as sheets, pillow-cases and muslins) and, in general, the absolute necessities of life, including wearing apparel of the commoner varieties, household articles and the like.

These are in constant purchase almost every day of the year. Take, for instance, that heterogeneous collection of articles, grouped under the generic and whimsical head of notions. There is thread of all kinds, there are hooks-and-eyes, snap-fasteners, hair-nets, darners, b.u.t.ton-hooks, tape-measures and what all not more--far be it from me even to attempt to mention the more than four thousand separate items that must be constantly carried in the notion departments.

For all of these there is a huge daily demand, while a month's supply of any of them is all that can, as a rule, be conveniently handled in the store. It must be patent that, as there is never an equal demand for these small but essential articles, the buyers must be placing constant orders for them. So it is with everything else that people must have--irrespective of tastes, wealth or the season of the year--and the number of the list is legion.

Therefore, the buyer of staples does not depend so much upon the sixth sense as upon common sense. He must have plenty for the latter, however, and it is sure to be kept working on a fairly even basis throughout the entire year.

In the category of the luxuries are included such articles as jewelry, musical instruments, Oriental rugs, paintings, fine bric-a-brac and the like. Clearly the buyer in this branch must possess real taste and discrimination in addition to commercial ability, in order to be able to purvey these properly to the public. He handles goods which have to be bought by people who have already purchased the necessities of life--the buying of luxuries involves the spending of the public's surplus and so this division of the work is at all times attended with great or less hazard.

But the real hazards, the real necessity for that sixth sense, which I just mentioned, the hardest and most nerve-racking buyer's job, comes in the purchase of those goods grouped under the common t.i.tle of novelties.

As one of the members of the Macy's merchandise council once observed, the departments devoted to staples sell what the people want, while those devoted to novelties make the people want what they have to sell.

And this last is quite true of the luxuries, as well.

Here, incidentally, is a very curious fact about merchandise: A staple is not a constant thing. In one department it is what everybody wants and in another it becomes a novelty. For instance, a cotton pillow-case selling for, let us say, a dollar, is a staple; while another pillow-case, of linen this time, embroidered with an old English initial, hand hemst.i.tched and edged with lace--we hesitate to guess at its cost--is a decided novelty, in the understanding of the store, at any rate. It also may be cla.s.sed as a luxury.

Styles, fads, exclusive designs and seasons determine the work of the buyer of novelties. The job is one that requires quick decisions. The staple buyer can "play safe," but the buyer of novelties who pursued the policy soon would find himself in the rear of the procession. Nor can he afford to make mistakes, for they may be costly indeed to the house that he represents. There is, in consequence, a greater demand on his nerve, his ingenuity and his imagination than you find in other cla.s.ses of buyers. He must circulate where there are people--at the theaters, country clubs, restaurants, churches, in Fifth Avenue--and he must keep his ear to the ground and both eyes wide open. Consequently, when it is reported in the Sunday paper that the women of Paris have taken up the fad of wearing jeweled nose-rings, he must see that New York's women of fashion may have the same opportunity of expressing their individuality, by visiting Macy's jewelry department.

This, of course, is rank exaggeration, but it indicates what the novelty buyer aims at. And surprisingly often he hits the mark.

In such a huge establishment it is but natural that the reception hall outside the buying offices should be crowded most of the time. Mahomet oftimes goes to the mountain--or sends a representative to it to buy some of its goods--yet more often the mountain comes to Mahomet. And so, I am told, for five days a week--Sat.u.r.days being generally recognized as a closed day for buying--an average of from four hundred to six hundred and fifty salesmen a day visit the buying headquarters on the seventh floor of the store. Taking into consideration the fact that the goods purchased are paid for in cash within ten days of their delivery, these headquarters are most popular with the emissaries of manufacturers and wholesale houses. Added to this is the uniform policy of courtesy to salesmen, which has been stated by the company in its precise fashion:

"We have held, as far as within our power, the precept of which our late head, Isidor Straus, was a living personification--that business may be conducted between merchants who are gentlemen, in a manner profitable to both."