Nowadays in the great department stores they order this entire business of collecting both cash and packages in a far better fashion. The merchant of today has a variety of wondrous mechanical contraptions—not only cash-carriers but cash-registers—which do the work they once did, much more rapidly and efficiently. Even in those long ago days of the 'eighties the Macy store was beginning to install pneumatic tubes for carrying the money from the saleswomen at the counters to the high-set booths of the head cashiers, who seemingly had come to regard it as a mere commodity, to be regarded in as fully impersonal a fashion as boots or shoes or sugar or broom-sticks. Put that down as progress for the 'eighties.
THE FOURTEENTH STREET STORE OF OTHER DAYS
By the early 'seventies Macy's had absorbed the entire southeastern
corners of 14th Street and 6th Avenue, and had come to
be a fixture of New York
The Macy store prided itself during that second generation, as now, upon its willingness to take up innovations, particularly when they showed themselves as possessing at least a degree of real worth. Mr. Macy, with his old fashioned prejudices against innovations of any sort, was gone. His successors took a radically different position in regard to them. Here was the electric-light—that brand-new thing which this young man Tom Edison over at Menlo Park was developing so rapidly. It was new. It had been well advertised; particularly well advertised for that day and generation. How it drew folk, to gaze admiringly upon its hissing brilliancy! Ergo! The Macy store must have an electric light. And so in the late autumn days of 1878 one of the very first arc lamps to be displayed in New York was hung outside the Fourteenth Street front of the store and attracted many crowds. It was hardly less than a sensation.
In the following autumn arc lamps were placed throughout all the retail selling portions of the store. Of course, they were not very dependable. Most folk those days thought that they would never so become. The store's real reliance was upon its gas-lighting; nice, reliable old gas. You could depend upon it. The new system was still erratic. So figured the mind of the 'eighties.
Soon after the first electric lamps, the store's first telephone was installed. It, too, was a great novelty, and the customers of the establishment developed a habit of calling up their friends, just so that they could say they had used it. Eventually the convenience of the device became so apparent that folk stood in queues awaiting their turn to use it, and the telephone company requested Macy's to take it out or at least to discontinue the practice of using it so freely.
In that day there were no elevators nor for a considerable time thereafter. All the store's selling was at first, and for a long time thereafter, confined to its basement and to its main-floor. Gradually it began to encroach upon small portions of the second story. This afforded fairly generous selling space; for it must be remembered that the establishment not only filled the entire east side of Sixth Avenue from Thirteenth Street to Fourteenth Street but extended back upon each of them for more than one hundred and fifty feet. Moreover it was beginning slowly to acquire disconnected buildings in the surrounding territory; generally for the purpose of manufacturing certain lines of merchandise—a practice which it has almost entirely discontinued in these later years. Then it still made certain things that it wished fashioned along the lines which its clientele still demanded. And even some of the upper floors of the older buildings that formed the main store group were partly given over to the making of clothing; of underwear; and men's shirts and collars in particular.
It was after 1882, according to the memory of Mr. James E. Murphy, a salesman in the black silk department, who came to the store in that memorable year, that the first elevator was installed in the store. Up to that time, as we have just seen, there had been no necessity whatsoever for such a machine. But the steadily growing business of the store—there really seemed to be no way of holding Macy's back—made it necessary to use upper floors of the original building for retailing and more and more to crowd the manufacturing and other departments into outside structures.