The echo of Madison Square Mary telling the hour comes rolling up Broadway. The street doors swing open; almost as if working upon a single mechanism. The first of the shoppers come tumbling in. The great main aisle of the store—one thinks of it almost as the Broadway of this city within a city—is populated once again. The chief stream of the store's patrons pours down through it. Other streams from the doors in the side streets join it; still others diverge down the side aisles, up the stair and escalators, into the elevators which presently go packing off, one by one, toward the mysterious and fascinating regions of the upper floors. In three or four brief minutes the picture that one has of that mighty first floor from the mezzanine balcony that runs roundabout it is of a great mass of hurrying, scurrying humanity; no longer any well-defined currents, but little eddies and pools of human beings constantly and forever changing.
And this but hardly past nine o'clock in the morning. In another hour there will be still more folk within the great building. Most of them have come to shop, a few of them to take a tardy breakfast in the comfortable restaurant upon its eighth floor. One might not think that it would pay to open a restaurant for breakfast at as late an hour as nine in the morning, but such a one would not know his New York. Breakfast in our big town is rarely over until the setting of the sun.
For an hour at the beginning of the day the Macy family may shop in its own interest. The saleswomen—the men as well—may obtain permits from their division managers which in turn entitle them to large and conspicuous shopping cards which serve two pretty definite purposes—the identification of the saleswoman as an actual and authorized shopper (she is not supposed to go nosing around other departments merely in her own interest or curiosity) and the obtaining for her of the discount to which she is entitled. Macy's is known pretty generally as a store of no special privileges or discounts. Teachers, clergymen, professional shoppers, dressmakers are recognized and welcomed in the big store, but only upon the same terms as every other sort of customer. But the rule bends, ever and ever so gently, for the man or woman who is employed within it. After all, he or she is a part of the family and so entitled to be recognized. This recognition takes the form of a sizable reduction upon the wearing apparel necessary for his or her personal use. This difference goes upon the books of the store as a business expense.
By ten the store has finished shopping in its own behalf. Its maximum force for the day is on the job and the wise shopper comes close to this hour. For by eleven the force is reduced. Luncheon is a very simple human necessity; but a necessity, nevertheless. And New York has never countenanced the Parisian habit of locking up practically all shops and stores and offices for an hour and a half or two hours in the middle of the day. But then New York has never taken its meal-times quite so seriously as Paris. Upon this one thing alone a considerable essay might be written.
But New York must lunch, just as Paris or London or any other community must lunch. And so for three valuable hours out of the middle of the day the Macy force is reduced nearly one-third its size. Forty-five minutes is the ordinary allotment for lunch and the house prefers that its folk shall take this mid-day meal underneath its roof. Toward this end it has made, as we shall see, elaborate and expensive preparations in the form of elaborate lunch-rooms and the like. However, it recognizes that there are many workers who prefer to go out at the middle of the day. And proper arrangements are made for the accommodation of these folk.
By two o'clock, however, practically the entire selling force at least is back again. The hardest portion of the day begins. For, no matter how hard the store may advertise, no matter how it may strive to educate its patrons in every other way to the use of its facilities in the less crowded and hence more comfortable morning hours, the hard and solemn fact remains that it suits the comfort and convenience of the average New York woman to shop in the afternoon. And shop in the afternoon she does. She comes into Macy's right after luncheon—although a single glance at the big and crowded restaurant would easily convince you that she often lunches as well as shops in the big red-brick institution of Herald Square—and then gets right down to the serious business of shopping.
And at Macy's it is business; always business. The big store at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, in recent years at least, has not gone in for shows—for organ and orchestral concerts or recitals or anything of that sort. It has considered that its best shows are always upon its counters. It has had no quarrel with the successful stores that have added entertainment features to the other routine of their operations. It merely has contended that its own method was completely satisfactory to itself. Which, after all, is a position of infinite strength.
"Macy's attractions are its prices!" is an advertising slogan of the house so long sounded now that it has become almost a household phrase to its hundreds of thousands of regular patrons. It is a phrase up to which it has lived, steadily and consistently. And not only has it steadfastly refused to give shows of any sort—save, of course, those wonderful window pageants of other years, which were horses of quite a different color indeed—but it has also refused up to the present time to install such non-merchandise enterprises as manicuring parlors, hair-dressing rooms, barber shops and the like. And this despite the fact that in selling such things as groceries and automobile sundries—to take two specific instances out of several—it has gone considerably beyond the merchandise scope of some of the very largest of its New York competitors.
"Hundreds of thousands of regular patrons?" you interrupt and repeat. "A hundred thousand people is a whole lot. Until very recently, at least, the population of what would be considered a pretty good-sized American city."
Not long ago, I asked how many people came into Macy's in the passing of an average business day. I was promptly told that several times the firm had endeavored to make an actual and systematic count of the folk who passed through each of its many entrances, but had never entirely succeeded. Once, of a busy October day, the count up to two o'clock in the afternoon had reached and passed the one hundred and twenty thousand mark. At that time each of the great escalators which ascend from the main floor was handling its maximum capacity of 7,400 persons an hour; each of the fourteen public elevators was carrying the full number of passengers permitted it by law and the store management; while a host of other folk were doing business upon the ground floor without ever ascending to the fascinating mysteries of the land of Up-Above.