The Romance of a Great Store

by Edward Hungerford

It is the major task of the first of these assistants 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.

The second and the third assistant managers are the heads of non-selling organizations within the store, the fourth and the fifth handle the training and the educational departments, respectively. The second assistant has, as his especial responsibility, the merchandise checkers, the collectors, the stock clerks, the cashiers and the interior mail and messenger service. The other non-selling assistant general manager supervises the receiving department, the department of money orders and adjustments, the supply department, the delivery, the receiving, the time office, the manufacturing, and sundry other smaller specialties of the store; small, however, only in a comparative sense. Taken by themselves they quickly would be seen to be sizable indeed.

The tasks of most of these departments are fairly obvious from their names. Some of the others we shall see in a bit of detail as we go further into the store and its workings. In other chapters we shall describe what the great delivery department is supposed to accomplish, and actually does accomplish, the scope and plan and reach of the departments of training and of employment, and some others, too. It takes no great strain upon the imagination to conceive of the importance of the detective bureau's work, nor that of the superintendent of buildings.

So much, then, for a preliminary bird's-eye view of a mammoth machine, not a machine for turning out shoes or typewriters or paper, but for buying and selling all these things and many, many more. And as you read in the earlier part of this book, the huge mechanism did not spring into its being in a year, or in a decade, or even in a generation. It represents slow, hard, steady growth; and slow, hard, steady growth it is still having.

There are now one hundred and eighteen departments in Macy's and yet, out of many thousands of separate and distinct items, there are some things that the store does not sell. Some of these commodities are handled by other great department-stores. But while Macy's may and does follow a charted path, it is its own chart and its own path. It never follows blindly the pathways of others. So, for instance, it does not sell pianos. In this particular case, at least, the reason is not hard to discover. Remember, all the while, that Macy's sells for cash and for cash alone—always and forever; and then consider that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, pianos are sold upon the installment plan. The installment plan is entirely outside of the Macy scheme of salesmanship. It may or may not be a good plan. But to adopt it Macy's would either have to change its selling policy or else dispose of so few pianos that it would not be profitable to maintain a department for them. This is the alpha and the omega of the piano, as far as Macy's is concerned. It has no intention either of changing its deep-rooted and well-founded selling policy, nor, on the other hand, of establishing a little-used and possibly unprofitable department. Upon this decision it stands quite content.

Yet assuredly Macy's is organized to sell nearly all of the necessities of life—and an unusually large number of the luxuries in addition. From hosiery to ice cream, from women's suits to artists' materials, from eye-glasses to sausages, and from petticoats to ukeleles, the list of the store's wares is almost without limit. Other furniture is not hedged about by the same merchandising traditions and restrictions as are pianos; there are in the upper floor of this great market-place pieces of household furnishings whose prices run well into the hundreds and even thousands of dollars, to say nothing of rare Oriental rugs, fine paintings and other works of art.

These one hundred and eighteen departments have been arranged after long study and experience and well thought out plans. In fact, so many conflicting and intricate features have entered into their planning that it is hardly possible within the space of these pages to give more than the broad general policy of the department organizations of the store. Yet it is another of these fairly obvious principles that upon its main floor—where its space, square foot by square foot, is by far at its highest value, and where there is a maximum of accessibility—should be displayed the items that sell the most quickly and the most readily. This follows the very reasonable theory that goods for which there is the most popular demand should at all times be the most accessible. Varying slightly in specific cases and conditions, as one ascends into the five upper selling floors of the store, the merchandise falls more and more into classifications that call for care and deliberation in the purchasing. Thus, upon the main floor, one will find such articles as umbrellas, books, candy, notions, and the like—to make but a few instances out of many—while upon the second, there will be yardage goods, linens, shoes and so forth.

Parenthetically, it may be set down that in older days, yardage goods—meaning cloths and weaves of almost every sort—never used to be found above the ground floor of any department-store. Retail merchandising tradition in New York suffered a body blow some years ago when Macy's sent them upstairs. Even the men who worked in the department protested against the change. A sizable proportion of their income was and is in their commissions upon their total volume of sales. They could not see the sales upstairs.

"For two cents I'd resign," said one of the veterans, just as the change was announced.

No one offered him the two cents, however, and he remained. And the following year saw the department reach a new high level for total sales in its yard goods.