"'May I help you, madam?'
"The customer shook her head, a negative; she was merely trying to adjust her veil, she explained. But our saleswoman was resourceful in her tact.
"'Well, maybe, I can assist you with that,' she insisted, and straightway proceeded to do so. That was her notion of the service of our store."
It is incidents just like this—seemingly small when you take them apart and place them out by themselves—but in the aggregate very real and very important, that make for a store its lifelong customers. Let the young woman continue. Like a good many other young women in the store she is a college graduate and also possessed of a power for shrewd observation.
" ... One woman bought some gloves from me and while she waited for her change showed me her shopping-list. It was miles long, seemingly, and appeared to include everything from a safety-pin to a toy submarine. As she conned it, she said that she had shopped in Macy's for years, and nowhere else. In fact, I remember that she said that she would be completely lost in any other store.... Others came back, bringing a single glove that they had purchased a year or more before and wanting another pair just like them, they had been so satisfactory....
"Not all of them are quite so cheery, however. Occasionally some unreasonable and irate customer would appear, storming at having to wait a few precious moments for her change, or at not being able to find the same glove that her friend purchased the week before—the chances being quite good that her friend might have bought the glove in another store. These are the times that test the wit and diplomacy and resource of the girl behind the counter.
"A day behind a counter is filled to the brim with experiences—you have your finger on the pulse of a part of the life of New York—you are a part of a huge and important organization, and you come into contact with the world in general. Even customers coming to our glove counter furnished us with interesting moments. One in particular came to me to get some of our children's woolen gloves. He was a robust old man—about fifty-five, I'd have said—but he told me he was sixty-nine. He said he had just bought the same gloves elsewhere for over twice as much. (I said I didn't doubt that in the least.) And then he went on to say his wife and daughters shopped in stores where the name meant a great deal, but that he always came to Macy's because he came for the merchandise he got. He ended by saying he was a happy man, with three romping grandchildren, that he daily handled over two thousand men, but couldn't handle one woman. I should like to see him try to run Macy's and have to handle some six thousand men and women."
The personnel of each of the selling floors of the store is under the direction of an organization captain, whose precise title is floor superintendent. He has an understudy—or, as he is known in the parlance of the place, a relief—so that the floor is never, even for a minute, without an executive head.
This floor superintendent is a man of considerable discretionary powers. He must be. These powers are being constantly brought into play as he is called upon to decide the merits of this or that customer's claim. He is a man of tact and judgment, both of which qualities are kept in constant operation. Upon his floor he is the direct representative of the management and so looks out for its interests. From his desk upon the floor headquarters he directs and supervises, yet he constantly circulates throughout his various departments and sees to it himself that the matters for which he is responsible are thoroughly carried out. The orderliness of the floor is his special concern, and when, from time to time, it becomes necessary to shift salesclerks from one department to another—as in the case of the numberless special sales requiring extra help—it is he who engineers the details of the transfer.
Acting as lieutenants to the floor superintendents are the section managers, who, as we have already seen, were in the store of yesterday known as "floorwalkers." But in the Macy's of today something considerably different is meant from the superannuated and somewhat pompous gentleman who used to condescend, when we asked for the location of silverware, to wave us away with a cryptic "second-aisle-to-the-right-rear-of-the-store." It now means a live, up-to-date, agreeable gentleman, with a man's-size job to fill.