The Romance of a Great Store

by Edward Hungerford

The public service department means exactly what it is called. It is at the service of the public. In concrete form it is a free information bureau, where theater seats and railroad and Pullman tickets may be purchased at face value—and not one cent beyond, not even the usual moderate fifty-cent advance of the hotel agencies—where astute and marvelously informed young men and women, with a miniature library of reference books at their immediate command, stand ready and willing to answer all the reasonable questions that may be thrust at them. To it is added a postal office, a telegraph office and public telephones for both local and long distance service.

The third assistant general manager of the store also has within his bailiwick the important department of mail orders and adjustments. Although in the technical sense of the word Macy's today has no mail order department—having been forced to abandon its once promising beginning along this line because of a sheer lack of room in which to handle it—the store each year actually receives thousands of orders for its goods by mail, from folk who, for one reason or another, find it inconvenient to visit it. These are received and systematically handled in this very department. Under its adjustment division comes the extremely interesting bureau of investigation, which concerns itself with all complaints, and the correspondence bureau, which handles more than ninety-five per cent. of the mail of the house.

It requires no particular keenness of imagination to see that, even with complaints reduced to a minimum and letter-writing and handling to a fine science, there is an infinite amount of detail in these two departments alone—detail that reaches into every part of the store and that necessitates a clever combination of system and diplomacy.

The exposition of the workings of the Macy organization is yet to lead us into other chapters in which various separate subjects of interest will be treated at greater length than here; but now is the time and place to focus our attention upon one of the small, but extremely important, departments that works unseen—but not unfelt—behind the scenes. It is known as the comparison department and the work that it does is of vast importance in the operation of the store. Its functions are unending—and continuous. Macy's policy of underselling its competitors is an unhalting one.

I have before me a Macy advertisement from a New York newspaper of recent date. In a conspicuous place in it there is a card which says: "For sixty-two years we have sold dependable merchandise at lowest in the city prices. We are doing so now and shall continue to do so." This was published at a time when the recent reaction from the extremely high prices of the war period already had begun to set in; and yet this was the big store's sole acknowledgment of the deflation sentiment—to say nothing of hysteria—which was sweeping the town. Its competitors had been offering their wares at reductions of from twenty to fifty per cent. from their topmost prices, but, serene and secure in the knowledge that its policy in selling had been consistently adhered to, Macy's only reiterated that its prices would continue to be the lowest in the city—quality for quality.

To hold fast to this policy, through thick and thin, has not always been easy. Macy's has fought some royal battles in its behalf—yet not so much because it was a policy as because with the big store in Herald Square it has become a principle of the most fundamental sort.

More than twenty years ago the principle became extremely difficult to maintain, because of the growing tendency of the proprietors of articles, so patented or copyrighted as to make their imitation practically impossible, to attempt to fix their final retail sales price. It no longer became the mere question of whether Macy's or any other store would have the right to undersell its competitors; it became the fundamental question of whether the great centuries-old open market of the world could continue to remain an open market, in the interest of the consumer; and not a closed market, in the interest of the producer. To maintain the first of these positions, in behalf of its patrons, Macy's entered upon and won, almost single-handed, one of the notable legal battles in the history of this country.

As far back as 1901—if you are a stickler for exact dates—this whole question of price maintenance became an acute issue with Macy's. It came to pass that when the prominent publishers of America formed an association, one prime purpose of which was to fix the prices at which their books would sell at retail, the store quickly saw that if this trust agreement was permitted to stand unchallenged, its cardinal principle of underselling its competitors, would have to be sacrificed. Macy's did not propose to make such a sacrifice—to permit its customers to be sacrificed—without a protest. And such a protest it prepared to make.

Isidor Straus, then the head of the business, sat in the office of his friend and counsel, Edmond E. Wise, in a downtown office. Mr. Wise put the thing frankly and without equivocation before his client. He said that it would be a hard legal fight, no doubt of that, but that a great principle was at stake; the keen mind of the lawyer was convinced of the economic fallacy of the position of the publishers' association.