From the mine and from the ice-floes to her neck and back a mighty process has been undergone. The great multiplex machine of merchandising has accomplished the process. A thousand other ones as well. Herald Square sits not alone between the East River and the North, between the Battery and the Harlem, between five populous boroughs of the great New York, not alone between the four million other folk who dwell within fifty miles of her ancient City Hall, but between the shoe factories of Lynn, the cotton mills of Lowell and of the Carolinas, the woolen factories of the Scots and the nearer ones of Lawrence, the paper mills of the Berkshires, the porcelain kilns of Pennsylvania, between a thousand other manufacturing industries, both very great and very small, as well. Into Herald Square—into the red-brick edifice upon the westerly side of Herald Square and reaching all the way on Broadway from Thirty-fourth to Thirty-fifth Streets—all of these pour a goodly portion of their products. In turn, these are poured by the big red-brick store into the pockets and the homes of its tens of thousands of patrons.
A mighty business this; and, as we shall presently see, a business made up of many little businesses. Merchandising, financing, transportation; each has played its own great part in the bringing of that silk sock upon your foot or the felt that you wear upon your head. Each has co-operated; each has correlated its effort. There are few accidents in modern business. Rule-o'-thumb has stepped out of its back-door. In its place have come cool calculation, steady planning, scientific investigation. If modern merchandising has tricks, these are they. And they are the tricks that win.
In our last chapter we pictured R. H. Macy & Company as a machine of salesmanship. Now I should like to change the film upon the screen. I should like to show you Macy's as a machine of buying. Obviously one cannot sell, without first buying. Buying must at all times precede selling, while to meet competition and still sell goods at a profit, the keenest sort of shrewd merchandising must be used in purchasing. Your buyer must be no less a salesman than he who stands behind the retail counters and, what is more to the point, he must constantly keep his finger upon the pulse of the market. Which means, in turn, that he must not for a day or an hour lose his touch with manufacturing and financial conditions—to say nothing of the changeable public taste.
For the one hundred and eighteen different departments of the Macy's of today there are now sixty-nine buyers; the majority of them women. This last is not surprising when one comes to consider that by far the larger percentage of the department-store's customers are of the gentler sex. Women know how to buy for women—or should know. How foolish indeed would be the merchant prince of the New York of this day who would not instantly say "yes" to the assertion that feminine taste in buying is the one thing with which his store absolutely could not dispense. So the woman buyer in our city stores is so much an accepted fact as to call today for little special comment, save possibly to add that in no store outside of Macy's has she come more completely into her own. The buyer's job covets her. And she covets the buyer's job. Well she may. For it is a job well worth coveting—in independence, in opportunity and in salary.
In almost every case a buyer comes to the job from retail experience—although occasionally a knowledge of wholesale selling develops the required skill. In nine cases out of ten, however, he or she rises to the important little office on the seventh floor from the salesforce upon the retail floors beneath. From salesclerk he—or as we have just learned, usually she—is promoted to "head of stock," which is the title of the head clerk in a department having three or four or more clerks. This promotion comes from a superior knowledge of the stock, yet not from that alone: the clerk must have executive ability. An agreeable temperament is also a necessary ingredient to the potion of promotion.
To the position of assistant buyer is the next and logical promotion for the ambitious and successful "head of stock." After this should come the step to the big job—which steadily grows bigger—of buyer, or as the Macy store prefers to call it, department manager.
Department managers do no actual selling. They now have graduated from that. Yet none the less are they salesmen—in more than a little truth, super-salesmen. For not only must they know what to buy—and how to buy it at the most favorable price—but they are equally responsible for knowing what to do with their purchases, once made. They are the merchants of the departments; accountable for the saleability of their stock. It is very much their concern whether those departments show a profit or a loss. Little stores within a big store. A big store made up of more than a hundred little stores.
As we have seen, it is not an uncommon custom for some department-stores to rent out or even to sell the privilege of many, if not all of its little stores. Macy's—in recent years at least—has not followed this policy. It has found that its own best organization comes from keeping the department as a unit; a pretty distinct and important unit, right up close to the very top of the business, where its three partners are specialists in merchandising; and passing proud of that.
The foundation of all successful buying is built of the bricks of sales knowledge laid in the mortar of good judgment. It is squared up by a sixth sense that has no name—yet a qualification which, by its presence or its absence, makes or unmakes a buyer's value. In its various branches, however, this unnamed sense is required, to a varying degree, perhaps, least of all in the purchasing of staple goods.