The Romance of a Great Store

by Edward Hungerford

This, in the modern department-store, is considered a feature of the utmost importance, and nowhere more so than at Macy's. Sixty-four years of salesmanship experience, in the course of which it has been the originator of many daring and successful display experiments, has shown the house their full value.

Yet, even in Macy's, there are certain reservations to the strong house policy of attractive display. Certain fundamentals are stressed. The invitation to buy is forever put in the goods themselves rather than in the background against which they are shown. It requires no especial astuteness to see from this fact alone an enormous expense is saved; the benefit of which, according to the now well understood Macy plan, is passed on to buyer. Other stores spend many thousands of dollars in building and decorating special rooms and sections for merchandising which are far out of the ordinary. To give an air of extreme exclusiveness, chic, Parisian atmosphere—call it what you may—elaborate partitions are put up and expensive decorators given carte-blanche. The result is beautiful, almost invariably. Shopping in such surroundings becomes a peculiar delight—particularly to the woman patron. But milady pays. In the expressive, if not elegant, old phrase she "pays through the nose."

That some New York shoppers may like to pay this way is not for a moment to be doubted, but that the majority do, Macy's stoutly refuses to believe. While the house has not hesitated to install certain very lovely "special" rooms—vide the salon for the display of its imported frocks—the main thought in the construction of its present home in Herald Square was to build a retail market-place which would afford honest, efficient, comfortable marketing at the lowest possible prices. This meant that it would be inadvisable, to say the least, to give the store the atmosphere of either a palace or a boudoir. This is a policy that has continued until this day.

None the less, Macy goods are displayed with the taste that makes them most desirable to the customer; psychological forethought, in a word. Novelties, of course, take precedence over staples—the articles that make the customer stop and investigate. Except under unusual conditions, the demand for staples does not have to be stimulated, and ordinarily no especial attempt is made to give them more than ordinary display. One underlying factor in the successful display of goods is to preserve harmonious color relations between them and, so far as possible, this harmony pervades the entire floor. The buying public would not tolerate a store where they heard profanity among the employees; and at Macy's they do not have to endure colors that swear at one another.

Held in high esteem by the public as well as by the store itself are the display windows which line the entire ground-floor frontage of the building on Broadway and on Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth Streets. Here merchandise is arranged by master window dressers under the general direction of the advertising department, for if the front windows of a house such as this are not advertising, what, then, is? Especially when the art of window dressing has come in recent years to be a finely developed art of its own. For many years before it left Fourteenth Street Macy's had a fame not merely nation-wide but fairly world-wide for its window displays—we already have referred to the wondrous Christmas pageants that it formerly held as a part of them. In this it was again a pioneer, blazing a new commercial path for its competitors to follow.

Because window display is recognized as advertising, the ceaseless work of the master window dressers upon the outer rim of the Macy store comes under the direct supervision of the advertising department which in turn reports direct to no less an authority than the triple partnership itself. Publicity is the great right-arm of the super-store of the America of today. Publicity not in one channel, but in a thousand. Macy's not only helps to dominate the advertising pages of the newspapers of New York and a good many miles round about it, its red star not only gleams in Herald Square, but in these very recent days upon the high-set electric hoardings of Times Square that blaze forth far into the night; it finds its way into the public thought here and there and everywhere. And yet, with due appreciation of every other medium of publicity, the street window of the store still remains one of the most important phases of its appeal to possible patrons.

Its displays are scheduled long in advance; are devised as carefully as the decoration of a home might be, or, better still, as Urban or Pogany would plan the stage-settings of a scene in the Metropolitan or at any one of the various "Follies" that one finds just north of the Opera House. A large staff of men is kept constantly at work dressing the windows, and this staff includes the carpenters, paper-hangers, painters and electricians who are needed to help prepare the special exhibits. Under the floor of the window next the principal entrance on Thirty-fourth Street there is a tank, which is used when a pool of water is required to carry out some scenic effect. It is capable of floating a canoe to suggest the joys of camping and the need of going to Macy's for one's vacation requisites—as well as for use in other capacities. Known in the store as the "parlor window" it has been made to represent pretty nearly everything from milady's bedroom to a glorified carpenter shop.

Window displays are regarded by Macy's as an important auxiliary to newspaper announcements. Very recently, during the few weeks before Christmas, a sale of overcoats was advertised. All the windows were then dressed with Christmas merchandise, but from one of them this was all removed and the sale overcoats substituted. For one day only. For upon the very next one the Christmas window was returned to its holly and mistletoe flavor.

Here is a pretty direct indication of the store's attitude towards its immensely valuable windows—if you do not consider them valuable inquire the price of the advertising signs in the Herald Square neighborhood. I asked its advertising manager if, in his opinion, the window space would not bring better returns if it were devoted to direct selling, instead of mere indirect selling through display. I had in the back of my mind some of the great Paris emporiums who think so little of window- and so much of selling-space that on bright warm days they spread some of their notions and novelty-counters right out upon the broad sidewalks of the Boulevards.