"Harlem and The Bronx" is a sizable room for itself. The further end of the second conveyor to receive milady's precious package rests upon a table in its very center. Roundabout the table are small compartments or bins, each about the size of a small packing case; each numbered and corresponding to a definite wagon route or run. Run No. 87 (the number is purely fictitious) takes in West One Hundred and Fourth Street. Into compartment No. 87 goes milady's packages. But not, of course, until the clerical young man technically known as the sheet-writer has made a record of it. Into his records, also, go all the other packages destined that day for that particular room. If there should be, as sometimes happens, an overplus of packages for the single run, then it is the business of one of the assistant superintendents of delivery to meet the emergency either by stretching momentarily the runs of the adjoining routes or by sending a special wagon up from the main store. Experience and judgment must cut the cloth to fit the case.
Under any ordinary procedure milady's package will go out early in the morning of the day following her purchase. That, at least, is the store's ordinary guarantee of delivery. As a matter of fact, it does far better than this. On ordinary days, when weather and street conditions in Manhattan have not gone in conditions of near-impassability, there are at least two regular deliveries to every part of the island south of One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street, with a single one at least to every other part of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, to say nothing of the downtown portions of Jersey City and Hoboken. Easily said, this thing. But when one comes to realize how tremendously widespread the metropolitan district of Greater New York is these days, the performance of it becomes a transportation marvel, a masterpiece of organization.
I shall not bore you with a description of the printed forms, the checks and counter checks that accompany the delivery of milady's package. It is enough to say that they are both complete and necessary. The complications of C. O. D. add greatly to their perplexities. For, discourage it as they may and do, the department-store owners of New York never have been able to wean milady from the joys of this method of shopping. When she says "C. O. D." in Macy's the salesclerk immediately and courteously replies: "Have you tried having a depositor's account, madam?" A good many of them have, and all who have have liked the method. Yet the C. O. D. still has its great appeal. And out of all the deliveries from the big store in Herald Square more than half of them are collect-on-delivery. This means, in turn, a good deal of complication for the delivery department. Its drivers have to be cashiers, in miniature. When they report at the main store at half-past seven in the morning, each is furnished with five dollars in change; a sum which is doubled in the case of the suburban drivers. Moreover, for the correct handling of the forms, a double amount of care and understanding is required. One does not wonder that the department-store proprietors discourage the C. O. D.
Yet it all requires a high type of wagon representative. Hardly less than the salesclerk does the wagon driver of the store have it in his power to make or lose friends for his house. His is no small opportunity for real salesmanship. The big stores realize this, and select these men with great care and discernment. They know that the man who shouts "Macy's" up the areaway or elevator-shaft once or twice a week is apt to become the same sort of good family friend and ally as the iceman or the butcher's boy. The man knows that, too: particularly in the vicinity of Christmas week. His own trials are many and varied. Apartment house superintendents and janitors, with prejudices of their own, are rarely co-operative, generally obstructive, in fact. Some people—even store patrons—are naturally mean. They take out all their meanness upon the department-store man who, because of his very position, is unable to strike back.
Yet the job has its compensations, aside from the warm remembrances of the holiday season. People, in the main, are decent after all. If Mrs. Jinks, who lives in Albemarle Road, Flatbush, is out at the matinee or the movies for the afternoon, Mrs. Blinks, who lives next door, will take in her packages. The Macy man has been long enough on the route to know that by this time. Such knowledge is a part of his stock in trade. He must not only know the regular patrons of the store, but all of their neighbors. While by the correct and courteous handling of both he may not only retain trade for it but bring new customers to its doors.
Let us now suppose that milady does not live in either Manhattan, Brooklyn or the Bronx, but in one of those smart suburbs: Forest Hills, New Rochelle, Englewood or the Oranges, to pick four or five out of many. She still is well within the limits of Macy's own delivery service. If she lives in the first of these—Forest Hills—she will be served, not direct from the Herald Square establishment, but from the little Long Island community of Queens. Fifteen wagon and motor truck routes run from the Macy sub-station there, which in turn is fed by the merchandise coming out over the great Queensborough bridge, each evening, on heavy five-ton trucks. And, to go back even further, these have been filled from the super-sized compartments at the end of the conveyor-chute marked "Suburban."
Similarly, if she dwell in New Rochelle, she will be served by one of the fifteen motor trucks running out from the sub-station at Woodlawn, remembered by travelers upon the trains to Boston chiefly as the place of the enormous cemetery. It serves the great suburban territory north of the direct delivery routes out from the main store—a line drawn through Kingsbridge and Pelham Avenue—out as far as Ossining, Mt. Kisco and Stamford.
Englewood and the New Jersey territory roundabout are served by Macy's Hackensack sub-station, with nine more routes; while the Oranges, mighty Newark, Montclair and that immediate vicinage draws its merchandise through a fourth sub-station, right in the heart of Newark, itself, and operating ten regular motor truck routes. The fifth and last all-the-year sub-station is at West New Brighton, Staten Island. It serves that far-flung and least populated of New York's five boroughs, Richmond.
In the summer months another sub-station is added to the list, at Seabright, down on the New Jersey coast, and serving all those populous resorts from the Atlantic Highlands on the north to Spring Lake on the south. This is an expensive feature of Macy service, and one for which the store receives no extra compensation. It is one of the many expensive things that must be charged to profit-and-loss or the somewhat indefinite "overhead"—indefinite enough when one comes to consider its ramifications, but always fairly definite in its drain upon the daily financial balances of the store.
At each of these sub-stations there are, in addition to the fairly obvious necessary facilities for re-sorting the merchandise, complete garage facilities for the wagons and trucks running out from them; these, of course, are in addition to the store's main stables and garages in West Nineteenth Street and also in West Thirty-eighth, Manhattan. Together all of these form a very considerable fleet upon wheels, with a personnel in keeping. For the delivery routes alone, and taking no account of the sizable force employed in the upkeep of vehicles and horses, there are employed, in the city service of the store, one hundred and ninety drivers and chauffeurs, with one hundred and eighty-six helpers, and in the suburban service, seventy-four drivers and eighty-six helpers.