Through the hands of these there pours a constant and a terrific stream of merchandise. The conveying system in the basement of the Herald Square store has a generous maximum carrying capacity of five thousand packages an hour—a capacity which sometimes is actually reached toward the close of an exceptionally busy day, say toward the end of the pre-Christmas season. Twenty-five thousand packages is an average day's work for that basement room; upon occasion it has gone well over forty-one thousand. It should be borne in mind, moreover, that a package does not always represent a single purchase; in fact, it rarely does. Inside of one assembled package—generally assembled, as we saw in a previous chapter, at the store's transfer desk—there may be all the way from two to ten separate parcels. You may take your own guess as to the average number.
Here, then, is the great and complicated system in its simplest form. Its ramifications are many and astonishing. For instance, milady is apt at times to change her mind. Yes, she is. And send the package back. Even though not as often in Macy's as in the charge account stores. Here is another decided benefit in the cash system—not alone to the store, but, because of its habit of passing on its economies, to its patrons as well. Yet in the course of a year a considerable number of packages must come back. Despite a thorough educational system and constant oversight and admonition there is bound to be a percentage of incorrect address slips. These and other causes produce a certain definite return flow of merchandise; which must have its own forms and safeguards, for the protection both of the store and its customer. They all make detail, but extremely necessary detail.
In the basement there is a store room whose broad shelves hold a variety of merchandise, bought and paid for, but never delivered. The store makes at least two attempts to deliver every article given to its delivery department. That department is unusually clever with telephone books, club lists and other less used avenues of finding recalcitrant addresses. But there come times when even its resourcefulness is entirely baffled. Then the undelivered goods must go to the store room until some properly accredited human being comes up somewhere, sometime to demand them. In an astonishing number of cases the some one does not come up sometime or somewhere. In such a case after a fair length of time the goods themselves go back to stock. But the record of the transaction stays accessible in the store's files, so that its bureau of investigation, at any future time, may order a duplicate of the lost shipment out of the stock—out of the open market if the stock then fails to hold it—in order that Macy's may keep full faith with its patrons.
Such a holdover is, of course, to be entirely distinguished from those which are held in advance of delivery; in certain cases up to thirty days without advance payment, in others up to sixty upon partial payment and in still others up to six months after full payment. This last, however, is a merchandising procedure quite common to most retail establishments.
One feature of the delivery department remains for our consideration; the branch of it which is situated upon the ninth floor and which, oddly enough, handles the heaviest merchandise shipped out of the store—furniture. There are, of course, heavy shipments that go out of the basements—hundreds of them on an average that are entirely too heavy for the conveyor-chutes and the "revolving-ring." A notable one of these is an electric washing-machine, which, crated, will weigh slightly in excess of two hundred pounds. Shipments such as these go to the basement on hand trucks and by the freight elevators. There they are boxed and crated; often a considerable job. As a rule the expert packers of the delivery department can put even a fairly sizable or unwieldy purchase into boxing within twelve or fifteen minutes; an elaborate and fragile bit of statuary has been known to take a full hour and a half before it was safely prepared for wagon shipment.
Likewise the furniture craters upon the ninth floor oftimes find their job a sizable one indeed. The boxing of a divan or a dining-room table is no easy task whatsoever. And in cases where the delivery is to be made within the limits of Macy service it is often avoided entirely. The freight elevators of the store are of the largest size ever designed; so big that a heavy motor truck is no particular strain upon their individual capacity. One of these trucks can be and is driven straight to and from the ninth floor. After it has reached the department the placing of fine furniture in its cavernous interior is merely a nicety of planning and arrangement, a skillful use of ropes and blankets and padding. The truck may run to any point within forty or fifty miles of the store at less cost than crating; even though crating be done at cost, itself.
So spread the tentacles of Macy's, those long arms of distribution that keep the store from ever being a merely abstract thing. The bright red and yellow wagons and trucks—each bearing its good-luck symbol of the red star—carry Herald Square to the far limits of a far-flung city. The men who ride them are upon the outposts of salesmanship. Yet through system and through organization they are forever closely connected with it. The blood that courses through your finger-tips comes straight from your heart. The life-blood of understanding, of enthusiasm, of morale, that Macy's outriders bring with them is the life-blood of the humanized machine that functions so steadily there in the heart of Manhattan.