A school such as this must have teachers. It is futile to add that they must be specially trained and thoroughly competent in every way to fulfill the unusual task set before them. And this, of itself, has been a problem, not alone with Macy's, but with the other large department-stores of New York. They have co-operated to solve it, with the direct result that some two or three years ago retail store training became a practical factor in the city's educational system. Under the enthusiastic aid of Doctor Lee Galloway, its head, the successful and rapidly expanding business division of New York University created the school of retail selling, bearing the name of and affiliated with the parent institution. The merchants of New York raised a fund of $100,000 for the establishment and promotion of this enterprise and from it last June came its first graduating class—young men and women qualified to teach store training in the great bazaars of our modern Bagdad.
The purposes of this school are set forth succinctly in its first manual, which has come off the press. Its object is "to dignify retail selling through education in the following ways: To train teachers in retail selling for public high schools and for retail stores, to train employees of retail stores for executive positions and to do special research work for the department managers of retail stores."
In accordance with the first of these expressed avenues of its endeavors the Board of Estimate of the city of New York already has begun to move in full co-operation. A high school in the lower west side of Manhattan—the Haaren High School at Hubert and Collister Streets—has been designated as training center for this work. Girls are there being taught retail selling. Nearly one hundred already are entered in the course and within a few short months the larger stores of the city will begin to benefit by this highly practical educational work.
That this experiment will prove successful seems now to be well beyond the shadows of doubt. Yet such success will be in no small measure due to the individual efforts of Dr. Michael H. Lucey, principal of the Julia Richman High School—in West Thirteenth Street, just back of Macy's original store—who has devoted great energies to its launching. Convinced, from the outset, of the real necessity of a training course in retail selling in the city schools, Dr. Lucey makes no secret of his dubious fears at the beginning of the experiment:
"I honestly didn't see how we were going to do it," he says, in frankly discussing the entire matter, "the tradition in favor of an office career rather than a selling one in a store has so long ruled in the high schools of the city. There are several reasons for this—the most important one, in my mind, the feeling in the average high school girl's head that less education having been required in past years for the girl behind the counter than for the girl behind the typewriter, she lost a certain definite sort of caste, if she followed the first of these callings. Of course, that is utter rubbish. I have no hesitancy today in telling my girls that if they are looking for a genuine career retail selling is the thing for them. In office work, if they are very good, they may get up to forty or even fifty dollars a week but there they are pretty nearly sure to come to a standstill."
The skilled educator shakes his head as he says this.
"You see the difficulty is that so many girls coming out of schools such as these look upon business not as a boy would look at it, as a career with indefinite and permanent possibilities, but rather as a bridge between schooling and matrimony—a bridge of but four, or five, or six years. And when they are frank with me—and they often are—and tell me of this bridge that is in their minds, I am frank to advise office work. It offers better immediate returns—yet in the long run none that are even comparable with those of a high-grade department-store."
Following the successful plan of the University of Cincinnati in its technical engineering courses, the students down at Haaren are grouped into working pairs, which means that, in practice and working in alternation, each goes to school every other week. In the week that one is in the classroom, her partner is in one of the city stores studying retail selling at first hand. When, at the end of six days, she returns to her schoolroom she has many questions derived from her actual practice to put to her instructor. So the practice and the principles of this new hard-headed science are kept hand in hand with its actual workings.
Nor is this all: some six or seven hundred young women—and young men, too—are also making a special study of retail selling in the city's evening schools. A single course at the DeWitt Clinton High School is quite typical of these. Four evenings a week, for two hours each evening, a huge class is being taught—in an even more detailed way than is possible under a department-store roof—the principles and manufacture of textiles. In these classes a goodly number of the Macy family are enrolled. Another goodly enrollment goes into the special lectures given by a museum instructor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on certain evenings and Sunday afternoons.
Truly, indeed, education has become the handmaiden of merchandising.