The Romance of a Great Store

by Edward Hungerford

The elevator as well as the escalator will play a vastly important part in the fabrication of the new Macy's. The one has by no means been overshadowed by the growing importance of the other. There are to be in all fifty-six elevators, of one type or another, in the reconstructed building. Of all these none is more interesting than the ingenious lifts by which whole motor trucks, laden as well as empty, are carried into the structure, up eleven floors to the merchandising reception rooms and down into the basement and sub-basement for filling for the city delivery.

Now are we back again to the handling of that merchandise stream which we first began to consider but a moment ago. At the beginning we can make assertion that in the entire history of retail selling no more ingenious scheme has been devised for the orderly and rapid movement of goods in and out of a department-store.

This flow is kept normal and downward by the simple process of first taking the loaded incoming trucks up to the eleventh floor of the building for unloading. In the present store—as well as in a good many other stores—a great amount of immensely valuable ground floor space is given over to the various functions of receiving and distributing merchandise. We have seen long ago how a modern store values this ground floor space. For instance, in relation to the value of, let us say, the third floor, it is about as ten to one.

Neither does Macy's propose to clutter the sidewalk frontage of even the least important of its frontage streets—Thirty-fifth Street—by long lines of motor trucks or drays, receiving or discharging goods. In fact this sort of thing has become practically impossible in the really important cities of the America of today. If municipal ordinance permits it, public sentiment rarely does. And the keen merchant of today—to say nothing of tomorrow—never ignores public sentiment.

So, to the eleventh floor the motor trucks must go—on two huge high-speed freight elevators which open directly into Thirty-fifth Street. Our horseless age makes this possible. The modern architect, planning for the congested heart of the island of Manhattan, can indeed and reverently thank God for the coming of the gasoline engine and the electric storage battery—to say nothing of the engineers who helped to make them possible.

Upon that eleventh floor there will extend, for the full width of the building, a giant quay, or high-level platform, with its stout floor at the exact level of the floors of the standardized motor trucks of Macy's (the comparatively small proportion of "foreign" or outside vehicles that bring merchandise to the store are to be unloaded at the Thirty-fifth Street doorways and not admitted within the building). The unloading under the present well-developed system is a short matter; the trucks may quickly be despatched back to the street once again; while the refuse and debris of the packers goes to appropriate bins behind them.

Through chutes and sliding-ways the merchandise descends a single floor to the great tenth story—extending through both the present building and the new one to come. Here it will be quickly classified and placed upon a conveyor which moves at the level of and between the two sides of a double table some five or six hundred feet in length which will extend the greater part of the length of the enlarged store. From this center table—the backbone of the whole scheme of this particular distribution—will extend in parallel aisles at right angles to it, whole hundreds of bins and shelves and compartments. The entire arrangement will resemble nothing so much as a huge double gridiron, with many tiny interstices.

Now do you begin to see the operation of this scheme? If not, let me endeavor to make it more clear to you. This miniature and silent city, whose straight and regular streets are lined in turn with miniature apartment houses of merchandise, is zoned—into six great zones. Every selling department of the store—118 in the present one—is assigned to one or the other of these zones. There it keeps its reserve stock. It is, in truth, a reservoir.

Now, see the plan function! The men's shoe department is out of a certain small part of its highly diversified stock. It sends a requisition up to its representative upon the tenth floor. It is a matter of minutes—almost of seconds—to locate the necessary cartons in the simplified and scientifically arranged compartments and shelves; a matter certainly of mere seconds to despatch them down to the selling department.

For this, the second thrust of the goods-stream through the new Macy's, especial provisions have been made by the installation of six so-called utility units. Three of these are placed at equal intervals along the Thirty-fourth Street wall of the enlarged building; the other three at equal intervals upon its Thirty-fifth Street edge. Each unit consists of one elevator (large enough to hold two of the rolling-carts, standardized for the floor movement of merchandise through the aisles of the selling departments of the store), one small dummy elevator (for the handling of single packages of unusual size or type), and a spiral chute (this last for the despatch of sold goods).