Chapter I: A Day in a Great Store (5)

It is house policy--sound policy--to encourage employees to look out not only for the store's interest, but for their own. An ambitious salesman is indeed an asset; and there are ways of keeping him ambitious. There is, for instance, the system of bonuses for punctuality, which takes the final form of extra holidays in the summertime. A week's holiday with pay is given without fail to each and every employee of eight months' standing. But a record of good attendance and punctuality for fifty long weeks brings another week of vacation, also with full pay. Department-stores not so long ago used to penalize their workers for tardiness. The new Macy plan works best, however.

The list of those bonus possibilities is long. There is, of course, chief amongst them, the bonus which takes the concrete form of a sales commission. The salesclerk is set a moderate quota for his or her week's work. On sales that reach above this figure he or she is paid a percentage commission. And, lest you may be tempted to dismiss this statement with a mere shrug of the shoulders, as a perfunctory thing perhaps, permit me to tell you that but last year a retail salesman in the furniture department earned in excess of $6,000 in wages and commissions.

One other thing before we are done with this main chapter on the Macy family and starting up another which shall show the super-household at its play; it is a thing closely associated both with department-store employment and training: this "special squad" which has become so distinctive a feature of the big red-brick selling enterprise in Herald Square. Concretely, it is a group of college graduates--the heads of the firm are themselves college men and have none of the contempt for education that has become so blatant a thing in the minds of so many "self-made business captains" of today--who desire to enter upon this fascinating and comparatively new field of department-store service.

As one of the executives of the department of training himself says, "Many of these young grads come in here with the rattle of their brand-new diplomas so loud in their ears that for quite a while they can't hear anything else."

Yet they are good material--as a rule, uncommonly good material. So Dr. Michael Lucey says, and Dr. Lucey knows. As a supplement to his educational work in the commercial high schools he entered Macy's last summer and spent the two months of his vacation in the special squad, studying the store from a variety of intimate and personal angles. On his first day in it, the distinguished educator sold clothing--men's clothing--and he sold to his first customer, an accomplishment which he notes with no little pride. His pride at the moment was large. But the next moment was destined to take a fall. A floor manager down the aisle espied the new clerk.

"Don't let those trousers sweep the floor," he admonished.

And the educator had his first taste of store discipline.

Sooner or later all these young men out of college get that first taste. It does not harm them. And it is not very long before they begin to observe that, after all, there are still a few things about which they know practically nothing. After which their real education begins.

A department-store is, among other things, a great melting pot. An Englishman who came into Macy's special squad last year inquired just what work might be expected of him. He was told.

"Manual labor," he protested, "I can't think of it. I wear the silver badge."

Which meant that he was one of the King's own--a pensioner of the late war. The store executive who first handled this bit of human raw material possessed a deal of real tact; most of them do. He smiled gently upon the Britisher.

"After all," he suggested, "you know you don't have to tell your King that you had to use your two good hands in hard work."

The Englishman saw the point. He laughed, shook hands and went to work. In six months he was an executive, himself. It's a way that they have at Macy's. And here is part of the way.

Manual labor is demanded invariably of those who enlist in the special squad. It has a regular system through which each of its workers must pass. First he is given the history and development of the store and of its policies. This work is followed by a week on the receiving platform and then a good stiff session in the marking-room. The college boy follows the merchandise along a little further. He proceeds for a while to sell it--then does the work of a section manager. After which there come, in logical sequence, the delivery department, the bureau of investigation, the comptroller's office, the tube system, an intensive study of the departments of employment and of training. These are not only studied but written reports are made upon them. After which he should have a pretty fair idea of the store and the things for which it stands.

The course is only varied in slight detail for the woman college graduate. Macy's has naught but the highest regard for the gentler sex--not alone as its patrons but as members of its staff--yesterday, today and tomorrow. A woman may not be able to handle heavy cases upon the receiving platform. But there are other sorts of cases that she may handle--and frequently with a tact and diplomacy not often shown by the more oppressed sex. I might cite a hundred instances from within the store where she has shown both--and initiative as well. But I shall give only one--where initiative played the largest part. Some few months ago a young woman who has climbed high in the store organization, to the important post of buyer of a most important line of muslin wearing apparel, found herself in France, but a few hours before the steamer upon which she was booked to sail to the United States was to depart from Southampton. To take a steamer across the Channel and then catch her boat was quite out of the question. She did the next best thing. She hopped on an aeroplane and flew from Paris to London; seemingly in almost less time than it here takes to tell it. She caught her boat. Her instructions were to catch the boat. And long since she had acquired the Macy habit of obeying orders.

Upon this, again, a whole volume might be written--upon the thoroughness of an organization which really organizes, a training department that really trains, a system which really systematizes. And all under the title of a family group--in which affection and tact and understanding come into play quite as often as discipline and energy and initiative.

VII. The Family at Play

In the business machine of yesterday there were no adjustments for play. It prided itself upon its efficiency. And in the next breath it proclaimed that such efficiency left no room whatsoever for such foolishness as recreation. Today we know much better. We know that play--healthy, uniform play in a decent amount--is one of the very finest of tonics for the human frame. And so count it as one of the very highest factors in our modern schemes of efficiency.

Macy's plays and makes no secret of the fact. On the contrary, it is intensely proud of its provisions for the welfare of its workers. Industrial recreation is no mere idle phrase to it. In hard fact no small portion of the remarkable esprit de corps of the store is due to its well organized recreational and social service work. In a large measure this part of the operation of the store corresponds to what the War and Navy Departments did through their Commissions on Training Camp Activities during the great war. Bearing in mind our likening Macy's to an army in an earlier chapter, the parallel now becomes a close one indeed. Organized recreation promoted better team work in the war; it now promotes better team work in business. Ergo, it is for the welfare of Macy's that it shall promote organized recreation beneath its own roof.

And yet that very phrase, "welfare work," is not often used underneath that roof. It has the flavor of patronage which is so wholly lacking in this family of thousands, and so it is thrust forever into the discard. "The bunch" gets together--you see, you may call the family by almost any name that pleases you best--various groups are forever assembling at the Men's Club or the Community Club and making plans for their numerous activities. And these last cover a surprisingly large range.

Any male employee of the store may join the Macy Men's Club. It is a wholly self-governing body and, aside from making up the inevitable deficits that accrue, the store has no paternalistic or direct attitude whatsoever toward it. The club itself is situated at 156 West Thirty-fifth Street, just west of the store, but entirely separated from it. It occupies two floors of an extremely comfortable building. In its externals it differs very little from any other sort of men's club. There are a reading room and a smoking room where, toward the close of the day and well into the evening, its members may relax. And there is a restaurant serving extremely good meals.

It is only as one pokes beneath the surface that he begins to find out how very real this small institution, that is an offshoot of the larger one, really is. Its restaurant serves meals at considerably less than cost. And the fact that this club is regarded as something more than a mere combination of eating-place and rest-room is shown by its organization activities in other directions. For example, its members interest themselves in general athletics to the extent that, in the proper seasons, they have very creditable teams of baseball, basketball, football and the like, while occasional outings with suitable field events are arranged. Each Thursday evening there is organized athletic work in a large private gymnasium that is especially hired for the purpose.

In fact it is at this last point that the Men's Club comes in contact with the Community Club, which is the nucleus organization covering other recreational activities among the women, the girls and the younger men of the store family. For, by careful planning, both of these clubs manage to use the big gymnasium of a single evening, while, after the athletic work is over, the floor is cleared and there is dancing until going-home time.

These comforts are not given without some cost to the Macy folk. That would be very bad business indeed. It has been so decided long since. And so, while it may be human nature to be ever on the lookout for "something for nothing," it is quite as human to derive very much additional enjoyment from the things for which one pays. Even the suggestion of charity is not pleasant. And with this in view these clubs charge nominal sums for their privileges. In so doing they earn the respect of those who share in them.

Dues for the Men's Club are placed at three dollars a year--that surely is a nominal figure. These go toward the development of club activities outside of its actual running expenses (rent, the restaurant, etc.). The gymnasium fee is another three dollars, which is much less than one would pay for a similar facility elsewhere in New York.

The scale of charges for the Community Club is quite different. The dues here are but twenty-five cents a year--its membership is made up mainly of lower-salaried folk--with small extra charges for special activities. For instance, the Spanish class, which is taught by one of the Spanish interpreters in the store and which has a constant attendance of about forty, costs its pupils the very inconsiderable sum of five cents a lesson. The gymnasium charge is kept in a like ratio. There are a few others in addition. The aggregate cost, however, of as many activities as an average employee can take up is of little moment or burden to him or to her--nothing as compared with the sense of independence that goes with the small act of payment.

The Choral Club, under the direction of a competent leader, meets Wednesday evenings in the big recreation room on the third floor of the store, with a usual attendance of about two hundred men and women who are trained in part singing and in chorus work of various sorts. This is not only enjoyable and popular for its own sake but it has an added value in leading toward the organizing of the store's talent for concerts and for musical plays.

And it has such talent. Do not forget that--not even for a passing moment. It would be odd, indeed, if a family of five thousand folk did not develop upon demand much real histrionic and artistic ability of every sort. And when such potentialities are fostered and encouraged, the results--well, they are such as to warn Florenz Ziegfeld and the rest of the Forty-second Street theatrical producers to keep a sharp eye, indeed, upon Macy's.

On Monday evenings, the entire winter long and well into the spring, the Dramatic Club meets and here every budding Maxine Elliott or Ina Claire has her full opportunity. On Tuesday there is a get-together evening--one begins to think with all these evenings so neatly filled of the calendar of a real social enterprise--and then one sees the store family at its fullest relaxation. Here was a recent Tuesday night. It was just before Christmas and the store was approaching the annual peak load of its year's traffic. Yet it had no intention whatsoever of relaxing a single one of its social endeavors.

On this particular Tuesday evening our salesgirl--the one whom we saw but a moment ago being inducted into the selling organism of the store--made her first personal acquaintance with the Community Club. Let her tell her own story, and in her own way:

"Up in the recreation room a few hundred of us gathered for a regular party. Some few of us had gone home after store hours for our dinner; the others had had it right in the store's own lunchroom. It surely is great the way that you _can_ get a meal there in Macy's at any time you are staying late--either on duty or on pleasure.

"At about six-thirty the evening's program got under way--so that the many friendly, chattering groups of girls in the big room finally had to simmer down to something approaching silence. Then the Choral Club began singing for us--some good, old-time Christmas carols first, and then some other songs. All of us joined finally in the chorus, leaving the club to carry the difficult parts. They could do that all right, too. Mr. Janpolski, their leader, finally gave us a solo and after that there was a grand march led by our own beloved Marjorie Sidney. Everybody joined in--not only in body, but in spirit. It was like Washington's Birthday in the big gym up at Northampton. Messenger girls, college graduates, salesfolk, deliverymen, managers--everyone was just the same in that blessed hour. Distinctions of the store were gone. We were boys and girls--some of us a bit grown up and grayed to be sure, but all with Peter Pannish hearts--having a real party once again.

"The grand march ended in dancing for every one--with a jolly negro at the piano doing his level best to uphold the reputation of his race for really spontaneous music. Finally, after many encore dances, everybody withdrew from the floor and out came Mr. Salek, the director of the Men's Club, and Miss Knowles, doing an almost professional dance. The Castles had very little on this couple--the way Salek lifted his partner and then let her down--slowly, slowly, still more slowly--reminded me of Maurice and Walton. Their performance brought down the house. Of course they had to respond to encores; again and again and again.

"Following this--for Macy's believes that variety is the spice of all life--a Junior recited the unforgetable ''Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house.' She really was a darling. And how Christmassy she looked, with her big butterfly sash and her hairbow of scarlet tulle.... Next on the program came dancing--for everybody. First, however, there was another march, so that each couple received a number--while every little while certain numbers (the couples that held them) were eliminated from the floor. The nicest part about this elimination dance, as they called it, was that instead of only the last couple getting the prize, as is generally done--every couple, as soon as its number was called and it left the floor, went over to a big chimney-top, with a proverbially jolly 'Santa' peering out of it. There Santa gave to each one a little gift, such as a whistle, a stick of candy, or a jolly little rattle. Then, after more dancing, refreshments were served by gaily garbed Junior waitresses. After which the dancing continued until the merry Community Club Christmas dance was entirely over."

Already I have touched upon the annual vacation of the Macy worker--one week with pay after eight months continuous employment, two weeks after two years, three weeks after five years, and a month after twenty-five years of service. A charming retreat among the hills of Sullivan County, eighty-seven miles from New York and, through the foresight of the management of the store, purchased long ago, provides an ideal vacation spot for the Macy girls who wish to spend their holidays among truly rural surroundings. For this purpose a large farm house and a hundred acres of surrounding land were acquired by Macy's and more than fifty thousand dollars spent in enlarging the house, beautifying the grounds and otherwise making them suitable for their summertime uses. In addition to the big and immaculately white farm house there are three cottages upon the property. As many as sixty-five girls can be accommodated at a single time upon it.

Three jumps or so from the main house and stretched out in front of it is a lake; a regular lake, if you please, big enough for boating and for bathing, although not so large that one of the keen-eyed chaperones may keep her weather eye on those of her charges whose tastes run toward water sports. In this Adamless Eden bloomers and middy blouses are _de rigueur_, and as the few restraints imposed are only those inspired by ordinary good sense, the girls experience the real joys of living.

All of these activities and interests--and many, many more besides--are faithfully chronicled in the Macy house organ, _Sparks_. Here is a monthly magazine--of some sixteen pages, each measuring seven by ten inches--that in appearance alone would grace any newsstand, while its contents almost invariably bear out the attractiveness of its cover designs. Practically the entire publication is prepared by its staff, which, in turn, is composed of members of the Macy family.

House organs, such as this, are, of course, no novelty in the American business world of today. There probably are not less than fifty department-stores alone which are now printing brisk contemporaries of _Sparks_. The internal publications of a house, such as Macy's, have long since come to be recognized as one of its most valuable media for the promotion of morale. It costs money, but it is money well expended. So says modern business. And modern business ought to know. For it has tested the results. And the house organ long since became one of the really valuable aides.

Here, then, in _Sparks_ is not only a medium in which the Macy folks may come the better to know about one another, a bulletin board upon which the heads of the house may from time to time carry very direct and sincere messages to their big family, but a mouthpiece in which the embryo literary genius may become articulate. And, lest you be tempted to believe that I have permitted simile to carry me quite away from fact, let me show you a single instance--there are a number of others beside--in which a real literary genius has come to bloom underneath the great roof that looks down upon Herald Square:

His pen name is Francis Carlin--but his real name, the one under which he entered Macy's, is James Francis Carlin MacDonnell. Of him _Current Opinion_ but a year or two ago said: "The writer (Carlin) ... was until a few weeks ago a floorwalker in one of the big department-stores of New York City (Macy's) and was discovered by Padraic Colum. He had his book obscurely printed and it has been unobtainable at bookstores until recently.... It has the true Celtic quality. The dedication alone is worth the price of admission: 'It is here that the book begins and it is here, that a prayer is asked for the soul of the scribe who wrote it for the glory of God, the honor of Erin and the pleasure of the woman who came from both--his mother.'"

Mr. MacDonnell has written two books: this first, _My Ireland_, and more recently the _Cairn of Stones_. That he has great talent is again attested by _The Boston Transcript_ which said recently: "Mr. Carlin's Celtic poems, ballads and lyrics are nearer the fine perfection of the native poets belonging to the Celtic renaissance than those produced by any poet of Irish blood born in America."

After which, who may now dare say that genius may not blossom in a department-store? And even were it not for the gaining glory of Carlin, the pages of any current issue of _Sparks_ would show that there is more than a deal of artistic merit in the widespread ranks of the Macy family. The desire for self-expression is never stunted. And the pages of its avenue of expression are read by none more closely than the members of the family who hold the ownership of Macy's.

And yet these men--the heads of the great merchandising house--are not only accessible to their business family through the printed word. They are not standoffish. On the contrary, they are most widely known throughout the store; most reachable, both within their offices and without. Take the single matter of grievances, for a most important instance: A Macy worker may feel that justice on some point or other is being denied him by a superior. In such a case he has immediate recourse to any one of three expedients: he may take his case to the department of training, to the general manager of the store, or to one of the officers of the corporation. As a rule, however, the difficulty can be straightened out in the first of these avenues of appeal, which is an automatic clearing-house for all matters of personnel. The heads of this department have been chosen as much as anything for the sympathy which enables them to review any employee's case intelligently and fairly and for the influence that makes it possible for them to see at all times that full justice is being done. While the fact that the worker, himself, may take the matter to the general manager or even to one of the three members of the firm, is a practical guarantee against persecution of any sort.

Recreation in the modern store stands side by side with education in perfecting the individual employee]

Just off the corner of the recreation room on the third floor is the private office of the assistant superintendent of training. Her title sounds rather formidable and does justice neither to her job nor to her personality: for in reality she combines the qualities of a charming hostess, an efficient manager and a mother confessor.

In the Macy book of information for employees there is a paragraph under the heading, "Department of Training," which says: "It is the purpose of this department to interest itself in all the employees of this organization. Do not hesitate to go with your troubles to the assistant superintendent of training, whose duty it is to interest herself in you: both in the store and at your home. She will be glad to give you advice, both in business and in personal matters."

And so she has her hands full, and sometimes her heart as well; for, among five thousand folk of every sort and kind, there are bound to be many perplexing personal problems and troubles, to which the very best kind of help is the kindly and disinterested advice of a sympathetic and understanding person. And when that person is a woman--a woman of rare tact--the problem is generally apt to approach its solution. Which makes for friendship, not merely between the worker and that woman, but between the worker and the store. And so still another rivet is clinched in the great morale bridge between the business machine and the human units that enable it to function so very well indeed. And the Macy spirit becomes an even more tangible thing.

As one goes through the store he finds many evidences of the things that go to upbuild that spirit. It may be only a printed sign cautioning courtesy and cheerfulness, not merely between the store workers and its patrons, but between the members of the Macy family, themselves. "A smile with every package and a 'thank you' as good-bye," rings one. And remember that other, again more cautious: "In speaking say 'we' and 'our,' not 'I' and 'mine.'" It may be the warm hand of friendship from the member of the reception committee to the new girl that comes to work under the Herald Square roof, or it may be any of the long-planned, coolly devised methods of social justice to the store employee. These last are never to be overlooked.

For instance, three months after the day that a new employee first arrives to work at Macy's, membership in the Macy Mutual Aid Association becomes automatic. In no small way it becomes a real part of his job. It is the object of the M. M. A. A. to provide and maintain a fund for the assistance of its members during sickness and of their families or dependents in case of death. Dues in this association are graded according to the worker's salary, consist of one per cent. of the salary up to thirty dollars; while the sick benefits are two-thirds of the salary, limited by a benefit of twenty dollars. The death benefits are five times the weekly salary, with a minimum of sixty dollars and a maximum of one hundred and fifty dollars.

It is obvious that these dues do not of themselves pay the benefits. The house "chips in." Yet not through sympathy, but through one of the tenets of good business as we moderns have now begun to know it.

"It would be poor business for me, indeed," said a silk manufacturer of Connecticut to me not long ago, "to let my people become sick. I want no germ diseases in my mills. Neither do I want the mills to cease their continuous operation. That, too, is poor business. And so the sickness that may cost my worker ten dollars may easily cost me twenty-five--in the stoppage of my plant, alone."

The control of the Macy Mutual Aid Association is, moreover, vested solely in the hands of the store employees. An itemized statement of its receipts and its disbursements as well as its proceedings is posted each month on the store bulletin boards and printed in _Sparks_, so that every member of the organization may know its exact affairs. It decidedly does not work in the dark.

I should be derelict, indeed, in regard to this whole question of health in modern industry--and of the particular modern industry of which this book treats--if I neglected in these pages that corner of the high-set eighth floor--flooded by sunshine during the greater part of each pleasant day--where sits the Macy hospital, conducted by the Macy Mutual Aid Association. It is, of course, solely an emergency hospital, yet one where doctors, nurses, dentists and a chiropodist are constantly on duty. Three doctors--two men and one woman--consult with and prescribe for the patients, two dentists look after their teeth, and a chiropodist takes care of that prime asset to all salespeople--the feet. Those members of the hospital staff are professional men and women of the first rank and they work with the best and latest equipment. Although the emergency hospital is primarily for the services of the store workers it stands also at the service of any one who may come into the building and need its services. For instance, in case a customer becomes ill, a wheelchair is sent, and he or she, as the case may be, is taken to the hospital for immediate restorative treatment.

One or two final phases of this family life upon a huge scale in the very heart of New York and I am done with it. Thrift, in the Macy category of the making of a good worker, comes only next to good health. Under that same widespread roof there is a savings bank for the sole use of Macy folk. Any amount from five cents upward is accepted as a deposit and the fact that good use is made of this constant incentive to thrift is evidenced by the continued and prosperous operation of the institution. It has not been necessary to organize it as a full-fledged savings bank. At the end of each day it transfers its funds, by means of a special messenger, to one of the largest of New York savings banks which handles the accounts directly. The law does not permit a savings bank in the State of New York to open branches--else that would have been done at Macy's long ago. The messenger method was the only feasible substitute.

Believing that even the most provident may occasionally have good reasons, indeed, for wishing to borrow money, the heads of the house have set aside a permanent fund as a loan reserve for the Macy folk. Any one who has been in the store's employ for at least three months may, upon advancing even ordinarily satisfactory reasons, borrow from this fund. The limit is a sum which can be repaid in ten weekly installments. No security is required nor is any interest charged. The employee is bound by nothing but his honor.

That sixty-four years of continuous operation have established the commercial success of Macy's should be patent to you by this time. But now that you have known of the present-day family that dwells beneath its roof, you may ask: Has this policy toward its personnel worked out in hard practice? The question is indeed a fair one. To carry it still further, is this machine of modern business humanized and inspired in fact as well as in theory? One cannot help but think of the machine. Machines _are_ hard. Generally they are fabricated in that hardest of all metals--steel. Can steel be warmed and tempered? Can the fact be recognized that the units of the Macy store are human and warm; and not steel and cold?

I think so. I imagine that you would have the answer to all these questions if you could talk for a little time with Jimmie Woods, whom we saw, but a short time hence, as a push-cart horse for the early Macy's and who has come today to be the assistant superintendent of the store's delivery department. His new job requires much more push than that old-time one. As a caption-line in a recent issue of _Sparks_ aptly said: "Jimmie Woods delivers the goods." Metaphorically speaking, the house of Macy does the same thing. And at no point more than in its treatment of its human factors.

The day was not so very long ago when the life of a salesperson, even in a New York store of the better class, was not a particularly enviable thing. We saw, when we discussed the earlier Macy's, the long hours and the low wages of the rank and file of the organization. These things have changed today--in all department-stores that are worthy of the name. Public opinion was partly responsible for the change. But I think quite as large a factor was the realization that gradually was forced upon the minds of the merchants themselves that the old methods were poor business methods. Macy's knows that today. We have seen the man who came to New York fifteen years ago with eleven dollars and a suitcase come to a high-salaried position with the house today; the retail furniture salesman earning over six thousand dollars a year, the twenty-five buyers at ten thousand a year and upward, as well as those at twenty-five thousand a year and upward. And we know that every one of these men and women have been the product of the Macy organization--from the moment that they began at the very bottom of the ladder.

And, lest you still think I befog the question, permit me to add that the minimum weekly wage of the woman employee in Macy's today is $14.00; and the average pay--apart from that of the executives and sub-executives--the men and women who, in the store's own nomenclature, are classed as "specials" and exempted from the time-disc record of their comings and their goings--is $25.00.

Have I now answered your question fairly? If still you wobble and are uncertain, permit me to call your attention to the service records of the store. They speak more eloquently than aught else can of the loyalty and the interest of its workers. Qualities such as these are not generated under bad working practices of any sort.

The records tell--and tell accurately, as well as eloquently. A Macy man was recently retired on a pension--the store's list of pensioners runs to a considerable length--after a round half-century of service. Others will soon follow in his footsteps. There are today upon the rolls ninety-two men and women who have been with it for more than twenty-five years. In the delivery department alone there are twenty-three men who have records of twenty years or more; and of these there are three who have been there more than forty years. Three hundred members of the Macy family have records of fifteen years or over, fifteen hundred have been with it upwards of five years and--despite the recent after-the-war difficulties of maintaining labor morale and organization--only about one-quarter of the force have come within the twelvemonth. The labor turnover in Macy's is low indeed--and constantly is growing lower.

These figures, it seems to me, are the surest indication that the store's workers are treated fairly. Moreover, they alone show clearly the workings of its announced policy to give its own people every possible opportunity to grow within its ranks. In fact, no man or woman can stand still long at Macy's and continue to hold his or her job. Progress is a very necessary requisite there. And in order that progress may be recognized, steadily and fairly, system comes in once again to stabilize a very natural phase of human development. As the Macy employee shows new capabilities or additional industry, recommendations for increases in his remuneration are made by his department manager to a salary committee, appointed for this sole purpose. Periodically this committee receives a list of all the store folk who have not received an increase for a period of six months. The list is carefully reviewed and, whenever and wherever it can be justified, the pay envelope of the employee is fattened.

Macy's is, after all, a very human institution. The machine may be steel-like, but it is not steel. It is flesh and blood and human understanding. I sometimes think of it as a country town, rather than as a family--one of those nice, old-fashioned sorts of country towns, where most of the residents know one another, where there is an efficient governing body and where the community spirit is one of the strongest factors in its progress. Being human it is fallible, being fallible it still has something for which to work; and in fulfilling this obligation of work it is carrying out its destiny.

_Tomorrow_

I. In Which Macy's Prepares to Build Anew

Yesterday, when Milady of Manhattan went for her shopping along the tree-lined reaches of Fourteenth Street, and found her way into that perennially fascinating shop at the corner of Sixth Avenue which specialized in its ribbons and its gloves and its rare exotic imported perfumes, she dreamed but little, if indeed she dreamed at all, of a Macy's that some day should stand intrenched at Herald Square and embrace a whole block-front of Broadway. Today Milady, finding her way into that small triangular "Square" in the very heart of Manhattan--still on the sharp lookout for ribbons and gloves and rare exotic perfumes--and Heaven only knows what else beside--may little dream of the changes that a tomorrow--

Tomorrow--what business has a book such as this to be talking of tomorrow; a vague, fantastic thing that only fools may seek to interpret in advance?

We have seen between these covers quite a number of things--some of them passing odd things--yet classified among the factors of good business, according to all of its modern definitions. And to them we shall now add another--the understanding and the correct interpretation of tomorrow. I think that when I depicted Mr. Macy standing with his daughter, Florence, at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway half a century ago and explaining how there would be the business center of New York fifty years hence, I called attention to the sharp commercial fact that a great machine of modern business goes ahead quite as much upon the vision and the foresight of the men that guide it as upon their prudence. Which means in still another way, the proper understanding of tomorrows. And that understanding today is quite as much an asset of Macy's as its real estate, its cash balances in the banks, or the millions of dollars standing in the stock upon its shelves.

More than a decade ago the big store in Herald Square first began to feel its own growing pains. The fact that ten years before that it had been planned as the largest single department-store building in the United States, if not in the entire world, availed nothing when business came in even greater measure than the most far-sighted of its planners had dared to dream. Within three or four years after the time that the caravans of trucks and drays had moved Macy's the mile uptown from the old store to the new, changes were under way in the new building, changes seeking to make an economy of space here, another economy there--everywhere that an odd corner could be utilized to the better advantage of the store and its patrons, it was at once so used. Finally it became necessary to abandon the exhibition hall that was originally located on the ninth floor and thrust that great space into one of the larger non-selling departments of the enterprise; and two or three years later an entire extra floor was added atop of the big building--adding a goodly ten per cent. to its million square feet of floor space already existing.

Yet even these changes could not solve the final problem. Macy's still refused to stay put. Its growth was relentless, unending. Each fresh provision made for its expansion was quickly swallowed up, with the result that the proprietors of the store finally faced the inevitable: the need of making a real addition to their plant, not a series of picayune little extensions, but one fine, sweeping move which should be as distinct a step forward in Macy progress as the mighty hegira that occurred when the store moved north from Fourteenth Street to Thirty-fourth--a little more than eighteen years ago.

And, facing the inevitable, Macy's quickly made up its mind. It never has been noted for any particular hesitancy. It decided to step ahead.

Forecasting tomorrow in New York is not, after all, so vast a task as it might seem to be at a careless first glance. That is, if you do not put your tomorrow too far ahead--say more than ten or a dozen years at the most. I am perfectly willing to sit in these beginning days of 1922 and to assert that to attempt to forecast 1952 or even 1942 is not a particularly alluring pastime--if one has any real desire for accuracy. But 1932 is not so difficult. It is the business of skilled experts to interpret 1932 in 1922; a business which incidentally is rendered vastly easier in New York today than it was ten years ago by two hard and settled facts--the one, the wonderfully efficient new zoning plan of the city, and the other, the construction of the Pennsylvania Railroad Station on Seventh and Eighth Avenues, from Thirty-first to Thirty-third Streets.

The first of these factors should hold the strictly commercial development of the city--save for local outlying hubs or centers--south of Fifty-ninth Street. The block-a-year uptown movement of Manhattan for whole decades past has finally been halted; and halted effectually. Central Park has of course proved no little barrier in fixing Fifty-ninth Street as the arbitrary point of stoppage. But the zoning law, protecting the fine residence streets north of that point, and the Pennsylvania Station are also factors not to be overlooked.

True it is that at the very moment that these paragraphs are being written whole groups of new business buildings are being opened, in Fifty-seventh, Fifty-eighth and Fifty-ninth Streets, in the center of Manhattan. But other and bigger buildings are going up in the cross-streets far to the south of these. Count that much for the Pennsylvania Station. For it, and it alone, has proved the salvation of Thirty-fourth Street. Macy's, Altman's, McCreery's, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Hotel McAlpin--none of these alone nor all of them together--might have been able to save Thirty-fourth Street from becoming another Fourteenth, or another Twenty-third--a dull, wide thoroughfare given almost entirely in its later days to wholesale trade of one sort or another.

The Pennsylvania Station could do, and did do, the trick. Opened in 1910--but eight years after Macy's came first to Thirty-fourth Street and that brisk thoroughfare of today was in the very youth of its prosperity--the traffic which it handled day by day and month by month at that time was more than doubled in 1920. Not only has the business of the parent road that occupies it practically doubled in that decade, but the inclusion of the important through trains of the Baltimore & Ohio and the Lehigh Valley Railroads, to say nothing of the traffic of the huge suburban Long Island system increasing by leaps and bounds each twelvemonth, has begun at last to tax the facilities of a structure seemingly far too big ever to be severely taxed. In recent months the cementing of a closer traffic alliance between the New Haven and the Pennsylvania systems renders it a foregone conclusion that more and more of the through trains from New England will be brought to the big white-pillared station in Seventh Avenue.

You cannot down a street on which there stands a city gateway, particularly if the city gateway be one through which there sweeps all the way from fifty to sixty thousand folk a day. Thirty-fourth Street cannot be downed. Remember that, if you will. It will not be compelled to share the rather bitter fate of its former wide-set compeers just to the south. This much is known today.

And being known, it settles forever even the possibility of Macy's moving uptown once again. It, too, is fixed. It has cast its die with the street called Thirty-fourth and with Thirty-fourth it is going to remain. So Macy's buys the realty to the west of its present building and prepares thereon to erect, in connection with its present edifice, a great new store building--in ground space one hundred and twenty-five by two hundred feet--in height, nineteen full floors above the street (and two basements beneath)--in all, some 500,000 square feet of floor-space or close to fifty per cent. added to the 1,100,000 square feet of the present store.

Offhand, it would seem to be a comparatively easy matter for the proprietors of a store, such as Macy's, to go to their architect and say to him:

"Here is a fine plot, one hundred and twenty-five feet by two hundred. We want you to design and build for us upon it a modern retail building--high enough to provide all necessary facilities and scientific enough to bring it not merely abreast of other stores across the land, but a good long jump ahead of them."

After which the architect would call for his young men and their draughting-boards and proceed, upon white paper, to erect his department-store.

But his problem in this case is not white paper--at least white paper undefiled. The real problem is a perfectly good store building at the east end of the Macy plot--a building far too good and far too modern to be "scrapped"--in any recognized sense of the word. It was built to last all the way from half a century to a full century and its owners have not the slightest intention of pulling it down. It must remain the chief front of the enlarged Macy store. The caryatides upon either side of its main doors, the red star that surmounts them, must continue to look down into busy Broadway, as they have been looking for nearly two decades past.

It happens, too, that the store itself was never designed for extensions toward the west. In the conception of its original architect there was a distinct section set out at the west end of the present building for purely service and non-selling purposes. These included, upon the ground-floor, the great tunnel and merchandise unloading docks for incoming trucks, similar ones for the outgoing merchandise, freight elevators a-plenty; and in between them and through them a truly vast variety of working provision, shops, offices, school and comfort rooms, and the like. A good feature, this section--which occupies almost the exact site of the former Koster & Bial Theater--but tremendously in the way when one comes to consider the extension of the store toward the west.

A final factor of this particular reconstruction problem--and perhaps the greatest of all--lies in the fact that it must be carried forward while the store is doing its regular business. Even when the peak load of its traffic is reached--those fearfully hard weeks that immediately precede the Christmas holiday--the workaday routine of Macy's must not be seriously disturbed. Which complicates vastly the architect's problem. It is one thing to design and to erect a store building whose tenant does not approach the structure with his wares for sale until the merchant has given his final release, and another--infinitely harder--thing to build, and build efficiently, as business goes forward all the while. The machine as it grinds must be rebuilded. And all the while it must lose none of its efficiency.

Yet, when all is said and done, an architect's life is made up of a number of things of this sort. And the associated architects of the new Macy store--Messrs. Robert D. Kohn and William S. Holden--have not permitted the overwhelming problem of its reconstruction to fill them with anything even remotely approaching a state of panic. For that is not an architect's way.

They have, from the beginning, come toward the big problem quietly, sanely and efficiently. At the very beginning and in company with two of the officers of the corporation they went upon an extended trip through the more modern department-stores across the land. Here, there, everywhere, they found features worth noting and collating. When they were done with their journeys they had, as a foundation for their studies upon the new Macy store, a sort of standardized practice of most of its fellows across the land.

This preliminary completed, the engineering member of the partnership, Mr. Holden, began an intensive study of the fundamental factors of the business machine that he was to enlarge. To begin with there was its traffic--divided, as we have seen in earlier chapters, into three great and fairly distinct avenues: the merchandise, the shoppers who come to purchase it, and the employees who wait upon their needs.

It is fairly essential that these three streams of traffic be kept separate, save at such points where, for the conduct of the business, they must be brought together.

Here, then, was a real opportunity for study. Mr. Holden began with the traffic streams of the shoppers.

Obviously, and despite the growing importance and activity of the Pennsylvania Station, to say nothing of the west side subway, which runs down Seventh Avenue in front of it, the main traffic streams of shoppers must continue to come into Macy's from Broadway. The star of Broadway is even more firmly set in the heavens of New York than that of Thirty-fourth Street.

These main traffic streams within the store are, then, roughly speaking, three in number; one comes from the northeast corner--at Thirty-fifth Street--another from the southeast corner at Thirty-fourth Street--the third still shows a decided fondness for the impressive center doors upon Broadway. Within the store they unite and then separate into a variety of smaller currents. A goodly portion of these violate all the similes of streams and proceed upstairs at the rate of about 10,300 folk an hour at the busiest times of busy days. And there are an astonishingly large number of these times. Of these 10,300, about 7,400 will ascend upon the great escalator, which reaches up into the sixth, or last selling floor, of the present store.

When this escalator was first built, eighteen years ago, it was looked upon as hardly less than a transportation marvel. Every similar device that had preceded it was known as a single-file moving-stairway, with the capacity estimated at sixty persons a minute, or 3,600 an hour. By making its escalator double-file, Macy's not only slightly more than doubled its capacity but rendered it the full equivalent of at least twenty-five passenger elevators of the largest size.

The man whose business it is to have a sort of first-hand acquaintance with 1932 said that by that year Macy's would need to take close to twenty thousand folk an hour to its upper floors. He was not only estimating upon the growth of New York, but upon the growth of the store itself.

"You will have to add another of the double escalators," said he, "that will bring your lifting capacity upon the two moving stairways up to almost fifteen thousand persons an hour."

An elevator of modern size and speed in a department-store with seven or eight selling floors ought to lift two hundred and forty persons an hour. This, as you can quickly find out for yourself, means that there will be needed for the new store but twenty passenger elevators to make good that deficit between increased escalator capacity and the total number of folk to be carried upstairs. And this, in itself, is a most moderate increase. The store already has fourteen modern passenger elevators. Credit this much, if you will, to the escalator.

So it goes, then, that the new Macy's will have a second double-file escalator on the opposite side of the main aisle, which is the store's own Broadway, and in the same relative relation to it. It will run as far as the fourth floor which in the new scheme of Macy things is to be devoted to the important business of toy selling.

What goes up must come down. Shoppers are no exception to this old rule. If you still think that they are, stand late some busy afternoon at the main stair of Macy's and watch them descend. They frequently come at the rate of one hundred to the minute. And yet this is but a single stair!

It is neither practical nor modern greatly to increase stairway capacity in remodeling Macy's and so the question of a descending escalator thrusts itself upon the architects' attention. Despite a certain old-fashioned prejudice against it on the part of some old-fashioned New Yorkers, a descending escalator is not only practicable but entirely safe. Otherwise Macy's would not even consider its installation. The store planning experts went out to Chicago a few months ago, however, and into a great retail establishment there which boasts twelve selling floors. Escalators were its one salvation--descending, as well as ascending. The Macy party saw old ladies, women with children in their arms--everyone who walked, save only those walking upon crutches, using this quick and constant method of descent. They found the same devices in Boston--in subway stations as well as department-stores--and being used with equal facility. Straightway they decided that the New York shopper was neither more timid nor more reluctant to use a new idea than was her Boston or her Chicago sister. A descending escalator was placed in the plans for the new Macy's--for the use of the store's patrons.