Part 12
Salesmanship in a store as large as Macy's must of necessity include the knowledge of considerable detail in the making out of sales slips, procedure with regard to C. O. D. deliveries, depositors' accounts, exchanges and the like. This knowledge is a fundamental part of each salesperson's equipment. His or her efficiency must come, however, from a far wider development of the possibilities of the salesmanship, from the "playing of the game," as the department manager put it but a moment ago--the understanding use of courtesy, merchandise knowledge, helpfulness. Such efficiency pays. The Macy folk who come to use it regularly soon find themselves advancing to responsible and highly-paid positions.
It is interesting to follow the career of a sales slip from the time it is made out--when the sale is made--until the time that it ceases to function. Here is one of the most important items in the mechanism of a large retail store. It is an essential unit of a carefully developed system to keep track of sales, from the minute that they are made until they are finally delivered and audited.
The sales slip--the Macy clerk has three different ones of them in all--is made in three distinct parts--original, duplicate and triplicate. Each of these is divided into several parts; each of which in turn is destined for separate hands. The packer of the merchandise gets one part, which eventually goes to the customer, a second to the cashier, the third the clerk retains. Eventually these last two come together once again in the auditing department and are checked, the one against the other; after which one goes into the archives of the bureau of investigation, in case that there is any further question about the details of the transaction. This one example of the infinite detail in the conduct of a great store is a slight indication of the responsibility upon the shoulders of not only its managers but the rank and file of its salesforce as well. A single error in the making out of a sales slip may easily result in expensive and harassing complications all the way along the line.
A system of transfer books enables the store's customer to make purchases in its various departments with the least possible waiting. The goods and prices are entered in a small book which is given the customer at the time of the first purchase of the day. While the customer is making his or her other purchases they are being sent to the wrapping room where they are held in a growing group until the customer presents the book to the cashier at the transfer desk on the main floor, pays the total and, a few minutes later, receives a neat package in which all of the items are wrapped together; or else it is sent to any designated address.
Enough, for the moment, of detail. Some of it is necessary to a proper understanding of the workings of this great machine of modern business, but too much of it may easily bore you. Instead, quickly turn your attention to a Macy feature dear to the heart of the average shopper--male or deadlier. Here is the familiar, the time-honored "special sale." In holding these Macy does not lay claim to originality, except perhaps in the amount of merchandising involved and the spectacularly low prices. Sales are in a large measure opportunities for the store as well as for the customer. It takes a goodly amount of merchandise from a manufacturer who for some reason offers a large concession in price and passes on its advantage to its customers. This is not generosity. It is good business. It is sound business. It is progressive business.
Take a sale of laundry soap that went on within the great store about a year ago. The soap was made in this country and contracted for by the city of Paris, upon a dollar basis. Exchange slumped, and with francs worth only a fraction of their former value, Paris couldn't afford to take it. Macy's offer for it was accepted and so marked was the reduction at which it was offered to the public that inside of two weeks the big store had sold twenty-two carloads of it. Figuring from the fact that a carload comprised six hundred cases, the turnover amounted to 6,862 cases; or, counting a hundred bars to a case, 686,200 pieces of soap!
The most successful sale of winter underwear that Macy's ever held took place during a very warm week in July, a twelvemonth before the laundry soap episode. A large manufacturer wanted to unload his stock and Macy's bought it for cash. Add to these facts the consideration that the goods were away out of season and you can readily see how it was possible to buy the goods at a very low price. Relying upon the public's ability to judge values, in and out of season, the store launched the sale--and launched it successfully. It was like a scene out of _Alice in Wonderland_ to see the crowds of men and women with perspiration rolling down their foreheads buying woolen "undies" against the needs of winter. Americans do like to be forehanded.
Macy's ability to buy and sell huge quantities of merchandise is demonstrated through these sales. Very recently over seven thousand of a particular leather traveling bag were sold in less than four weeks, at an aggregate price of nearly $75,000. In one day seven hundred vacuum cleaners were sold for $29.75 each. This list might be continued indefinitely; for not only has Macy's proved that it pays to advertise but that it pays to follow the Macy advertisements.
Down in the basement of this great mart of Herald Square there is a corner not often shown to the outer world, from which there constantly emerge noises which blend and combine to give the effect of a staccato rumble. Thud, thud, t-h-u-u-d, thud, thudity, thud, thud. Then a sound of air, as in a Gargantuan sigh. Thudity, thud, and so on, _ad infinitum_. These sounds seemingly are quite unending. If your curiosity draws you toward the door from which these sounds emerge and you finally are permitted to open it and go within, you will find a company of young women sitting along both sides of three sets of moving belts, quickly picking brass cylinders from the belts as they pass them. Except for the fact that there is another tube room on the fourth floor (for the upper floor selling departments) this basement place might truly be called the heart of the store, for it is these brass cylinders that contain the life-blood of the business, the cash which the customers pay for their purchases. Call the tube room the pulse of the store and the analogy is better--certainly their throbbing is a close index of its condition.
Alert cashiers pick up the carriers from the upper belt as they pass, deftly make the required change, and drop them to the lower belt, on which they are conveyed to other young women who despatch them to the departments whence they came. This continues for approximately eight hours each working day. The cash carriers do considerable traveling in the course of a year. One of them might easily go from the new Bagdad to the old. Yes, it might. If you still scoff let us look at the system together and do a little figuring upon our own account.
Throughout the store there are two hundred and fifty cash stations--the outer terminals of the line at one of whose common hearts we now stand. Each of these stations is connected with one or the other of the common hearts by two separate lines of tubing, one for sending and the other for receiving the carriers. There is a total of 125,000 feet of this tubing, or nearly twenty-four miles. Five thousand cash carriers are in use and the average number of round-trips made per day by all of them is 150,000. Each round-trip averages two hundred and fifty feet. The average distance traveled each day by this host of travelers then comes to the astonishing total of 37,500,000 feet--7,155 miles. Now to your atlases and find how far the new Bagdad is from the old. And if that distance does not give you pause, consider that the peak-load of the system was carried on a day when its mileage ran to 12,120--an equivalent of one-half the distance around the world--in a little over eight hours.
Truly it would seem that money goes far at Macy's.
V. Distributing the Goods
When milady of Manhattan finishes her purchases in Macy's, snaps her purse together once again and goes out of the store, the transaction is ended, at least as far as she herself is concerned. But not so for Macy's. Particularly not so when she has given orders that the goods be "sent," either to her own home or to the home of some friend. In such cases the largest part of the store's responsibility still is ahead of it. It must see to it that the package--or packages--shall be carried to the proper destination, quickly, promptly, correctly. Which means that the great business machine of Herald Square has another great function to perform.
There is, in the sub-basement of the Herald Square store, where the greatest portion of its own great transportation system is situated, an ancient two-wheeled cart, somewhat faded and battered, yet still a red delivery wagon and showing clearly the name of the house it served, R. H. Macy & Company. It is a treasured relic of other days, which now and then again, at great intervals, is shown to the populace in the all-too-rare parades of the huge wagon equipment of the store today.
The gentleman who gives the lecture which accompanies any public showing of this ancient equipage is Mr. James Woods, who, as we have already seen, has been with the store for nearly half a century and who has risen in its service to the important post of assistant superintendent of the delivery department. Mr. Woods regards the cart with tender affection, since it was he who once was the human horse who strode between its shafts. That was back in 1873, long years before the store had moved north from the once tree-shaded Fourteenth Street. Mr. Macy, himself, was still very much in charge of the enterprise and was passing proud of his delivery "fleet"--consisting of three horse-drawn wagons, and young Jimmie Woods with the cart. A good many prosperous New Yorkers then had their residences within a dozen blocks or less of the old store, and young Jimmie's legs--and the cart--could and did serve them, easily and expeditiously.
That was almost the beginning of the Macy delivery department. In fact it had been but five years before that Mr. Macy had acquired the first horse-drawn rig for this purpose. From that beginning the growth was steady although slow. Ten years after Mr. Woods first came to it--in 1883--there were but fifteen wagons. In 1902, when the great trek was made north to Herald Square, there were a hundred. Today there are more than two hundred and fifty, of which by far the larger number are motor driven. These last range all the way from the big five-ton motor trucks which, as we shall presently see, are used primarily for carrying merchandise between the store and its outlying distributing stations, down to the small one-ton truck, which is used at its greatest advantage in city street distribution. And an astonishing number of horse-drawn vehicles remain. That is, astonishing to the uninitiated layman, who perhaps has been led to believe that the motor truck in this, its heyday of perfection, could hardly be surpassed for any form of carrying. As a matter of fact, however, the department-stores as well as the express companies, skilled in the multiple distribution of small packages, have, after a careful and intensive study of the motor trucks--which has resulted in their ordering many, many hundreds of them for certain of their necessities--discovered that for certain forms of delivery the horse and wagon still remains unsurpassed. The time that a delivery wagon remains standing becomes an economic factor in its use. If it moved all the time it undoubtedly would be as cheap and certainly more efficient to use a small automobile truck. But when there are fairly lengthy stops and close together, where perhaps the vehicle is idle for four minutes for every one that it is actually in operation, the factor of having an expensive machine idle as against an inexpensive one comes into play.
Business organizations reckon these things not alone from sentiment, but from hard-headed facts. Yet they are not entirely free from sentiment, even in such seemingly purely commercial matters as delivery. The very condition and upkeep of the vehicles of a high-grade department-store show this. "Spic-and-span" is hardly the phrase by which to describe them. Fresh paint and gold striping--the smooth sides so cleaned and polished, that one might see his face reflected mirror-like upon them, the horses to the last state of perfection--this is the Macy standard of delivery. A Macy truck and wagon is designed to be one of the store's best advertisements.
A skillful trucking contractor from the lower west side of New York went to a department-store owner a dozen years or more ago and said:
"Mr. A----, after a little study of your delivery service, I am convinced that if you would turn it over to me, I could save you more than fifty per cent. in its operation."
Mr. A---- was a pretty hard-headed business man, "hard-boiled" is the word that might well be used to describe him. He turned quickly to the contractor.
"You interest me," said he. "How would you propose to do it?"
"At the outset, by making the wagon equipment a little less elaborate. It could be just as efficient without so much varnish and brass and gold-stripe."
Mr. A---- shook his head negatively.
"Oh, no," he said, "we know that much ourselves. If we were to do that, we should lose fifty per cent. of our advertisement upon the streets of New York."
We have left milady's package where she left it, in the hands of the salesclerk who sold it to her. The purchaser does not see it thereafter, not at least until it has come to her home. With an astonishing celerity and according to a carefully set-down program and practice it is wrapped right within the floor upon which the selling department is situated, and then dropped into a chute which leads with a straight, swift run into that nether world of Macy's--the basement headquarters of the delivery department. In reality this chute is a carrier, so designed as to carry the small individual packages with safety and order, as well as with celerity.
There are fourteen of these conveyors, coming down from all the selling floors save that of furniture which has its own special delivery organization on the ninth floor. Together they pour their almost constant stream of merchandise upon the so-called "revolving-ring" in the very center of the basement floor. This "revolving-ring," in purpose very much like the great and slowly revolving disc-like wooden wheels used in the freight stations of the express companies for a similar service, is, in reality, much larger than they. It is a "square-ring"--if I may use that paradoxical phrase--built of four slowly moving conveyor belts upon which a package may travel an indefinite number of round-trips. At various points upon the outer edge of this moving square the conveyor chutes drop their merchandise. Near the center are the wide-open mouths of other conveyors, which lead to distant corners of the basement.
The nimble-fingered and nimble-witted young men who stand within the "revolving-ring" feed the packages from it into these last conveyors. To each individual package is affixed a duplicate portion of the leaf of the salesbook. On it the salesclerk has written, or printed, the address to which the merchandise is to go, the cost, whether or not it is collect on delivery (known hereafter in this telling as C. O. D.) and other essential information. It is the addresses, however, which attract the eyes of the genii of the "revolving-ring." In their minds these fall into four great categories: City, meaning those portions of Manhattan Island south of Seventy-second Street on the east side and Ninety-ninth Street on the west; Harlem and the Bronx, the incorporated city of New York north of those two streets; Brooklyn and New Jersey--self-explanatory; and Suburban: all the rest of the territory within the far-flung limits of Macy's own generously wide delivery service. While for those points that are unfortunate enough to lie just outside of it--Boston or Philadelphia or Kamchatka or Manila (There hardly is an address to stagger the Macy delivery department)--the packages go direct to the shipping room, in its own corner of the basement.
Here these last are checked and wrapped for long-distance shipment. They are checked against the payment or the non-payment of transportation charges; the store has very definite rules of its own. A paid purchase of but $2.50 is entitled to free delivery within any of the Eastern States, of $5 and over to any of the Middle States as well, of $10 and over to any corner of the whole United States. Freight and express prepayments are arranged upon a somewhat similar basis. The majority of the long-distance shipments go by parcel post, however. Still, in the course of a twelvemonth, there are enough to go both by express and freight to make a pretty considerable transportation bill in themselves.
Again we have neglected that precious package of milady's. It may be only an extra pair of corset-laces--in which case the saleswoman must have suggested that madam herself transport it to her habitat--or it may be an eight or ten-yard piece of heavy silk for her new evening gown, or the evening gown itself. In any case it receives the same care and attention. We have already seen how it is packed, sent through the conveyor-chute down into the basement and then upon the "revolving-ring" before the nimble eyes of the men with nimble hands and wits as well.
Milady lives in West One Hundred and Fourth Street. The sorter's eyes catch that much from the address slip, torn originally from the salesclerk's book and pasted upon the package's outer wrappings. "Harlem" his mind reports back to his eyes. Into the chute-entrance labeled "Harlem and The Bronx" goes the package.
"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."