The Romance of a Great Store

ever sleeps at all. There is an hour, however-from three of the morning until four-when the city is all but stilled; when its heart-beats are

the measured walk of a policeman and the hurried one of some much belated suburbanite hurrying toward the great railroad station over in Seventh Avenue; these sounds, occasional and unrelated seemi

refly lunch wagon which has stood in the busy Herald Square these thirty years or more now. The morning papers are out. The newspaper wagons, as well as those that bring milk and other comestibles, begin to multiply. The earliest workers in the heart of Manhattan now bestir themselves. By six

to be paced-the night walking of the Macy watchmen would reach from Dan to Beersheba or possibly from New York to Erie-millions of dollars worth of stock and fixtures to be guarded. A diamond ring would be missed; and so would a spool of thread. Nothing must be disturbed. And in order that the owne

e-half hours of hard endeavor can make daily a mighty dirty store and a huge housekeeping job. There is at the best a vast litter-and yet a litter that cannot be carelessly thrust away. In all that debris there may be some one tiny article of great val

mpatient early shoppers, against the panes of the public entrance doors. Through the night these toilers work; silently, unseen, save by others of their own kind. Far below them, in the cellars of the great structure at Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway, there are other squads who stand to unending tricks at the boilers, the engines, the dynamos and the other mechanical appliances of the organism. The fires may never die; the lights never go out-not even from

s later. First the store must be made ready for his coming. It is not enough that it shall be thoroughly cleaned in every fashion. The stock must be displayed anew; the long m

non-selling forces. They "sign in" their arrival upon a sheet. For while Macy's is known as the department-store without a time-clock, there is none which is more punctilious about keeping an exact record of the comings and goings of its workers, from the lowest to the highest. In the entire permanent organization of more than five thousand folk, there are n

after

substituted. These are duplicates of the earlier ones. When the section manager (a modern and much better name for the "floor-walker" of the

rkers and the junior girls respectively) open on the precise moment of the half-hour. Even before they swing backward upon their hinges the earliest risers of the Macy family are beginning to group themselves in front of them. They go tramping up the broad stairs

is no time to be lost; and yet no unseemly haste or confusion. And no noise. Noise, p

that stairhead automatically orders closed the two auxiliary entrances in Thirty-fifth. And yet, in order perhaps that perfectly automatic and impartial systems may, after all, be tinged by a bit of human sympathy and understanding, eight-forty-five is forever translated at the employees' doors as eighty-f

n running to unwonted heights-the group is admonished; always gently, always considerately. It is made to them a point of fairness, between the store and themselves. And almost invariably the admonition is received in the spirit in which it is given. In other days it was quite customary for the store manager or one of his several assistants to receive these late-come

hroughout the day. Consider now that it is still lacking a few brief minutes of nine o'clock on a workday morning. The sales force are through the lockers and getting to their day's work upon the floor. The non-selling forces as well-elev

rintendent's office just beneath the main stair, where five or ten minutes ago the "big chief" of the whole main floor was giving his section managers their special instructions for the day. The

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again. The chief stream of the store's patrons pours down through it. Other streams from the doors in the side streets join it; still others diverge down the side aisles, up the stair and escalators, into the elevators which presently go packing off, one by one, toward the mysterious and fascinating regions of th

few of them to take a tardy breakfast in the comfortable restaurant upon its eighth floor. One might not think that it would pay to open a restaurant for break

osing around other departments merely in her own interest or curiosity) and the obtaining for her of the discount to which she is entitled. Macy's is known pretty generally as a store of no special privileges or discounts. Teachers, clergymen, professional shoppers, dressmakers are recognized and welcomed in the big store, but only upon the same terms as every other sort

n is a very simple human necessity; but a necessity, nevertheless. And New York has never countenanced the Parisian habit of locking up practically all shops and stores and offices for an hour

tes is the ordinary allotment for lunch and the house prefers that its folk shall take this mid-day meal underneath its roof. Toward this end it has made, as we shall see, elaborate and expensive preparations in t

s facilities in the less crowded and hence more comfortable morning hours, the hard and solemn fact remains that it suits the comfort and convenience of the average New York woman to shop in the afternoon. And shop in the afternoon she does. She comes into Mac

or recitals or anything of that sort. It has considered that its best shows are always upon its counters. It has had no quarrel with the successful stores that have added entertainment

astly refused to give shows of any sort-save, of course, those wonderful window pageants of other years, which were horses of quite a different color indeed-but it has also refused up to the present time to install such non-merchandise enterprises as manicuring parlors, hair-dressin

undred thousand people is a whole lot. Until very recently, at least, the

ly succeeded. Once, of a busy October day, the count up to two o'clock in the afternoon had reached and passed the one hundred and twenty thousand mark. At that time each of the great escalators which ascend from the main floor was handling its maximum capacity of 7,400 persons

half hours. Could more folk have been squeezed through those wide doors and into those broad aisles? It would have seemed not. Even with the aid of a whole corps of special policemen and traffic rules as scientific and as ingenious as those which regulate the vehicular traffic of nearby Fifth Avenue, it was a task of

crisply lighted little workshop. At a long bench underneath an atelier-like window three men, fairly well-advanced in years, were working. One was engraving upon silver-the other two upon glass. The chief of the shop explained to me that in the beginning they were Germans but they had been in Macy's so many, many years that the

ow where we shall go to replace

it doing this sort o

wered

train them ourselves. It is only the material for training that worries me. A

ward to a real career for himself. To be an executive-no matter by what name or title-and in as short a time as is humanly possible is apparently the only object that he sees ahead of him. A laudable ambition to be sure. But on

han artisanship, that task; it was artistry. A real work of real art even though at the moment these elaborate cut-glass designs have lost a little in public f

pitcher that Bridget or Selma has so carelessly broken-is the chief factor of a shop that handles, as other parts of its day's job, jewelry and watch repairs, electro-plating of gold, copper, silver, nickel, the printing or engraving or stamping of stationery of every sort, to say nothing of leather goods of every kind and descr

e in a distant city and found up under its roof a man whose sole task from one year's end to the other was the making of repairs upon toy locomotives. How I envied that man his job! And how the other day I envied the job of the Macy man who was repainting dolls' houses, one fascinating suburban villa after another. The doctor in the far corner of the room, whose patients ran all

-thi

nd the great doors shut-simultaneously, as in the morning they had opened. But not permanently, of course. Dozens, hundreds, perhaps a thousand or more shoppers still are left within the store. Each is to be accorded a f

to let them out, but never again this day to let newcomers in. No rule of th

ese go out upon the stock. Counters are emptied. The stock, wherever possible, is put away, and when not put away is carefully covered. Nothing is left to chance nor to du

like carts in orderly formation and proceeding upon the debris like a miniature army. Four, five, six hours of hard work await them. It will be midnight,

he morning. There is little restriction, no red-tape about their leaving. Their brass discs-each individual and bearing the employee's

ection made by two store detectives who stand either side of the descending file at the main employees

f the day, are asked to take them to a well-equipped check and storage room close by the lockers, where they may regain them at night, stamped and viséd, to go out into the open onc

ge evening there may be a half dozen of such outlaw packages detected. Their holders are not thieves. There is not even the implication that they are thieves. They are simply trying to ignore a fair and open-minded rule which the store

people by not asking them to work in the dark. If we make a rule and its rulings sometimes puzzle them-sometimes even seem a litt

ackage to be illicit. It merely is carelessness. And the thoughtless worker to whom it is returned in the morning is merely asked not to be careless again, but to make a fu

even then it is held at a minimum; an astonishing minimum when one comes to compare it with the Christmas seasons of, say, a mere twenty years ago. The state law says that aside from that fortnight of holiday turmoil, the women workers of the store, who are considerably in the majority, shall not wo

the pernicious habit of keeping the stores open for business evenings and late in the evening, but the progressive thought of the store managers of New York, themselves. These last have yielded little to the sentimentalists in real looking forward. Theirs have been the practical problems-not the least of these that of the education of a shopping public which seemingly had demanded that the big department-stores of