Part 4

For many years it was the only store in town to carry soaps and perfumes. This, of itself, brought to the store a clientele of its own--the most beautiful women of New York, among the most notable of them, Rose Eytinge, the actress, who was just then coming to the pinnacle of her fame.

Mr. Macy, accompanied by his wife and daughter--the latter of whom is still alive at an advanced age--took up his residence at first over the store and then, a little later, in a small house in West Twelfth Street, within easy walking distance of his place of business. From this he afterward moved to a larger residence in West Forty-ninth Street. He was a man of sturdy build, of more than medium height and thick-set, extremely affable in manner. He wore a heavy beard, and an old employee of the store was wont to liken his appearance to that of the poet, Longfellow. His tendency toward black cigars and to appearing in the store in his shirt-sleeves did not heighten the resemblance, however.

He was a man of almost indomitable will. Such a quality was quite as necessary for success in those days as in these. The modern ideas of beneficence and generosity to the employee were little dreamed of then. The successful merchant, like the successful manufacturer or the successful banker, drove his men and drove them hard. Macy was no exception to this rule. If he had been, it is doubtful if he would have lasted long. For while '58 was a year of seeming prosperity in New York it also followed directly one of the notable panic-years in the financial history of the United States and was soon to be followed by four years of internecine struggle in the nation--in which its credit and financial resources were to be strained to the utmost.

It is entirely possible that the record of the Macy store might not be set down as one of final and overwhelming success, if it had not been for the driving force of a woman, who was brought into the organization not long after the opening of the original store in lower Sixth Avenue. This woman, Margaret Getchell, was also born in Nantucket. She had been a school-teacher upon the island, until the loss of one of her eyes forced her to seek less confining work. She drifted to New York and, taking advantage of a girlhood acquaintance with Mr. Macy, asked him for employment in his store. He knew her and was glad to take her in. She, in turn, engaged rooms in a flat just over a picture-frame store, in Sixth Avenue, across from her employment, so that she might devote every possible moment of her time, day and night, to its success.

So was born a real executive--and in a day when the possibilities of women ever becoming business executives were as remote seemingly as that they might ever fly. For decades after she had gone, she left the impress of her remarkable personality upon the store. An attractive figure she was: a small, slight woman, with masses of glorious hair and a pert upturn to her nose, while the loss of her eye was overcome, from the point of view of appearance at least, by the wearing of an artificial one, which she handled so cleverly that many folk knew her for a long time without realizing her misfortune.

At every turn, Margaret Getchell was a clever woman. Once when Mr. Macy had imported a wonderful mechanical singing-bird--a thing quite as unusual in that early day as was the phonograph when it came upon the market--and its elaborate mechanism had slipped out of order, it was she, with the aid of a penknife, a screw-driver and a pair of pliers--I presume that she also used a hair-pin--who took it entirely apart and put it together again. And at another time she trained two cats to permit themselves to be arrayed in doll's clothing and to sleep for hours in twin-cribs, to the great amusement and delectation of the visitors to the store. Later she caused a photograph to be made of the exhibit, which was retailed in great quantities to the younger customers. Miss Getchell was nothing if not businesslike.

It was her keen, commercial acumen that made her alert in the heart center of the early store--the cashier's office. She tolerated neither discrepancies nor irregularities there. There it was that the New England school-ma'm showed itself most keenly. Did a saleswoman overcharge a patron two dollars? And did the cashier accept and pass the check? Then the cashier must pay the two dollars out of her meagre pay-envelope on Saturday night. "Overs" were treated the same as "unders." It made no difference that the store was already ahead two dollars on the transaction. Discipline was the thing. Discipline would keep that sort of offense from being repeated many times, and Macy's from ever being given the unsavory reputation of making a practice of overcharging.

"Don't ever erase a figure or change it, no matter what seems to be the logical reason in your own mind," she kept telling her cashiers. "The very act implies dishonesty."

So does the New England conscience ever lean backward.

Yet it is related of this same Margaret Getchell that when a little and comparatively friendless girl had been admitted to the cashier's cage--a decided innovation in those days--and had been found in an apparent peculation of three dollars and promptly discharged by Mr. Macy, Miss Getchell dropped everything else and went to work on behalf of the little cashier. Intuitively she felt that another of her sex in the cage had made the theft--a young woman who had come into the store from a prominent up-state family to learn merchandising. The up-state young woman was fond of dress. Her dress demands far exceeded her salary. Of that Miss Getchell was sure.

Yet intuition is one thing and proof quite another. For a fortnight the store manager worked upon her surpassing problem. She induced Macy to suspend for a time his order of discharge and she kept putting the women cashiers in relays in the cage, to suit her own fancy and her own plans. The petty thefts continued. But not for long. The plans worked. The altered checks were found to be all in the time of one of the cashiers--and that was not the one who had been discharged. Miss Getchell drove to the home of Miss Upper New York and there, in the presence of her family, got both confession and reparation.

The original small store in Sixth Avenue just south of 14th Street. Here the business starts in 1858]

She was forever seeking new lines of activities for the store--branching out here, branching out there, and turning most of these new ventures into lines of resounding profits. "If necessary, we shall handle everything except one," she is reputed to have said. And upon being asked what that one was, she replied brusquely, "Coffins." Once she embarked Macy upon the grocery business--whole decades before the establishment of the present huge grocery department--and while eventually the store was forced to drop for a time this line of merchandise, she succeeded in taking so much business from New York's then leading firm of grocers that they came to Macy, himself, and begged him to drop the competition.

In the retailing world of that day, tradition and habit still governed and with an iron hand. Stores opened early in the morning and kept open until late in the evening, and did this six days of the week. Their workers rose and left their homes--before dawn in many months of the year--and did not return to them until well after dark. Yet they did not complain, for that was the fashion of the times and was recognized as such. Wages were as low as the hours were long. But food-costs also were low, and rentals but a tiny fraction of their present figure. The apartment house had not yet come to New York. It was a development set for a full two decades later. The store-workers lived in boarding-houses, in small furnished rooms or with their families. The greater part of them resided within walking distance of their employment.

Mr. Macy had all of his fair share of traditional New England thrift. One of the favorite early anecdotes of "the old man," as his fellow-workers were prone to call him, and with no small show of affection, concerned his refusal to permit shades to be placed upon the gas-jets in the store, saying that he paid for the light and so wanted the full value for his money. He was skeptical, at the best, about innovations. Moreover, necessity compelled him to keep close watch upon the pennies. At one time he reduced the weekly wages of his cash-girls from two dollars to one-dollar-and-a-half, saying that the war was over and he could no longer afford to pay war wages. Yet when a courageous sales-clerk went to him and told him that she could not possibly live any longer upon her weekly wage of three dollars, he promptly raised it a dollar, without argument or hesitation. And the following week he automatically extended the same increase to every other clerk in the store.

Labor conditions in that day were hard, indeed. The working hours, as I have already said, were long. In regular times the store hours were from eight to six, instead of from nine to five-thirty, as today. On busy days the clerks worked an extra hour, putting the stock in place, while in the fortnight which preceded Christmas the store was open evenings--supposedly until ten o'clock, as a matter of fact, often until long after ten, when the workers were well toward the point of exhaustion. Other conditions of their labor were slightly better. There were no seats in the aisles and conversation between the clerks was punishable by discharge. They might make their personal purchases only on Friday mornings, between eight and nine o'clock, and they received no discount whatsoever. In Mr. Macy's day the only discounts ever given were to the New York Juvenile Asylum in Thirteenth Street nearby, which was an institution peculiarly close to his heart.

There were no lockers in the early days of the old store. In one of its upper floors several small rooms were set aside as a crude sort of cloak-room for the employees. A few nails around the walls sufficed for their outer wraps but there were never enough of these nails to go around. One of the clerks was chosen to come early and stay late in order to supervise these rooms. Inasmuch as there was neither glory nor remuneration in this task, it was not eagerly sought after.

Nevertheless, here was the enlightened day at hand when women would and did work in stores--not alone in great numbers but in a great majority and in many cases to the exclusion of men. It was one of the sweeping economic changes that the Civil War brought in its train. When the men must go to fight in the armies of the North, women must take their places--for only a little while it seemed up to that time. Yet so well did they do much of men's work, that their retention in many of their positions came as a very natural course. So while the decade that preceded the Civil War found few or no professions open to women--save those of teaching or of domestic employment--the one which followed it found them coming in increasing numbers, into a steadily increasing number and variety of endeavors.

So it was then that the great war of the last century brought women behind the counters of the stores--Macy's was no exception to the invasion. They came to stay. And stay they have, to this very day, even though most of the New York stores still retain men to a considerable extent in some of their departments--notably those devoted to the sale of furniture, dress-goods and boots and shoes. For some varieties of stock the male clerk still is the most suitable and successful sort of salesman.

In his store in Haverhill, Mr. Macy had adopted as his trade-mark a rooster bearing the motto in his beak, "While I live, I'll crow." For his nascent enterprise in New York, however, he adopted a different and, to him at least, a far more significant device, which to this day remains the symbol of the great enterprise which still bears his name.

It was a star, a star of red, if you will. And back of that simple symbol rests a story: It seems that in the days of his youth when he sailed the northern seas in a whaling ship he had gradually acquired such proficiency that he was made first mate and then master. It was in the earlier capacity, however, and upon an occasion when he was given a trick at the wheel that Macy found himself in a thick fog off a New England port--one version of the story says Boston, the other New Bedford. To catch the familiar lights of the harbor gateways was out of the question. The cloud banks lay low against the shore. Overhead there was a rift or two, and in one of them, well ahead of the vessel's prow, there gleamed a brilliant star.

For the young skipper this was literally a star of hope. His quick wit made it a guiding star. By it he steered his course and so successfully into the safety of the harbor that the star became for him thereafter the symbol of success. With the strange insistency that was inherent in the man, he was wont to say that the failure of his Boston store was due to the fact that he had not there adopted the star as his trade-mark. He made no such mistake in his New York enterprise. The star became the forefront of his business. And to this day it is a prominent feature of the main facade of the great establishment which bears his name.

Mr. Macy never lost his boyhood affection for the sea--the one thing inborn of his ancestral blood. It is related of him that one morning on his way to the store he found a small silver anchor lying on the sidewalk, picked it up, placed it in his pocket and thereafter carried it until the day of his death, regarding it as a talisman of real value. There was one souvenir of his early connection of which he was greatly ashamed, however. As a boy he had permitted his shipmates to tattoo the backs of his hands. In later years he regretted this exceedingly, and developed a habit of talking to strangers with the palms of his hands held uppermost, so that they might not see the tattoo marks.

From the very beginning Macy adopted certain fixed and definite policies for his business. These showed not alone the vision but the breadth and bigness of the man. For one of the most important of them he decided that in his business he would have cash transactions only. This applied both ways--to the purchase of his merchandise as well as to its retail sale. It is a bed-rock principle that has come down to today as a foundation of the business that he founded. It is perhaps the one rule of it, from which there is no deviation, at any time or under any circumstance. It is related that a full quarter of a century after Macy had first adopted this principle, one of the then partners of the concern was approached by a warm personal friend, a man of high financial standing, who said that he wished to make a rather elaborate purchase that morning, but not having either cash or a check handy, asked for an exception to the no-credit rule. The partner shook his head, smiled, rather sadly, and said:

"No, Mr. Blank, I cannot do that, even for you. But I can tell you what I can, and shall do."

And so saying he reached for his own check-book, wrote out a personal voucher for two hundred dollars, stepped over to the cashier's office, had it cashed and presented the money, in crisp green bills to his friend.

"You can repay me, at your convenience," was all that he said.

Convinced that trust--as he insisted upon calling credit--was a millstone upon the neck of the merchant--let alone a struggling man of thirty-five who previously had known failure--Macy insisted upon matching his purchases for any ensuing week close to his sales for the preceding one. He did all his own buying at first; and for a number of years thereafter he employed no professional buyers whatsoever. In this way he kept his margin closely in hand and at all times well within the range of safety. There was little of the spirit of the gambler in him. It would not have sat well with his Yankee blood.