Part 5

A second principle of the store in those early days which has come easily and naturally down to these--when it is accepted retailing principle everywhere--was the marking of the selling price upon each and every article. It seems odd to think today that the installing of such a fair and commonsense principle should once have been regarded as a stroke of daring initiative in merchandising. Yet the fact remains that in the days when Macy's was young, in the average store one bargained and bargained constantly. There was no single price set upon any article. Even when one went into as fine and showy a store as New York might boast one bartered. Caveat emptor, "Let the buyer beware," was seemingly the dominating retail motto of those days.

But not in Mr. Macy's. The selling price went on every article displayed in the store in those days and in such plain and readable figures that any fairly educated person might clearly understand. This principle alone was one of the huge factors that went toward the early and immediate success of the enterprise.

There was still another merchandising idea born of that great and fertile New England brain that needs to be set down at this time. For many years a notable feature of the advertising of the Macy store has been in the peculiar shading of its prices--at forty-nine cents or ninety-eight, or at $1.98 or $4.98 or $9.98 rather than in the even multiples of dollars. A good many worldly-wise folk have jumped to the quick conclusion that this was due to a desire on the part of the store to make the selling price of any given article seem a little less than it really was. As a matter of fact it was due to nothing of the sort. With all of his respect for the honesty of his sales-force, the Yankee mind of R. H. Macy took few chances--even in that regard. He felt that in almost every transaction the money handed over by the customer would be in even silver coin or bills. To give back the change from an odd-figured selling-price the salesman or the saleswoman would be compelled to do business with the cashier and so to make a full record of the transaction. With the commodities in even dollars and their larger fractions the temptation to pocket the entire amount might be present.

It required a good deal of logic, or long-distance reasoning, to figure out such a possibility and an almost certain safeguard against it. But that was Macy. His was not the day of cash-registers or other checking devices. The salesman and the saleswoman in a store was still apt to find himself or herself an object of suspicion on the part of his or her employer. Business ethics were still in the making. A long road in them was still to be traversed.

Mr. Macy's brother-in-law, Mr. Houghton, did not long remain in partnership with him, but retired to Boston, where he became senior partner of the house of Houghton & Dutton, which is still in existence. For a long number of years thereafter Macy conducted his business alone. Its steadily increasing growth, however, the multiplication of its responsibilities and problems, and his own oncoming years finally caused him to admit to partnership on the first day of January, 1877, two of his oldest and most valued employees, Abiel T. LaForge and Robert M. Valentine. It had long been rumored in the store that Miss Getchell's years of faithful service were finally to be rewarded by a real partnership in it. But even in 1876, woman's place in modern business had not been firmly enough established to permit so radical a step by a business house of as large ramifications and responsibilities as Macy's had come to be. Yet the point was quickly overcome--and in a most unexpected way. Early in 1876 Miss Getchell became Mr. LaForge's wife. And so, in a most active and interested way, she gained at the end a real financial interest in the profitable business, in the upbuilding of which she had been so large a factor.

Mr. LaForge had been a major in the Northern Army during the Civil War; in fact it was there that he had contracted the tuberculosis which was to cause his early demise. He had come into the store in the middle of the 'seventies as one of its first professional buyers--being a specialist in laces--and had developed real executive ability. He had great affection for things military. And when Mr. Macy told him of the uniformed attendants of his beloved Bon Marche, LaForge promptly proceeded to place the entire salesforce of Macy's in uniform. Neat uniforms they were, too: of a bluish-grey cadet cloth, and with stiff upstanding collars of a much darker blue upon the points of which were interwoven the familiar device of the bright red star. The Macy uniforms did not long remain, however. New York is not Paris. And in that day, when uniforms in general were looked upon as something quite foreign to the idea of the republic, American labor was particularly averse to them.

His important partnership step taken, Mr. Macy began to lay down his responsibilities. Despite his great fame and vigorous constitution his health had begun to fail under the multiplicity of duties. Again he turned toward the sea. He embarked upon a long voyage to Europe; in which he was to combine both business and pleasure. From that voyage he never returned. His health sank rapidly and he died in Paris, on the twenty-ninth day of March, 1877.

Two days later in New York, Mr. LaForge and Mr. Valentine formed a partnership, Mr. LaForge, although the younger of the two men, becoming the senior member of the firm. It was provided in the co-partnership papers that the business should be continued under the name of R. H. Macy & Co., until January 1, 1879; and thereafter under the new firm name of LaForge and Valentine. However, Mr. LaForge's death in 1878, followed a year later by that of his wife, prevented this scheme from being carried out. The question of changing the name of a well-established business--now come to be one of the great enterprises of the city of New York--was never again brought forward. The name of Macy had attained far too fine a trade value to be easily dropped, even if sentiment had not come into the reckoning. And sentiment still ruled the big retail house in lower Sixth Avenue, sentiment demanded that the name of one of New York's greatest merchant princes should be henceforth perpetuated in the business which he had so solidly founded. And so that name continues--in growing strength and prosperity.

III. Fourteenth Street Days

By 1883 the Macy store had rounded out its first quarter century of existence. The big, comfortable, homely group of red brick buildings on Sixth Avenue from Thirteenth to Fourteenth Streets had come to be as much a real landmark of New York as the Grand Central Depot, Grace Church, Booth's Theater, the Metropolitan Opera House or the equally new Casino Theater in upper Broadway. Its founder had been dead for six years. But the business marched steadily on--growing steadily both in its scope and in its volume. It already was among the first, if not the very first in New York, in the variety and the magnitude of its operations. It employed more than fifteen hundred men and women, a great growth since 1870 when an early payroll of the store had shown but one hundred on its employment list.

Other stores had followed closely upon the heels of Macy's. Stewart's had moved up Broadway from Chambers Street to its wonderful square iron emporium between Ninth and Tenth Streets, where, after the death of the man who had established it, it enjoyed varying success for a long time until its final resuscitation by that great Philadelphia merchant, John Wanamaker. Benjamin Altman had moved his store from its original location on Third Avenue to Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street, Koch was at Nineteenth Street, but Ehrich was still over on Eighth Avenue. None of these had been an important merchant in the beginning. But all of them, by 1883, were beginning to come into their own. The Sixth Avenue shopping district of the 'eighties and the 'nineties was being born. Mr. Macy's vision of more than twenty-five years years before was being abundantly justified. The new elevated railroad, which formed the backbone of Sixth Avenue and which had been completed about a decade before, all the way from South Ferry to One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street, had proved a mighty factor in bringing shoppers into it. Mr. Macy in 1858 might not have foreseen the coming of this remarkable system of rapid transit--the first of its kind in any large city of the world. But he foresaw the coming of both Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. There is no doubt of that. He had a habit of reiterating his prophecy to all with whom he came in contact.

The prophecy came to pass. Union Square no longer was surrounded by fine residences. Trade had invaded it, successfully. Tiffany's, Brentano's, The Century's fine publishing house had come to replace the homes of the old time New Yorkers. So, too, had Fourteenth Street been transformed. Delmonico's was still at one of its Fifth Avenue corners and back of it stood, and still stands, the Van Buren residence, a sort of Last of the Mohicans in brick and stone and timber and plaster. All the rest was business; high-grade business, if you please, and Macy's stood in the very heart of it.

We saw, in a preceding chapter, how just before the passing of Mr. Macy he had taken into partnership Mr. LaForge and Mr. Valentine. Mr. LaForge, as we have just seen, lived hardly a year after Mr. Macy's death in Paris, and Mr. Valentine died less than a twelvemonth later--on February 15, 1879. Yet the force and impress of both of these men remained with the organization for a long time after their going. Miss Prunty, one of the older members of it, still remembers as one of her earliest recollections, seeing Mr. LaForge taking groups of the cash-girls out to supper during the racking holiday season. The little girls were duly grateful. Theirs was a drab existence, at the best; long hours and wearying ones. A type that has quite passed out of existence--in these days of automatic carriers--that old-time cash girl in the big store, with her red-checked gingham frock and her hair in pig-tails, which had a fashion of sticking straight out from her small head. Lunch in a small tin pail and a vast ambition, which led many and many a one of them into positions of real trust and responsibility.

The most of them continued in the business of merchandising. They rose rapidly to be saleswomen, buyers and department managers--not alone in Macy's; but in the other great stores of the city. A Macy training became recognized as a business schooling of the greatest value. While at least one of these Macy graduates--Carrie DeMar--came to be an actress of nation-wide reputation, a comedienne of real merit.

There were times when the existence of these smart, pert little girls grew less drab. One of them told me not so long ago of the entente cordiale which she had upbuilded between Mr. S---- and herself; nearly fifty years ago.

"Mr. S---- was the only floorwalker that the store possessed in those days," said she. "Mr. Macy had been much impressed by his fine appearance and had created the post for him. On duty, he seemed a most solemn man. That was a part of his work. Behind it all he was most human, however; and sometimes on a hot day in midsummer he would begin to think of the cooling lager that flowed at The Grapevine, a few blocks down the avenue. That settled it. He would have to slip down there for five minutes. And slip down he did, while I stood guard at the Thirteenth Street door. I felt that Miss Getchell's far-seeing eye was forever upon us or that Mr. Macy might turn up quite unexpectedly.

"In return for all this, Mr. S---- would occasionally stand guard while I would slip over to John Huyler's bakery at Eighth Avenue and Fourteenth Street--sometimes to get one of his wonderful pies, and other times to buy the lovely new candies upon which he was beginning to experiment. We were great pals--S---- and I."

Nowadays in the great department stores they order this entire business of collecting both cash and packages in a far better fashion. The merchant of today has a variety of wondrous mechanical contraptions--not only cash-carriers but cash-registers--which do the work they once did, much more rapidly and efficiently. Even in those long ago days of the 'eighties the Macy store was beginning to install pneumatic tubes for carrying the money from the saleswomen at the counters to the high-set booths of the head cashiers, who seemingly had come to regard it as a mere commodity, to be regarded in as fully impersonal a fashion as boots or shoes or sugar or broom-sticks. Put that down as progress for the 'eighties.

By the early 'seventies Macy's had absorbed the entire southeastern corners of 14th Street and 6th Avenue, and had come to be a fixture of New York]

The Macy store prided itself during that second generation, as now, upon its willingness to take up innovations, particularly when they showed themselves as possessing at least a degree of real worth. Mr. Macy, with his old fashioned prejudices against innovations of any sort, was gone. His successors took a radically different position in regard to them. Here was the electric-light--that brand-new thing which this young man Tom Edison over at Menlo Park was developing so rapidly. It was new. It had been well advertised; particularly well advertised for that day and generation. How it drew folk, to gaze admiringly upon its hissing brilliancy! Ergo! The Macy store must have an electric light. And so in the late autumn days of 1878 one of the very first arc lamps to be displayed in New York was hung outside the Fourteenth Street front of the store and attracted many crowds. It was hardly less than a sensation.

In the following autumn arc lamps were placed throughout all the retail selling portions of the store. Of course, they were not very dependable. Most folk those days thought that they would never so become. The store's real reliance was upon its gas-lighting; nice, reliable old gas. You could depend upon it. The new system was still erratic. So figured the mind of the 'eighties.

Soon after the first electric lamps, the store's first telephone was installed. It, too, was a great novelty, and the customers of the establishment developed a habit of calling up their friends, just so that they could say they had used it. Eventually the convenience of the device became so apparent that folk stood in queues awaiting their turn to use it, and the telephone company requested Macy's to take it out or at least to discontinue the practice of using it so freely.

In that day there were no elevators nor for a considerable time thereafter. All the store's selling was at first, and for a long time thereafter, confined to its basement and to its main-floor. Gradually it began to encroach upon small portions of the second story. This afforded fairly generous selling space; for it must be remembered that the establishment not only filled the entire east side of Sixth Avenue from Thirteenth Street to Fourteenth Street but extended back upon each of them for more than one hundred and fifty feet. Moreover it was beginning slowly to acquire disconnected buildings in the surrounding territory; generally for the purpose of manufacturing certain lines of merchandise--a practice which it has almost entirely discontinued in these later years. Then it still made certain things that it wished fashioned along the lines which its clientele still demanded. And even some of the upper floors of the older buildings that formed the main store group were partly given over to the making of clothing; of underwear; and men's shirts and collars in particular.

It was after 1882, according to the memory of Mr. James E. Murphy, a salesman in the black silk department, who came to the store in that memorable year, that the first elevator was installed in the store. Up to that time, as we have just seen, there had been no necessity whatsoever for such a machine. But the steadily growing business of the store--there really seemed to be no way of holding Macy's back--made it necessary to use upper floors of the original building for retailing and more and more to crowd the manufacturing and other departments into outside structures.

So Macy's progressed. It kept its selling methods as well as its stock, not only abreast of the times, but a little ahead of them. Miss Fallon, who was in the shoe department of those days of the 'eighties, recalls that up to that time the shoes had been kept in large chiffoniers--the sizes "21/2" to "31/2" in one drawer, "4" to "5" in the next, and so on. This meant that if a clerk was looking for a certain specified width--say "D" or "Double A"--she must rummage through the entire drawer until she came to a pair which had the required size neatly marked upon its lining. The mating of the shoes was accomplished by boring small awl holes in their backs and tying them neatly together. There was no repair shop in the shoe department of that day--merely an aged shoemaker who lived in a basement across Thirteenth Street and to whom shoes for repair were despatched almost as rapidly as they came into the store.

These methods seem crude today. But, even in 1883, they were in full keeping with the times. Merchandising was still in its swaddling clothes; the real science of salesmanship, a thing unknown. Yet men were groping through; and some of these men were in Macy's. You might take as such a man C. B. Webster, who came to the forefront of the business, soon after the deaths of Macy, LaForge and Valentine at the end of its second decade. In fact, his actual admission to the partnership preceded Mr. Valentine's death by a few months. A while later he married Mr. Valentine's widow. And when the last of the old partners was gone his was the steering hand upon the brisk and busy ship.

To help him in his work he brought to his right hand Jerome B. Wheeler, who was admitted as a full partner April 1, 1879, and who so continued until his complete retirement from business, December 31, 1887. Mr. Webster continued with the house for a considerably longer time, maintaining his active partnership until 1896 when he sold his interest in the business to his partners. He continued, however, to retain his private office in the Macy store, coming north with it from Fourteenth Street to Thirty-fourth in 1902, and, until his death four or five years ago, staying close beside the enterprise in which he had been so large a creative factor.

Webster and Wheeler are, then, the names most prominently connected with the second era of the store's growth and activity. They were bound to the founder of the house by blood-ties and by marriage. Mr. Webster's father--Josiah Locke Webster, a merchant of Providence, R. I.--and Mr. Macy were first cousins, their mothers having been sisters. The elder Webster and Rowland H. Macy were, in fact, the warmest of friends and so the proffer by the original proprietor of the store of an opening to his friend's son, came almost as a matter of course. Its educational value alone was enormous. Young Webster accepted. He joined the organization in 1876 and a year later was made one of its buyers. His worth quickly began to assert itself. And within another twelvemonth he had abandoned all idea of returning to his father's store in Providence and entered upon a partnership in the Macy business.