THE HERALD SQUARE OF ANTE-MACY DAYS
THE HERALD SQUARE OF ANTE-MACY DAYS
In 1900, before the coming of the present store, Broadway at 34th Streetgave but faint promise of its present importance
The move once considered was quickly determined upon. No other course seemingly would have been possible. To have erected a new store building upon a leasehold in a quarter of the town which presently might begin to slide backward—would have been a precarious experiment, to put it mildly. It must go uptown. The only question that really confronted the store was just where to go uptown. A site large enough for a huge department-store is not usually acquired overnight. Moreover, the necessity for secrecy in so important a step was obvious—the dangers of the mere suggestion of its becoming known were multifold.
With these things clearly understood, the search for a new site was begun. Various ones were considered, but were finally rejected. For a time the firm considered buying the famous old Gilsey House and the property immediately adjoining it. Another site which appealed to it even more was the former site of the Broadway Tabernacle on the east side of Broadway, just north of Thirty-fourth Street—the site of the present Marbridge Building. The commanding prescience of this corner forced itself upon them. Sixth Avenue, an artery street north and south, threaded by electric surface-cars and the elevated railroad—the McAdoo Tubes had not then come into even a paper being—was crossed at acute angles by an even moreimportant street—New York's incomparable Broadway—and at right angles by Thirty-fourth Street, which even then was giving promise of its coming importance. The original planners of the uptown city of New York made many serious mistakes in their far-seeing scheme. But they made no mistake when they took each half mile or so and made one of their cross streets into a thoroughfare as bold and as wide as one of their north and south avenues. Thirty-fourth was one of the streets picked out for such importance. And from the beginning it realized the judgment of its planners. The completion of the huge Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1897 (the earlier or Waldorf side in Thirty-third Street had been finished in 1893) had fixed the importance of the street. Thirteen years later the opening of the Pennsylvania Station was to confirm it—for all time.
In 1900 the vast plan of the Pennsylvania Railroad for the invasion of Manhattan was as yet unknown. Even in the main offices of that railroad, in Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, it still was most inchoate and fragmentary. In the language of the moment, Macy's was "acting on its own." The store was using its own powers of foreseeing—and using them very well indeed.
But the site on the east side of Herald Square was not to be. In free titles it was not nearly large enough. But the west side of the square! There was a possibility. If the new store could be builded there it not only could possess an actual Broadway frontage but it would be set so far back from the elevated railroad asnot to be bothered by its noise or smoke, even in the slightest degree. As a matter of fact the last already was disappearing. The electric third-rail system was being installed everywhere upon the Manhattan system, and the pertinacious, puffy little locomotives, which so long had been a feature of New York town, were doomed to an early disappearance.
The west side of Herald Square appealed to Macy's. Long and exacting searches into its land-titles were made. Some three hundred feet back of Broadway the magnificent new theater of Koster & Bial's, extending all the way from Thirty-fourth Street to Thirty-fifth, backed up a tract which in the main was occupied by comparatively low buildings, the most of them brown-stone residences, which already were in the course of transformation into small business places. This tract seemingly was quite large enough for the new Macy's—with the possible exception, perhaps, of its engine-room and mechanical departments. The firm decided to take it, and with a policy of magnificent secrecy began negotiations for its lease. In order to accommodate the engine and machinery rooms it purchased a tract upon the north side of Thirty-fifth Street just back of the former Herald Square Theater. On this last land stood two of New York's most notorious resorts of twenty years ago—the Pekin and the Tivoli. The development of the Macy plan drove them out of the street and, for the time being at least, out of business.
The Macy plan did not go through to a finalculmination, however, quite as it had been laid out. So huge a scheme and one involving so many separate real-estate transactions is hard to keep a secret for any great length of time. Gradually the news of Macy's contemplated step became public property. It caused public astonishment and public acclaim. For, remember, if you will, that in 1900, none of the department stores had moved uptown north of Twenty-third Street. Bloomingdale's was at Third Avenue and Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth Streets, but it was a gradual upgrowth, from a modest beginning upon that original important corner. The last move had been in 1862, when A. T. Stewart had moved his store from Chambers Street north to Ninth. The cost of the lot and structure to Mr. Stewart was $2,750,000—a stupendous figure in that day.
The publicity surrounding the proposed move of Macy's found the Straus family still without one of the plots necessary to the complete acquisition of all the land in the block east of Koster & Bial's. It was the small but important northwest corner of Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street—a mere thirty by fifty feet, a remnant of an ancient farm whose zig-zag boundaries antedated the coming of the city plan and showed a seeming fine contempt for it. This tiny parcel was the property of an old-time New Yorker, the Rev. Duane Pell. Dr. Pell was on an extended trip in Europe in 1901, when Macy's began the active acquisition of its new store-site. It was given to understand that his asking price for the small corner was $250,000; anastonishing figure for such a tiny bit of land, even today, but Dr. Pell felt that he held the key to the entire important Herald Square corner and that he was justified in asking any price for it that he saw fit to ask.
While the plot was so small as to afford very little to it in the way of actual floor space the Macy management felt that it was so essential to the appearance of the store that it agreed to come to Dr. Pell's price—and so cabled him; in Spain. Word came back that he was about to embark for New York and that he would take up the entire matter immediately upon his arrival.
A few years before the Macy organization planned to be the initial department-store to move uptown, Henry Siegel, a Chicago merchant, who had achieved a somewhat spectacular and ephemeral success in that city, decided upon the invasion of New York. He came to Manhattan and in Sixth Avenue, midway between Fourteenth and Twenty-third Streets, erected a store which for a time duplicated the success of its Chicago predecessor. The proposed move of the Macy store apparently filled him with consternation. With a good deal of prophetic vision he foresaw that other Sixth Avenue stores would go uptown in its wake. His own investment in that street was too great and too recent to be jeopardized.
Siegel hit upon the idea of stepping into the old site and building at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue as soon as the Macy organization should vacate. But to desire that valuable location and to secure it were two vastly different things. The Strauses were not asleepto the possibility of some one attempting such a move. It would not be the first time in merchandising history. They arranged carefully therefore that their old corner at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue should remain entirely empty for two years after they had moved out from it. The moral and educational effect of such a hiatus was not to be underestimated.
In the meantime the Chicago man was busy on his own behalf. Through his realty agents he had quickly discovered Dr. Duane Pell's ownership of the corner point of the new Macy plot. He also found that the dominie was already on his return to the United States. He entrusted to a faithful representative the task of meeting him at the steamer-pier. The agent was there, bright and early, to meet the boat, and within a half-hour of its docking Siegel had acquired the north-west corner of Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street.
Now was the Chicagoan in a strategic position to do business with the Macy concern. At least so he felt. The concern felt differently. As far as it was concerned the corner point had sentimental value; nothing else. We already have seen how slight was its floor-space. Without hesitation it turned its back upon the tiny corner, and with the money that it had intended investing in it, purchased the leasehold of the huge theater of Koster & Bial—about twenty thousand square feet of ground space—which enabled it to place its mechanical departments (engine-rooms and the like) in its main building, and so to leave the former Tivoli and Pekin sites for the moment unimproved. This done, it turned its attention to the gentleman fromChicago. It leased him the premises at Fourteenth Street at a much higher figure than it would have been glad to rent them to another concern, and under the provisions that they should not be occupied until at least two years after the removal of the parent concern from them and that the name "Macy" should never again appear on the buildings of that site.
With the site difficulties cleared up, the actual construction problems of the enterprise were entered upon. Nineteen hundred and one was born before Macy's was enabled to begin the wholesale destruction of the many buildings upon its new site. The job of clearing the site and erecting the new building was entrusted to the George A. Fuller Company, which had just completed the sensational Flatiron Building at the apex of Fifth Avenue and Broadway at Twenty-third Street, and it was one of the first, if not the very first of the building contracts in New York where the estimates were based upon the cubic feet contents. DeLomas and Cordes, who had had a considerable success in the planning of one or two of the more recent department stores in the lower Sixth Avenue district, were chosen as the architects of the new building. Before they entered upon the actual drawing of the plans they made an extended study of such structures, both in the United States and abroad. The new building represented the last word in department store design and construction. Nine stories in height and with 1,012,500 square feet of floor-space, it was designed not only to handle great throngs of shoppers each day but the multifold working details of service to them, with the greatest expedition,and economy. To do this it was estimated that there would be required fourteen passenger elevators, ten freight elevators and seven sidewalk elevators of the most recent type. Four escalators were installed running from the main floor to the fifth. It is to be noted, too, that these escalators were the very first to be installed in which the step upon which the passenger rides is held continuously horizontal. In the older types the ascending floor is held at an awkward angle of ascension and foothold is maintained only by the attaching of steel cleats at right angles to it.
Lighting, ventilation, plumbing, all these received in turn the most careful consideration and planning. For instance, it was determined quite early in the progress of the planning for the new Macy store that it should be ventilated entirely by great fans, which, sucking the air in ducts down from the roof, would heat it or cool it, as the necessities of the season might demand, before distributing it through another duct to the working floors of the building. In this way the close and stuffy atmosphere somewhat common to old-time department stores when filled with patrons was entirely obviated in this new one.
When we come to the consideration of the everyday workings of the Macy store today we shall see how well these architects of twenty years ago planned its details. We shall not see, however, one of the most interesting of them. When it was originally builded, by far the greater part of its ninth floor was devoted to a huge exhibition hall. Within a short time this room was in a fair way to become as famous as thelarger auditorium of Madison Square Garden. In it were held poultry-shows, flower shows, even one of the very first automobile shows. Within a few years after its opening, however, the business of the store had grown to such proportions that it was found necessary to give its great space to the more mundane business of direct selling.
The problem of the corner tip there at Thirty-fourth and Broadway was quickly overcome. If the new owner of that point had counted upon the new store which completely encircled him turning tens of thousands of folk past it each day he was doomed to disappointment. For Macy's made its own corner by means of a broad arcade entirely within the cover of its own huge roof; an inside street, lined with show-windows upon either side and giving, in wet weather as well as fine, a dry and handsome passageway direct from Broadway into Thirty-fourth Street.
The original suggestion for such an arcade came in an anonymous letter to the original architects of the building. Only within the past year or two has this passageway been abandoned. The demands of the business for more elbow-room are voracious and apparently unceasing. And the space that the arcade consumed became entirely too great to be used any longer for such a purpose.
In that summer of 1901, while the architects and contractors were busy at their plans and specifications, there was wholesale and systematic devastation upon such a scale as New York has rarely ever seen. Suchpullings down and tearings away! The scene was not without its drama at any time. The writer well remembers strolling into the Koster & Bial Music Hall on an evening during that season of destruction. There was no one to bar his passage into what, at the time of its opening, but eight short years before, had been New York's most elaborate playhouse. If his glance had not been turned downward there was nothing to indicate that the evening performance might not easily begin within the hour. Upwards the great auditorium of red and gold was immaculate. The proscenium, the tier upon tier of balcony and of gallery, the dozens of upholstered boxes, the exquisitely decorated ceiling had not been touched.
But if the eye glanced downward—what a difference! The main floor and its row upon row of heavy plush chairs was entirely gone. In their place was a mucky black sea of mud; a knee-high morass, if you please, in which a dozen contractor's wagons, hauled and tugged unevenly by squads of lunging mules and horses in their traces, circled in and circled out—inbound empty and outbound laden deep with their muddy burden. On the stage, back of what had once been the footlights and in the same place where the darling Carmencita had once been wont to make her bow, stood a shirt-sleeved gang-boss. On either side of him, spotlights—things theatrical yanked from the memories of yesteryear—threw their radiance down into the auditorium and the motley audience it held.
So went Koster & Bial's, the pet plaything of joyous New York in its Golden Age. In a short time thescaffolding was to rise in that mighty amphitheater and the decorations to come tumbling down. Gang upon gang to the roof; more gangs still to the stout sidewalls, brick by brick; down they came until Koster & Bial's was no more. Its site was marked by a huge and gaping hole in the subsoil of Manhattan.
There were other phases of that tearing-down that were less dramatic and more comic. A restaurant-keeper who had a small eating place on the Broadway side of the site sought obdurately to hold out in his location—seeking an advantageous cash settlement from the store owners. His lease, perfectly good, still had from sixty to ninety days to run. He felt that the store could not wait that length of time upon him—that, in the language of the street, it would be forced to "come across." But it did not "come across." It was not built that way. It was built on either side of the restaurant. Its steel girders were far above its tiny walls and spanning one another across its ceiling before its disappointed proprietor moved out—at the end of his perfectly good lease—and without one cent of bonus money in his pocket; after which it was almost a matter of mere hours to tear the flimsy structure away and remove a small segment of earth that held it up to street level. A barber around the corner in Thirty-fourth street caught his cue from the restaurant. He, too, was going to stand pat. But he was not in the same strategic position as therestaurateur. He had no lease. He merely was going to stay and defy the wreckers. They would not dare to touch his neat, immaculate shop.
They did dare. On the very night that his lease expired something happened to the business enterprise of the razor-wielder. A cyclone must have struck it. At least that was the way it looked. The barber, coming down to business on the morrow, found his movables upon the sidewalk, neatly piled together and covered by tarpaulins against the weather. But the shop was gone. Where it had stood on the close of the preceding day was a deep hole in the ground; and three Italian workmen were whistling the Anvil Chorus.
About the tenth of October, 1901, actual construction began on the new building. On the first day of November of the following year it was complete—or practically so. It was a record for building, even in New York, which is fairly used to records of that sort. A steel-framed nine-story building, approximately four hundred feet on Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth Streets, by one hundred and eighty feet on Broadway (widening to two hundred feet at the west end of the store), with 1,012,500 square feet of floor-space, and 13,500,000 cubic feet in all, had been erected in a trifle over six months. In the meanwhile the wisdom of the Macy choice of location was already being made evident. A Washington concern—Saks and Company—was on its way toward Herald Square. It took the west side of Broadway for the block just south of Thirty-fourth Street, and by dint of great effort and because its building was considerably smaller in area, succeeded in getting into it ahead of Macy's.
Herald Square! There was, and still is, a site wellworth rushing toward. We have seen already the strategic advantages of the new site, even as far back as 1902, long before the coming of the great Pennsylvania Station just back of it at Seventh Avenue. Ever since 1890, when the remarkable vision of the late James Gordon Bennett had seen the crossing of Broadway and Sixth Avenue as the finest possible location for his belovedHeraldand had torn down the little old armory in the gorge between these two thoroughfares, Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth Streets, to build a Venetian palace for it there, the square had been a veritable hub for the vast activities of New York. Hotels, shops and theaters sprang up roundabout it. And the coming of what is one of the finest, if not the very largest, of the great railroad terminals of the land but multiplied its real importance.
The actual moving from the old store to the new was a herculean task. Yet it was accomplished within three days—which means that large enterprise was reduced through the perfection of system to a rather ordinary one. This could not have been if all its details and its possibilities had not been anticipated long in advance and planned against.
The job was undertaken by the store itself; through its delivery department, in charge of Mr. James Price, with Mr. James Woods as his very active assistant. Both of these men are veteran employees of Macy's. The service record of the one of them reaches to forty-one years and the other to forty-eight. They knew full well the size of the moving-day task that confrontedthem. To pick up a huge New York department-store and carry it twenty uptown blocks—almost an even mile—was a deal of a contract. Yet neither of them flinched at it. But both put on their thinking-caps and evolved a definite plan for it—a plan which in all its details worked without a hitch.
The old store closed its doors for the final time at six o'clock in the evening of Monday, November 3, 1902. The following day was Election Day. The movers voted early. They came to the Fourteenth Street store not long after daybreak and there began the great trek uptown—stock and fixtures. For three days they kept a steady procession; west through Fourteenth Street, then north through Seventh Avenue—to Thirty-fourth—from the old store to the new—and the empty wagons returning down through Sixth Avenue to Fourteenth Street once again. The entire route was carefully patrolled by special guards and policemen, and the entire task finally accomplished late on Thursday evening, the 6th, at which Mr. Isidor Straus was called on the telephone and told quietly:
"We shall be able to open tomorrow if you wish it."
But the head of the house advised that the opening be set for Saturday, as had been advertised; it would give a final valuable day for setting things to rights, which meant that at eight o'clock on the morning of Saturday, November 8, the new store opened its doors to the public that was anxiously awaiting the much heralded event; with as much simplicity and seeming ease as if it had been situated at Thirty-fourth Street for the entire forty-four years of its life, instead ofbut a mere twenty-four hours. A great task had been accomplished, a long step forward safely taken—and Macy's was ready to enter upon a new decade of its existence.
In its wake there came uptown the other department-stores of New York; one by one until, with but three exceptions, every one of these establishments which had been situated south of Twenty-third Street and which are still in business today, had joined in the trek. Lord & Taylor's left its comfortable home at Broadway and Twentieth Street, in which it had been housed for nearly half a century since coming north from its original location in Grand Street, and moved to Fifth Avenue and Thirty-ninth; its ancient neighbor in Broadway, Arnold Constable & Company, stood again almost cheek by jowl in Fifth Avenue. McCreery's, first establishing an uptown branch in Thirty-fourth Street, eventually abandoned its older store in Twenty-third Street and consolidated its energies in the upper one. Mr. Altman moved his business to its new marble palace at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth, and Stern's went as far north as Forty-second. Lower Sixth Avenue began to look like a deserted village. Simpson-Crawford's, Greenhut's, Adam's, O'Neill's—one by one these closed their doors for the final time. Once, and that was but two decades ago, they had been household words among the women of New York. Now their buildings were emptied, stood empty and deserted for months and for years—in most cases until the coming of the Great War and our participation init, when the Government was very glad to make use of their spacious floors for war manufacturing and for hospitalization. Of Macy's old-time competitors downtown who failed to join in the uptown movement, but three remained—Wanamaker's, Daniell's and Hearn's, who stood and still stand pat and prosperous in the locations which they have occupied for almost half a century.
The rest are all gone. Twenty-third Street, which of a Saturday afternoon used to be filled from Fifth Avenue to Sixth with smart folk of every sort, is as dull as the deserted lower Sixth Avenue. Memories walk its spacious pavements. The Eden Museé, that paradise for youth of an earlier generation, is vanished. So is the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which for forty years played so large a part in the political history of the town. That part of New York today is all but dead—inside of twenty years. Some day hence it may be reborn. Such things have come to pass in the big town ere now.
In the meantime the newest New York has come into its being. The construction of the two modern railroad terminals—the one in Thirty-third Street and the other in Forty-second—has created in the district that lies between them what today would seem to be the permanent retail shopping center of the city. The one station brings nearly 60,000 folk—transients and commuters—the other almost 100,000, into New York each business day. They anchor and anchor firmly, its new business heart. Its sidewalks are daily thronged. As was Twenty-third Street two decades ago, so hasThirty-fourth become today. Not only the railroad stations but four great subways running north and south, four elevated railways, too, a dozen surface-car lines, and innumerable taxis and private motor-cars pour their passengers into it. It is a thoroughfare of surpassing importance.
THE MACY'S OF TODAY
THE MACY'S OF TODAY
By 1903 the new Macy's in Herald Square was finished and the businessgoing forward in great strides
Fifty years ago, as Rowland H. Macy walked home one evening with his daughter—as was his frequent wont—from the simple little old red-brick store in Fourteenth Street to their new house in Forty-ninth, he paused for a moment with her in front of the old Broadway Tabernacle.
"I want you to notice this corner, very carefully, Florence," said he. "A half-century hence and the business of New York is to be centered between Thirty-fourth Street and Forty-second. Here is to be the future business heart of this wonderful city."
It is upon the vision of men quite as much as upon their prudence that the success of their enterprises depends.
The subtle hour which in summer comes just before the break of day is the only hour in which New York ever sleeps; if indeed the modern Bagdad 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 at the lowest ebb of the twenty-four. In that hour even Broadway is nearly deserted and Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street equally emptied. The swinging lights of a white-fronted lunch-room or two; the echoing racket of an extremely occasional surface-car or elevated train; the rush of a "night-hawk" taxi; the clatter of the milk-wagon; 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 seemingly, are not New York; not at least the New York that you and I are accustomed to knowing. Yet, after all, they are New York; even, if you please, the New York of that throbbing heart, Herald Square.
Soon after four in the morning the city begins to rise. New York's heart-beat is quickening, distinctly, even though ever and ever so slightly at the beginning. Yet the activity is distinguishable. The policemen and the cabbies in the square realize it, so do the waiterand the cook in theFireflylunch 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 there is real animation in the broad streets in and roundabout Macy's. By seven the traffic there begins to be a matter of reckoning. A traffic policeman makes his appearance. The current of vehicles and humans in those thoroughfares come under regulation. At eight, the city is in full sway.
All this while Macy's has stood dark—save for the few yellow and red lights which police and fire protection demand. It fronts toward Broadway and the side streets alike are cold, impassive, unanimated. Inside the great dark building the watchmen are on ceaseless patrol. There are miles of corridors 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 owners of the store may sleep in the sound assurance that nothing is being disturbed, the night patrol is made a matter of system and of record. Watchmen's clocks, here and there and everywhere, proclaim the regularity of the system. And an occasional surprise test now and then acclaims its thoroughness.
Hours before, the store was thoroughly cleaned; from cellar to roof. The last of yesterday's belated shoppers was hardly out of this market-place, before the men of the cleaning squads were in upon their heels. What a mess to be tidied up! Eight and one-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 value—a ring or a purse, dropped by some hasty or careless shopper or salesgirl. It all must be carefully gone through and in the morning sent to the Lost and Found Department where the chances are that it will not remain very long before having a claimant.
Such is the ordinary routine of the cleaning squads. On rainy or snowy days its job is increased, measurably. It is astonishing the amount of filth the sidewalks of New York can give up on a wet day. Yet rain, or no rain, filth or no filth, the cleansing must be thorough. The store at eight o'clock of the next morning must be as clean as the proverbial pin. An earnest of which you can obtain for yourself any day by pressing your nose, among the first of the impatient 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 theorganism. The fires may never die; the lights never go out—not even from one year's end to the other. And so that the very heart and blood and nerve-force of Macy's shall in truth be unending there are engines and boilers and dynamos in the mechanical plant under the Thirty-fourth Street sidewalks. As many as five hundred tons of coal can be housed in the bunkers hard at hand. The entire plant could easily light and supply the other necessary electric current for the needs of any brisk American town of five or six thousand people.
Eight o'clock, and the night superintendent of the store unlocks the first of its outer doors. But not to the public. Mr. Public's hours do not begin until a full sixty minutes 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 miles of dust coverings lifted off, folded and put away until the coming of another evening. Which means, of course, that the store folk must come well in advance of its patrons.
In the half-hour which elapses between eight and eight-thirty, many of the minor executives—particularly those of the selling floors—make their appearance at the designated doors upon the side streets. In the parlance of the organization these are known as "specials" and are divided into several classes, denoting chiefly their connection with its selling or 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 punctiliousabout 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 not more than ten or a dozen who are exempted from this necessity. A man may draw a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year salary at Macy's and still be compelled to sign his time. It is part of the inherent democracy of the organization which holds as a high principle that what is fair for one man is fair for another. A better bed-rock principle can hardly be imagined.
Half after eight!
A bell rings somewhere. The time-lists of the minor executives—perhaps it is better to remember them as the specials—are closed, and new ones substituted. These are duplicates of the earlier ones. When the section manager (a modern and much better name for the "floor-walker" of the earlier days) signs one of these, he does not merely put down an "X" as before eight-thirty, but specifically writes down his arriving time.
But from eight-thirty to eight-forty-five is known to the rank and file of the organization as its hour for arrival. Three doors—one in Thirty-fourth Street (for the women, as well as for men executives) and two others, in Thirty-fifth Street (for the other men workers 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 infront of them. They go tramping up the broad stairs together; dropping into the slender receptacles the individual brass checks (of which much more a little later) at the first barrier-gateway; after which they go scurrying off to the locker-rooms, before descending or ascending to their various posts in the store.
For fifteen minutes this rank and file—a miniature army it is—comes trooping in. There is no time to be lost; and yet no unseemly haste or confusion. And no noise. Noise, particularly surplus noise, is quite unnecessary in a machine which is functioning well.
At eight-forty-five the barrier at the head of the main employees' stair at Thirty-fourth Street closes. And in order that there may not be even the slightest particle of unfairness—one gains an increasing admiration for the absolute impartiality of an organization such as this—the pressing of a button at 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-forty-seven. And in cases of bad weather, hard rain or snow or extreme cold, eight-forty-seven becomes the stroke of nine by the clock—in very extreme cases even later, with a special allowance being made from time to time for the occasional breakdown of New York's rather temperamental transportation system.
From eight-forty-five (eight-forty-seven) to nine o'clock, the late-comers—out of breath as a rule andextremely embarrassed into the bargain—are herded into a special group and given special "late" passes, without which they may not even enter the locker rooms, to say nothing of their posts in the store. Sometimes—when the tardiness percentages of the store have been 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-comers personally and individually and talk to them, heart-to-heart. This method has now been entirely abolished. It led to controversy. It led to argument. And both of these led to ill-feeling. Macy's will not tolerate ill-feeling between its executives and its rank and file. Therefore, anything that might even tend to such an end was abolished—completely and permanently.
In due time, and when we are studying in greater detail the Macy family, we shall come again to the consideration of the methods of checking the force in in the morning and out again at night—as well as in and out at different intervals throughout 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—elevator-men, cashiers, all the rest of them, are at theirposts. A doorman is told off to each of the public street entrances to the main floor. It is the regular post for each of these. He goes to it a minute or two before the coming of nine.
After a brief period of busy activity the store aisles are for the moment practically deserted once again. There is a group of buyers "signing in"—once again the inevitable time-list—at the superintendent'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 rest of the aisles are all but empty. The clerks are behind the desks, the cashiers at their posts, the section managers at attention, the elevators banked and waiting at the ground floor— Then—
Nine o'clock!
The echo of Madison Square Mary telling the hour comes rolling up Broadway. The street doors swing open; almost as if working upon a single mechanism. The first of the shoppers come tumbling in. The great main aisle of the store—one thinks of it almost as the Broadway of this city within a city—is populated once 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 the upper floors. In three or four brief minutes the picture that one has of that mighty first floor from the mezzanine balcony that runs roundabout it is of a great mass ofhurrying, scurrying humanity; no longer any well-defined currents, but little eddies and pools of human beings constantly and forever changing.
And this but hardly past nine o'clock in the morning. In another hour there will be still more folk within the great building. Most of them have come to shop, a 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 breakfast at as late an hour as nine in the morning, but such a one would not know his New York. Breakfast in our big town is rarely over until the setting of the sun.
For an hour at the beginning of the day the Macy family may shop in its own interest. The saleswomen—the men as well—may obtain permits from their division managers which in turn entitle them to large and conspicuous shopping cards which serve two pretty definite purposes—the identification of the saleswoman as an actual and authorized shopper (she is not supposed to go nosing 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 of customer. But the rule bends, ever and ever so gently, for the man or woman who is employed within it. After all, he or sheisa part of the family and so entitled to be recognized. Thisrecognition takes the form of a sizable reduction upon the wearing apparel necessary for his or her personal use. This difference goes upon the books of the store as a business expense.
By ten the store has finished shopping in its own behalf. Its maximum force for the day is on the job and the wise shopper comes close to this hour. For by eleven the force is reduced. Luncheon 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 and a half or two hours in the middle of the day. But then New York has never taken its meal-times quite so seriously as Paris. Upon this one thing alone a considerable essay might be written.
But New York must lunch, just as Paris or London or any other community must lunch. And so for three valuable hours out of the middle of the day the Macy force is reduced nearly one-third its size. Forty-five minutes 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 the form of elaborate lunch-rooms and the like. However, it recognizes that there are many workers who prefer to go out at the middle of the day. And proper arrangements are made for the accommodation of these folk.
By two o'clock, however, practically the entire selling force at least is back again. The hardest portion ofthe day begins. For, no matter how hard the store may advertise, no matter how it may strive to educate its patrons in every other way to the use of its 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 Macy's right after luncheon—although a single glance at the big and crowded restaurant would easily convince you that she often lunches as well as shops in the big red-brick institution of Herald Square—and then gets right down to the serious business of shopping.
And at Macy's itisbusiness; always business. The big store at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, in recent years at least, has not gone in for shows—for organ and orchestral concerts 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 features to the other routine of their operations. It merely has contended that its own method was completely satisfactory to itself. Which, after all, is a position of infinite strength.
"Macy's attractions are its prices!" is an advertising slogan of the house so long sounded now that it has become almost a household phrase to its hundreds of thousands of regular patrons. It is a phrase up to which it has lived, steadily and consistently. And not only has it steadfastly refused to give shows of any sort—save, of course, those wonderful windowpageants 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-dressing rooms, barber shops and the like. And this despite the fact that in selling such things as groceries and automobile sundries—to take two specific instances out of several—it has gone considerably beyond the merchandise scope of some of the very largest of its New York competitors.
"Hundreds of thousands of regular patrons?" you interrupt and repeat. "A hundred thousand people is a whole lot. Until very recently, at least, the population of what would be considered a pretty good-sized American city."
Not long ago, I asked how many people came into Macy's in the passing of an average business day. I was promptly told that several times the firm had endeavored to make an actual and systematic count of the folk who passed through each of its many entrances, but had never entirely 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 an hour; each of the fourteen public elevators was carrying the full number of passengers permitted it by law and the store management; while a host of other folk were doing business upon the ground floor without everascending to the fascinating mysteries of the land of Up-Above.
And that was October. If a man who had seen the throng of that pleasant autumn day and thought it well-nigh impossible only had returned to the big store on a December day—say the Saturday before Christmas last—he would have thought that three hundred thousand would have been far nearer the mark of the eight and one-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 a good half-hour to get within the huge mart; another half-hour to get out again. Certain departments—notably toys—possessed navigation problems of their very own, and other departments, such as refrigerators and other household goods, were comparatively deserted. The Christmas trade is nothing if not oddly balanced.
Through a store such as this one may wander,ad libitum, and find a new surprise at nearly every corner of it. Certainly upon each of its floors. Nor are these to be limited, in any way, to the floors to which the public is ordinarily admitted. Once I remember coming through the eighth floor and suddenly emerging upon a clean, 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 uponglass. 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 they were today to be classed as pretty thoroughly Americanized. One of them had sat at that bench—and the one down in Fourteenth Street that had preceded it before the northward trek to Thirty-fourth Street—for over thirty-two years. The three men were artisans—of the old school and of a sort that seemingly is not bred these days.
"When they are gone I do not know where we shall go to replace them," said the superintendent.
"You will have to quit doing this sort of work?" I ventured.
He answered quickly:
"Oh no," said he, "Macy's never quits. We shall have to find others—even if we train them ourselves. It is only the material for training that worries me. American young men of today are not overfond of painstaking work of this sort."
I knew instantly what he meant. As a nation we are made up of "shortcut" experts. Perseverance, patience, a tedious attention to uninteresting detail, have seemingly but little appeal to the average young man who is looking forward 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 one shudders at the mere thought of a land which should be composed entirely of executives and wishes that we mightdevelop more definitely a class of artisan workers, such as came to us forty, thirty, even twenty-five years ago.
The oldest of these men—the man with thirty Macy years to his credit—was chasing a hunting scene upon a great glass bowl as I bent over his desk. It was more than 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 favor. In their own time and order they will come back again, however. And the workmanship that made them possible will be restored to its own former high favor.
But even today there are large demands in Macy's for precisely this sort of thing. And glass grinding and engraving—which runs all the way from the making of prescription lenses for spectacles or for milady'slorgnonsup to the cutting of an entire dinner service of the most exquisitely patterned glass or repairs to the bowl or 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 description and a thousand lesser and highly individual jobs, such as the regilding of a mirror or the transformation of an ancient whale-oil lamp into a modern incandescent one. It is small wonder that as a minimum seventy-five men are constantly employed in this shop; more, as the exigencies of this season or of that may demand them.
Yet this is but one of Macy's shops under that giant roof of Herald Square. There are others in close proximity—like those for the making of mattresses and bedding of every sort and variety and the establishment which brings broken toys back into life again. To my own Peter Pannish soul this last forever has the greatest fascination. Once, long years ago, I went into a great store 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 the way from lovely dolls of the most delicate china and porcelain to Teddy Bears who apparently had been badly worsted in some terrific nursery struggle, was a man with a position in which he might have genuine pride; but for the painting and re-arranging of those small houses a man, with an imagination in his soul, might almost afford to pay for the privilege of doing the work!
Five-thirty!
Again the doormen to their posts, two or three minutes in advance of the exact hour set. The minute hand upon the face of the clock no sooner reaches the exact bottom of its course, before a bell rings within the store and the great doors shut—simultaneously, as in the morning they had opened. But not permanently, of course. Dozens, hundreds, perhaps athousand or more shoppers still are left within the store. Each is to be accorded a full opportunity to finish his or her transactions. There is no hurry; no ostensible hurry, at any rate. It would not be good-breeding to hasten the customer upon his way. And a canon of good merchandising is good breeding.
Gradually, however, the late-stayers eliminate themselves. The big doors open to let them out, but never again this day to let newcomers in. No rule of the house is observed more inexorably. And so gradually the store empties itself.
In the meantime certain departments have already ceased to function. The salesfolk are dismissed for the night and go scurrying off. A few bring out the dust-covers and these 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 dust. System reigns. And the section manager, the last to leave his department for the night, makes sure that everything there is ship-shape against the coming of another day.
Before he is gone—and he, in Macy's, is multiplied into ninety or a hundred human units—the cleaning squads are out upon the floor, rolling out their bin-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, perhaps later, before the store is absolutely clean again and settled down to the monotonous presence of the watchman, to await the arrival of another dawn.
In the meantime the Macy family is pouring forth into the side streets through the doorways through which they entered before nine of the morning. There is little restriction, no red-tape about their leaving. Their brass discs—each individual and bearing the employee's designating number—which they dropped in the morning have been returned to them in the course of the day for use again upon the morrow.
The only formality about their leaving—if indeed it might be called a formality—is the quick-fire inspection made by two store detectives who stand either side of the descending file at the main employees' stair, to see if any packages which are being carried out are lacking the check-room stamp and visé.
These last are the store's protection against possible theft through its inner walls. The workers who bring packages in, either in the morning or at any later time in the progress of 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 once again. Any purchases that they may make during the day follow a similar course. It is a definite and an orderly procedure. Any other would be indefinite and to an extent disorderly.
This is the reason why an occasional package—lacking the official stamp and visé of the check-room—is picked up by the keen-eyed detectives while its transporter is asked to tarry for a moment in an ante-room. In the course of an average evening there may be a half dozen of such outlaw packages detected. Their holdersare 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 has made, not alone for its own protection but for the protection of every man and woman in its employ. Such is the explanation which the assistant store manager makes to them before he dismisses them, at just a few minutes before six.
"We believe in explaining things," he will tell you afterwards. "For we believe that we gain the very best service from the Macy 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 little arbitrary, perhaps—we tell them why we have had to make the rule and almost invariably find them satisfied and quite content."
The packages, themselves, are detained overnight. The store reserves the right to make an inspection of them. Such inspection, even when it is made, rarely ever shows the package 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 full and co-operative use of the facilities which are provided for the comfort, and the protection, of him and his fellows; which generally is all that is necessary to be said.
By six the store is practically emptied of its workers. After that hour any one leaving it must have a pass and be interviewed by the night superintendent at the single door left open for exit. Night work in theMacy store is little and far between these days—save possibly in the Christmas season and 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 work more than fifty-four hours or oftener than one night a week and then not later than nine o'clock. In turn, the store, following the workings of the statute, designates Thursday as its late employment night. If, because of some emergency, it wishes to deviate from this, it must have a special permit.
As a matter of fact, however, Macy's anticipates the law; goes far ahead of it. It finds its women workers not only willing to work the occasional Thursday night shifts, but, with the practical advantages of a full dinner furnished without cost and overpay to come into the reckoning, for the most part extremely anxious. And it reminds the solicitous legislators up at Albany that it was not a statute that abolished 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 New York should be kept open evenings—some evenings throughout theentire year—and all evenings in a certain small and terrible season; and without consideration of the task this custom imposed upon the patient folk who were serving them. Out of such lack of consideration, out of such selfishness, if you please, was a great practical and moral reform in merchandising evolved. Which was, in itself, no little triumph.
I like to think of modern business as a huge, great single machine; or better still, a group of little machines gathered together and functioning as one. It is a simile that I have used time and time again. To feel that some single achievement of industry—of manufacturing or of merchandising—is as well organized and as well balanced as the many mechanisms that are laboring in its behalf, seems to bring the most single complete picture of modern business of the sort that our press has ofttimes been pleased to term "big business".
And sometimes I like to think of these "big businesses"—with their hundreds and thousands of human units—as armies. At no time is this last comparison more apt than when one comes to apply it to the modern department-store, as we today know it in America. For, even if you wish to grant an entire dissimilarity of purpose, one of these huge institutions has more than one point of similarity with an army. Not alone in numbers can this parallel be made, but quite as quickly in organization. While, to return to our first simile, it, too, is a big machine—humanized. Its parts are carefully co-ordinated so that the wholewill function with the least possible friction. Like an army it is officered with its generalissimo, its under generals, its colonels, its captains, its lieutenants, its sergeants and its corporals. The difference is only in nomenclature. The structure is quite the same. For, when you come to analyze, you will find the divisions of labor and of authority quite corresponding to similar divisions in the army. Officer, "non-com" and private—each contributes his more or less important part; each is a necessary factor in the success of the enterprise.
Like an army, the department-store of modern America is designed to move constantly forward. The "big-chief" scans his balance sheets, the rise and fall of the curves of his outgo and income averages, the tremendously meaningful jagged red lines of his graphic charts, quite as carefully as the army general keeps track of the movement of his forces upon the maps which his topographists send him. He gathers his officers roundabout him and plans the strategy of business with the same shrewd foresight that must be observed by the successful military leader. He must be a promoter of morale throughout his forces, even down to the newest and the lowest-paid clerk. There must be constant liaison between the general and the private in the ranks.
In considerable detail this parallel can be carried out. Soon, however, it must come to an end. That is, it ends in so far as Macy's is concerned. For the army at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street is neither an armyof offense nor of defense. Its sole position always is upon the front line of service.
At the head of the organization there are the three brother partners who inherited their original interest in the great business from their father, the late Isidor Straus, who, with their mother, lost his life in the supreme catastrophe of the sinking of theTitanic. In 1914 they acquired Nathan Straus' interest by purchase. These men, Jesse Isidor, the president, Percy S., the vice-president, and Herbert N., the secretary and treasurer, are its triple head and front. While each has trained himself to be a merchandise specialist of the highest order, there is none that knows the details of Macy's better than his brothers—they share equally in the supreme authority that directs the business. Directly responsible to them, in turn, is its general manager, its merchandise council and its advertising and financial departments.
As I write these paragraphs, the great chart of the Macy organization lies upon my desk. It is a vast and fascinating thing. With the lines extending upon it here and there and everywhere from the box which holds the triple-head, branching and rebranching here and there and again, it looks not unlike a giant map; a chart, if you prefer to have it so. And so it is, a chart upon which the steersmen of so vast and so responsible an enterprise safely pick their course upon a seemingly unending journey.
"Government by draughting-board," sniffed an old-time business man to me once, when I was trying to explain to him in some detail how a great steelmanufacturing plant of the Middle West attempted to accomplish its huge job, economically and efficiently, by the use of graphic charts. And he added: "I'd like to seemyselfheld down by blue-print authority."
To which, after all this while, I should like to reply:
"I should like to see a concern, as big and as successful as Macy's, operated without a careful charting of its always difficult path."
Yet, as a matter of hard fact, Macy's, any more than any other big and well-planned business organism of today, never binds itself to go blindly and unthinkingly upon the lines of the charts—and nowhere else. The real trick of executive direction seems to be to know when to follow these lines and when more or less to completely disregard them. Rule-of-thumb can never again overcome the rules of averages, of percentages or of economic laws. But the rule of wit and of human understanding can ofttimes be used to temper this first group and sometimes with astonishingly successful results.
A glance or two at this imposing organization chart lying before me begins to show the many, many ramifications of the huge Macy business tree. It shows, for instance, how, under the direction of the merchandise council, are four large branches of store activity more or less inter-related: the handling of Macy's own merchandise (meaning particularly that which is either made in the store's own factories or at least made under its direct supervision); the work of the large force of buyers; the comparison department(an important phase of the business to which we shall come in our own good time); and the foreign offices.
In the financial department, the controller is the quite logical chief. His general duties are fairly obvious. To help him in them, he has, under his direction, the chief cashier, the salary office, the auditing department, the depositors' account department—this last a most distinctive Macy feature—and a statistical department.
Obvious, too, is the greater part of the work of the publicity department. It includes in addition to the advertising manager—always an important factor in the modern department-store and particularly so in the case of Macy's—a display manager. It is the job of the first of these men to tell the public of the merchandise being offered for sale at the sign of the red star; the job of his compeer to see that it is properly displayed to them.
And, finally, there is the general manager—last but not least. Connected by an exceedingly direct and much-traveled line with the general offices upon the seventh floor of the store are Mr. W. J. Wells, the store's general manager, and his advisory council. For the G. M., big as he is always, has need of much advice. Upon his broad and efficient shoulders are placed such a tremendous array of responsibilities that one cannot but marvel at the sheer efficiency of the man—to say nothing of his reserves of physical and mental strength—who can hold down such a job. Yet, at Macy's, the man himself disclaims any superhuman powers.
"I am merely the automatic governor to this big machine," he will tell you, in his own simple, direct way. "In fact, if the machine always functioned one hundred per cent. efficient, there really would be no need either of me or of my job. It is because no machine that is built of human cogs and cams and levers and pulleys may ever work at one hundred per cent. efficiency that I, or some other man, must sit in this office. It is our job to meet the unusual and the unforeseen. We take up slack here and loosen there."
The translation of this is unmistakable. If the three men upon the high seventh floor of the institution are its steersmen, this man, who has his office at the rear of its broad mezzanine balcony, is at least its chief engineer. And to assist him he has five assistant engineers—assistant general managers, in reality. The habit of simile leads one into odd designations of title. Each of these five assistant general managers—we shall stand by the nomenclature of the store—in turn has a large number of departments reporting to him. While in addition to them and ranking as virtual assistant managers are the superintendent of the detective bureau and that of the building, itself.
The general manager, himself, is charged with the general duty of engaging, training and educating employees. He regulates salaries. He controls the transfer and discharge of employees. He is charged with the enforcement of all rules and regulations. He is the final authority to decide whether or not merchandise is returnable, for refund, exchange or credit. He also is the authority who adjusts all claims orcontroversies with customers. And he is the one to whom employees may appeal if they feel they are being treated unfairly by their superiors. A man-sized job truly! And because no one man, short of a superhuman at any rate, could ever perform all of its various and perplexing functions, Mr. Wells has his five assistants. In the event of his absence as well as that of any one of them the man below rises temporarily into his immediate superior's job.