Down in the basement of this great mart of Herald Square there is a
corner not often shown to the outer world, from which there constantly
emerge noises which blend and combine to give the effect of a staccato
rumble. Thud, thud, t-h-u-u-d, thud, thudity, thud, thud. Then a sound
of air, as in a Gargantuan sigh. Thudity, thud, and so on, _ad
infinitum_. These sounds seemingly are quite unending. If your curiosity
draws you toward the door from which these sounds emerge and you finally
are permitted to open it and go within, you will find a company of young
women sitting along both sides of three sets of moving belts, quickly
picking brass cylinders from the belts as they pass them. Except for the
fact that there is another tube room on the fourth floor (for the upper
floor selling departments) this basement place might truly be called the
heart of the store, for it is these brass cylinders that contain the
life-blood of the business, the cash which the customers pay for their
purchases. Call the tube room the pulse of the store and the analogy is
better--certainly their throbbing is a close index of its condition.
Alert cashiers pick up the carriers from the upper belt as they pass,
deftly make the required change, and drop them to the lower belt, on
which they are conveyed to other young women who despatch them to the
departments whence they came. This continues for approximately eight
hours each working day. The cash carriers do considerable traveling in
the course of a year. One of them might easily go from the new Bagdad to
the old. Yes, it might. If you still scoff let us look at the system
together and do a little figuring upon our own account.
Throughout the store there are two hundred and fifty cash stations--the
outer terminals of the line at one of whose common hearts we now stand.
Each of these stations is connected with one or the other of the common
hearts by two separate lines of tubing, one for sending and the other
for receiving the carriers. There is a total of 125,000 feet of this
tubing, or nearly twenty-four miles. Five thousand cash carriers are in
use and the average number of round-trips made per day by all of them is
150,000. Each round-trip averages two hundred and fifty feet. The
average distance traveled each day by this host of travelers then comes
to the astonishing total of 37,500,000 feet--7,155 miles. Now to your
atlases and find how far the new Bagdad is from the old. And if that
distance does not give you pause, consider that the peak-load of the
system was carried on a day when its mileage ran to 12,120--an
equivalent of one-half the distance around the world--in a little over
eight hours.
Truly it would seem that money goes far at Macy's.
V. Distributing the Goods
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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