Let us now suppose that milady does not live in either Manhattan,
Brooklyn or the Bronx, but in one of those smart suburbs: Forest Hills,
New Rochelle, Englewood or the Oranges, to pick four or five out of
many. She still is well within the limits of Macy's own delivery
service. If she lives in the first of these--Forest Hills--she will be
served, not direct from the Herald Square establishment, but from the
little Long Island community of Queens. Fifteen wagon and motor truck
routes run from the Macy sub-station there, which in turn is fed by the
merchandise coming out over the great Queensborough bridge, each
evening, on heavy five-ton trucks. And, to go back even further, these
have been filled from the super-sized compartments at the end of the
conveyor-chute marked "Suburban."
Similarly, if she dwell in New Rochelle, she will be served by one of
the fifteen motor trucks running out from the sub-station at Woodlawn,
remembered by travelers upon the trains to Boston chiefly as the place
of the enormous cemetery. It serves the great suburban territory north
of the direct delivery routes out from the main store--a line drawn
through Kingsbridge and Pelham Avenue--out as far as Ossining, Mt. Kisco
and Stamford.
Englewood and the New Jersey territory roundabout are served by Macy's
Hackensack sub-station, with nine more routes; while the Oranges, mighty
Newark, Montclair and that immediate vicinage draws its merchandise
through a fourth sub-station, right in the heart of Newark, itself, and
operating ten regular motor truck routes. The fifth and last
all-the-year sub-station is at West New Brighton, Staten Island. It
serves that far-flung and least populated of New York's five boroughs,
Richmond.
In the summer months another sub-station is added to the list, at
Seabright, down on the New Jersey coast, and serving all those populous
resorts from the Atlantic Highlands on the north to Spring Lake on the
south. This is an expensive feature of Macy service, and one for which
the store receives no extra compensation. It is one of the many
expensive things that must be charged to profit-and-loss or the somewhat
indefinite "_overhead_"--indefinite enough when one comes to consider
its ramifications, but always fairly definite in its drain upon the
daily financial balances of the store.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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