"Once each month three prizes are given to the employees who make the
best suggestions for the betterment of store service or conditions.
Don't hesitate to try for a prize, even if your suggestion does not
appear important. We need your ideas and like to have as many as
possible presented each month. Write plainly and drop your suggestions
in the boxes furnished for this purpose. The first prize is $10.00, the
second $5.00, and the third $2.00."
Here is only a single one of the many evidences of Macy co-operation
with the employees. Yet it illustrates clearly the house's policy of
making its workers feel an interest in and beyond the mere amount of
money that they draw at the end of the week. Not a few of these prizes
are awarded for suggestions as to procedure in technical matters
relating to the details of the business. Some of them result in the
saving of time--and consequently money--and others in the improvement of
working conditions. For example: ten dollars was awarded to the man who
suggested that the doors of fitting-rooms be equipped with signals to
show whether or not they are occupied; five dollars went to the one who
made the suggestion that the fire-axe and hook standing in the corner of
the customers' stairway be placed on the wall in a suitable case so that
children could not play with them; two dollars to her who advanced the
very reasonable idea that a scratch-pad in the 'phone booths would
prevent memoranda and art manifestations being made upon the walls. Here
are a few suggestions that were proffered and acted upon. The entire
list runs to a considerable length.
There is another notice upon the big bulletin board at the head of the
employees' stairs--a sort of town-crier affair with temporary and
permanent notices of interest to the store's workers--which tells the
working force that when vacancies occur within the big store they will
be promptly posted on this and other bulletin boards. The workers are
advised to apply for any position which they may feel they are competent
to fill. Ambition is not curbed in Macy's. On the contrary, it is
stimulated to every possible extent. The employee is restricted only by
his own limitations, if he has them. It is a firmly-fixed house policy
to promote, wherever it is at all possible, from its own ranks. Among
its high-salaried men and women are not a few who have worked their way
up from the bottom. In fact, among these six or eight of the best paid
men in the store, is one who boasts that he first came to New York
fifteen years ago, with but a suitcase and eleven dollars in his pocket.
The employment department must have been very much on the job when it
hired this man. It generally is very much on its job.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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