They have, from the beginning, come toward the big problem quietly, sanely and efficiently. At the very beginning and in company with two of the officers of the corporation they went upon an extended trip through the more modern department-stores across the land. Here, there, everywhere, they found features worth noting and collating. When they were done with their journeys they had, as a foundation for their studies upon the new Macy store, a sort of standardized practice of most of its fellows across the land. This preliminary completed, the engineering member of the partnership, Mr. Holden, began an intensive study of the fundamental factors of the business machine that he was to enlarge. To begin with there was its traffic--divided, as we have seen in earlier chapters, into three great and fairly distinct avenues: the merchandise, the shoppers who come to purchase it, and the employees who wait upon their needs. It is fairly essential that these three streams of traffic be kept separate, save at such points where, for the conduct of the business, they must be brought together. Here, then, was a real opportunity for study. Mr. Holden began with the traffic streams of the shoppers. Obviously, and despite the growing importance and activity of the Pennsylvania Station, to say nothing of the west side subway, which runs down Seventh Avenue in front of it, the main traffic streams of shoppers must continue to come into Macy's from Broadway. The star of Broadway is even more firmly set in the heavens of New York than that of Thirty-fourth Street. These main traffic streams within the store are, then, roughly speaking, three in number; one comes from the northeast corner--at Thirty-fifth Street--another from the southeast corner at Thirty-fourth Street--the third still shows a decided fondness for the impressive center doors upon Broadway. Within the store they unite and then separate into a variety of smaller currents. A goodly portion of these violate all the similes of streams and proceed upstairs at the rate of about 10,300 folk an hour at the busiest times of busy days. And there are an astonishingly large number of these times. Of these 10,300, about 7,400 will ascend upon the great escalator, which reaches up into the sixth, or last selling floor, of the present store. When this escalator was first built, eighteen years ago, it was looked upon as hardly less than a transportation marvel. Every similar device that had preceded it was known as a single-file moving-stairway, with the capacity estimated at sixty persons a minute, or 3,600 an hour. By making its escalator double-file, Macy's not only slightly more than doubled its capacity but rendered it the full equivalent of at least twenty-five passenger elevators of the largest size.