The second and the third assistant managers are the heads of non-selling
organizations within the store, the fourth and the fifth handle the
training and the educational departments, respectively. The second
assistant has, as his especial responsibility, the merchandise checkers,
the collectors, the stock clerks, the cashiers and the interior mail and
messenger service. The other non-selling assistant general manager
supervises the receiving department, the department of money orders and
adjustments, the supply department, the delivery, the receiving, the
time office, the manufacturing, and sundry other smaller specialties of
the store; small, however, only in a comparative sense. Taken by
themselves they quickly would be seen to be sizable indeed.
The tasks of most of these departments are fairly obvious from their
names. Some of the others we shall see in a bit of detail as we go
further into the store and its workings. In other chapters we shall
describe what the great delivery department is supposed to accomplish,
and actually does accomplish, the scope and plan and reach of the
departments of training and of employment, and some others, too. It
takes no great strain upon the imagination to conceive of the importance
of the detective bureau's work, nor that of the superintendent of
buildings.
So much, then, for a preliminary bird's-eye view of a mammoth machine,
not a machine for turning out shoes or typewriters or paper, but for
buying and selling all these things and many, many more. And as you read
in the earlier part of this book, the huge mechanism did not spring into
its being in a year, or in a decade, or even in a generation. It
represents slow, hard, steady growth; and slow, hard, steady growth it
is still having.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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