The public service department means exactly what it is called. It is at the service of the public. In concrete form it is a free information bureau, where theater seats and railroad and Pullman tickets may be purchased at face value--and not one cent beyond, not even the usual moderate fifty-cent advance of the hotel agencies--where astute and marvelously informed young men and women, with a miniature library of reference books at their immediate command, stand ready and willing to answer all the reasonable questions that may be thrust at them. To it is added a postal office, a telegraph office and public telephones for both local and long distance service. The third assistant general manager of the store also has within his bailiwick the important department of mail orders and adjustments. Although in the technical sense of the word Macy's today has no mail order department--having been forced to abandon its once promising beginning along this line because of a sheer lack of room in which to handle it--the store each year actually receives thousands of orders for its goods by mail, from folk who, for one reason or another, find it inconvenient to visit it. These are received and systematically handled in this very department. Under its adjustment division comes the extremely interesting bureau of investigation, which concerns itself with all complaints, and the correspondence bureau, which handles more than ninety-five per cent. of the mail of the house. It requires no particular keenness of imagination to see that, even with complaints reduced to a minimum and letter-writing and handling to a fine science, there is an infinite amount of detail in these two departments alone--detail that reaches into every part of the store and that necessitates a clever combination of system and diplomacy. The exposition of the workings of the Macy organization is yet to lead us into other chapters in which various separate subjects of interest will be treated at greater length than here; but now is the time and place to focus our attention upon one of the small, but extremely important, departments that works unseen--but not unfelt--behind the scenes. It is known as the comparison department and the work that it does is of vast importance in the operation of the store. Its functions are unending--and continuous. Macy's policy of underselling its competitors is an unhalting one.