Which means that the personnel of the order checking department up on the seventh floor must not only carefully verify the shipment as to quality and to price but as to the condition in which it actually is received. The hurried cursory examination of the platform porters becomes an unhurried and painstaking investigation in this last instance. The cases are not necessarily opened within the seventh floor headquarters of the order checking department. As in the case of the actual physical receipt, the unpacking is carried forward at the point of greatest convenience to the merchandise department to be served. But the results and records are kept at the one central headquarters. And the skilled and expert merchandise checkers from the selfsame headquarters are the men and women who oversee the unpacking--invariably. They pass the responsibility of their stamp and signature upon their receipts before the merchandise is turned over to the department manager, who himself, or through his responsibility, purchased it. Nothing is left to guesswork, or to chance. Now we see the full responsibility settled once again upon the broad shoulders--let us hope indeed that they are broad--of the buyer. With a full knowledge of the price that he paid for them, of market conditions, and of the prices of Macy's competitors he determines the prices at which his merchandise is to be sold. Clerks, known as markers, quickly attach these prices by small tags to the goods themselves. From the marking-rooms, where everything to be sold within this market-place is plainly and unequivocally priced, the merchandise goes without further delay either direct to the counters of the selling floors, or into the "reserves"--the warehouses that extend all the way from Twenty-eighth Street to north of Thirty-fifth, and from Broadway to Eighth Avenue. The stage is set. The show is ready. The performance may now begin. A trip through the hinterland of the Macy store is like a visit behind the scenes of a modern theater. You see there just the way in which the drama of selling actually is staged, from the settings to the properties. You rub shoulders with the actors and actresses, just off stage; with the electrician, the stage-manager, the carpenter and the stage-hands. And always your ear is waiting to hear outside the orchestra and the applause of the audience.