Into that ear there comes the almost rhythmic thud of automatic machines; a sort of continuous drone. You turn quickly and find beside you a row of ticket-printers, the little electric presses in which are made the price-tags that you find pinned or pasted or tied on every piece of Macy merchandise you buy. Miles of thin cardboard are fed into one side of these machines and come out the other; in proper-sized units, with the selling price of the article to be tagged plainly printed on them. Where the article is subject to Federal tax, this is also included as a separate item and the total given. One of these machines combines the operation of printing the price and attaching the ticket to the garment. It is detail--necessary detail, detail upon a vast scale. Here, then, is the receiving department of this great single retailing machine of modern business. It keeps over three hundred human units constantly upon the move--and, mind you, all that these people are doing is merely making the merchandise ready to sell. The next step is the final one before actual sale; the display of proffered goods--upon the counters and within the plate-glass windows along the street frontages. This, in the modern department-store, is considered a feature of the utmost importance, and nowhere more so than at Macy's. Sixty-four years of salesmanship experience, in the course of which it has been the originator of many daring and successful display experiments, has shown the house their full value. Yet, even in Macy's, there are certain reservations to the strong house policy of attractive display. Certain fundamentals are stressed. The invitation to buy is forever put in the goods themselves rather than in the background against which they are shown. It requires no especial astuteness to see from this fact alone an enormous expense is saved; the benefit of which, according to the now well understood Macy plan, is passed on to buyer. Other stores spend many thousands of dollars in building and decorating special rooms and sections for merchandising which are far out of the ordinary. To give an air of extreme exclusiveness, _chic_, Parisian atmosphere--call it what you may--elaborate partitions are put up and expensive decorators given carte-blanche. The result is beautiful, almost invariably. Shopping in such surroundings becomes a peculiar delight--particularly to the woman patron. But milady pays. In the expressive, if not elegant, old phrase she "pays through the nose."