The course is only varied in slight detail for the woman college graduate. Macy's has naught but the highest regard for the gentler sex--not alone as its patrons but as members of its staff--yesterday, today and tomorrow. A woman may not be able to handle heavy cases upon the receiving platform. But there are other sorts of cases that she may handle--and frequently with a tact and diplomacy not often shown by the more oppressed sex. I might cite a hundred instances from within the store where she has shown both--and initiative as well. But I shall give only one--where initiative played the largest part. Some few months ago a young woman who has climbed high in the store organization, to the important post of buyer of a most important line of muslin wearing apparel, found herself in France, but a few hours before the steamer upon which she was booked to sail to the United States was to depart from Southampton. To take a steamer across the Channel and then catch her boat was quite out of the question. She did the next best thing. She hopped on an aëroplane and flew from Paris to London; seemingly in almost less time than it here takes to tell it. She caught her boat. Her instructions were to catch the boat. And long since she had acquired the Macy habit of obeying orders.
Upon this, again, a whole volume might be written--upon the thoroughness of an organization which really organizes, a training department that really trains, a system which really systematizes. And all under the title of a family group--in which affection and tact and understanding come into play quite as often as discipline and energy and initiative.
In the business machine of yesterday there were no adjustments for play. It prided itself upon its efficiency. And in the next breath it proclaimed that such efficiency left no room whatsoever for such foolishness as recreation. Today we know much better. We know that play--healthy, uniform play in a decent amount--is one of the very finest of tonics for the human frame. And so count it as one of the very highest factors in our modern schemes of efficiency.
Macy's plays and makes no secret of the fact. On the contrary, it is intensely proud of its provisions for the welfare of its workers. Industrial recreation is no mere idle phrase to it. In hard fact no small portion of the remarkable esprit de corps of the store is due to its well organized recreational and social service work. In a large measure this part of the operation of the store corresponds to what the War and Navy Departments did through their Commissions on Training Camp Activities during the great war. Bearing in mind our likening Macy's to an army in an earlier chapter, the parallel now becomes a close one indeed. Organized recreation promoted better team work in the war; it now promotes better team work in business. Ergo, it is for the welfare of Macy's that it shall promote organized recreation beneath its own roof.