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Through the hordes of January sales shoppers in Macy's Manhattan store last week moved one of the toughest customers ever to confront a salesperson. As the board chairman of R. H. Macy & Co., Jack Isidor Straus is not only the biggest man in the world's biggest store but the chief executive of a 49-store chain that serves 110 million people a year. Yet Jack Straus, at 64, enjoys none of his duties so much as that of playing the indignant consumer. A man with the saucer eyes and eager fingers of a shopper ready to seize a bargain, he moves through Macy's like an avenging angel, fulfilling the dreams of every customer by raising Cain—and making his complaints stick.
"Just look at that customer." he snapped as he walked through children's ready-to-wear. "Not a soul around to wait on him. The salespeople think that with 150,000 customers a day, if they lose one it makes no difference." He grumped over the lack of service in the furniture department ("Looks like the Maine woods"), chewed out a salesman in the shirt department for not being quick enough. He had one word — "awful" — for some orange-colored vases on sale on the eighth floor, and viewed with disdain the incandescent ladies' stockings displayed on the main floor: "That's not my idea of what gals should put on their gams."
The store that Straus runs not only looms large in a nation that loves to buy; it has become part of the American scene. Macy's has inspired a movie (Miracle on 34th Street} and a Broadway musical (Here's Love). It has been the subject of an armful of books, of countless gags and cartoons, of many enduring legends. Its 40-year-old Thanksgiving Day parade — a two-mile panoply of celebrities, bands, six-story-tall balloons and pneumatic majorettes —is yearly watched by a million New Yorkers and a TV audience of 60 million. For visitors to New York, its Herald Square store is as much of a tourist attraction as the Empire State Building.
No Tomorrow. More than anything else, Macy's is a marketplace that represents all the problems and potential of the nation's 2,000,000 retailers—and thus is both the prototype and the archetype of the U.S. retail store. In its aisles, and the aisles of all the other stores across the nation, the greatest shopping spree in history took place last year. The U.S. economy had its most prosperous twelve months ever, and the U.S. consumer, who continued spending as if there were no tomorrow, helped considerably to bring about the country's fourth straight year of economic expansion.
Business and Government, the two other dominating forces in the economy, were obviously and equally vital in sustaining prosperity. Along with the consumer, they created a nonvicious circle: spending created more production, production created wealth, wealth created more spending. Of the three forces, the consumer did just a little more than most people had expected of him and thus gave the economy a bigger boost than it otherwise would have enjoyed.
Healed Wounds. The most important economic happenings of 1964 were: