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Wine & Stiff Collars. A major beneficiary of all these rises was Macy's of Manhattan, the anchor and source of Macy's network of stores (many of them under different names, such as Lasalle & Koch of Toledo, Davison's of Atlanta). Macy's 21-story store in Herald Square, which takes up a city block and has 21 acres of selling space, is a display case for more than 400,000 items of merchandise, each one of which is kept in at least a week's supply.
The Macy's shopper can buy an iguana ($2.49), a painting by Joan Miró, a heart-shaped mattress, an old-fashioned stiff collar, a complete set of Tom Swift books, fresh Beluga caviar, and 900 Macy's private-label items, the last at prices 10% to 15% below national brands. Macy's has a shop that sells nothing but candles, another devoted solely to Oriental rugs, still others dealing only in antiques or plastic flowers. It also has its own prescription drugstore, hardware and auto-accessories shops, theater club, travel agent, and a jewelry store watched over by a plainclothes detective. In its wine shop, which has its own wine tasters, $28.35 magnums of 1955 Taittinger Blanc de Blancs champagne mingle with 99¢ California sherry.
Mythical War. Liberia's President Tubman completely furnished his executive mansion at Macy's. Tonga's Amazonian Queen Salote outfitted herself for Queen Elizabeth's coronation by purchasing six Macy's gowns (size: 24). Some of the most avid customers are the visiting materialists from Russia and its satellites, who enjoy picking at Macy's the fruits of capitalist enterprise. For those who cannot make the trip to Herald Square, Macy's has a personal shopping service. Among millions of routine assignments, it has dispatched six bottles of Coppertone to a sunburned Englishman in Libya and enough nylon material for the wife of a Kuwait sheik to make a tablecloth to accommodate 84 diners.
Image is a main preoccupation of the store's executives. Vastness, variety and verisimilitude are parts of the image. So is Macy's reputation as a hard competitor. The store continues to collect millions worth of free publicity from its largely mythical war against Gimbels ("Macy's Will Not Be Undersold!"), even though Gimbels has long since been supplanted as New York's second largest store by Brooklyn's Abraham & Straus (in which Jack Straus's family held a major interest until 1913). Macy's also works at burnishing its reputation as an avid civic booster, buying full-page newspaper ads that hymn the local theater, symphonies and sports teams. Its publicity-minded executives are adept at the techniques of both Madison Avenue and Broadway; for various promotions they have brought into the store a Venetian gondola, $75,000 worth of flowers and a menagerie.