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Lackadaisical Lad. The Macy's image was cast by Jack Straus's forebears. Straus is descended from a line of German-Jewish traders who at the turn of the century paid $1,645,000 to buy Macy's, a thriving store that had been founded in 1858 by a onetime Yankee whaler named Rowland Hussey Macy. Straus's grandfather Isidor was a legendary merchant who started Macy's on its road to fame, later went down with the Titanic rather than get into a lifeboat while women and children were still aboard. Jack's father, Jesse Isidor, spread Macy's out from Newark to Toledo before he became Franklin Roosevelt's first Ambassador to France. Jack himself was practically born with a silver trowel in his hand; he used it at the age of two to lay the cornerstone of the present store. Ever since, he has seemed fated for his current job.
A lackadaisical lad who grew up on Manhattan's upper East Side, Straus joined Macy's training squad straight out of Harvard in 1921, moved up from corsets and handbags into the nonselling side, eventually becoming fourth assistant general manager. Then one day his father chided him: "Jack, if I take a pushcart and fill it full of management, I haven't got much to sell. If I fill it with merchandise, I have something to sell." Straus began all over again as a junior buyer, did so well on the way back up that he was made boss 25 years ago—a fact that makes him one of the longest-reigning corporate chiefs in the U.S.
The Brighter Breed. Straus has guided the store through a new era of change and crisis in retailing. The rise of discounters, the flight of customers to suburbia and the thickening traffic snarls have hurt all downtown stores, but they particularly challenged Macy's aging Herald Square store. The store was never the fanciest bazaar in Manhattan, and it has also become outmoded: less than 50% of its area can be devoted to selling space v. 75% in newer stores. Its sales, while huge, have barely changed in ten years. The store rings up a quarter of the Macy chain's total business, which last year amounted to $623.5 million. Profits of the chain are thin—$11.7 million after taxes—partly because the costs of operating in New York are high.
To combat such conditions, Macy's has reached far beyond Herald Square under Straus, who determined to take it to where the customers are. In the past ten years he has doubled the number of stores, and he plans in the next three to five years to raise the total from 49 to 60, expanding in California, Georgia, Missouri, New York and New Jersey. While most of the expansion has been in the high-growth, low-tax suburbs, Macy's has begun to build in government-subsidized urban redevelopment areas. But Straus vows: "I won't build anything without parking space." Last fall Macy's opened an $11 million store next to a highway in downtown New Haven, and next September it will move into the borough of Queens with a cylindrically shaped building that will be the ultimate drive-in: the customer will drive up one of two spiral ramps, peel off at any one of six parking levels, leave his car at the spot nearest the department he intends to visit. He will never have to walk more than 75 ft. from car to counter.