(6 of 10)
To mind his stores, Straus has brought along a breed of young merchants who are brighter and better-schooled than the intuitive amateurs of years past. Though he gives them plenty of freedom to exercise their talents, he constantly prods, needles and nags them. His aggressive concern for the consumer and his attention to the slightest details is both an inspiration and an irritant to insiders. After one recent exchange with Straus on the interoffice squawk box, David Yunich, the president of Macy's nine-store New York division, sighed: "Sometimes I'd like to confine the admiral to the sundeck."
The admiral has no intention of keeping his fingers off operations, although he occasionally murmurs something about leaving his $175,000-a-year post in five years or so. When and if that happens, a possible successor is the 40-year-old son of Straus and his wife Margaret, Kenneth Hollister Straus, now a vice president of the New York division. But Straus insists that "it depends on how well Kenny does whether he takes over the company." More likely to succeed is R. H. Macy's president, Wheelock Bingham, 57. In any event, Straus will have a considerable voice in the choice: he and his family have effective control of Macy's with about 7% of the stock, or some $15 million worth.
Dogs on the Roof. Straus is fond of saying that "Macy's operates like a family"—and the store is certainly an informal, self-contained community. Among its 11,000 full-time employees are 4,828 modestly paid ($84.84 a week) salespeople, including 1,400 who can interpret in 42 languages, and 150 telephone operators who write 1,000,000 orders a year. Macy's also has a private police force big enough to protect a city the size of Des Moines; it is captained by an ex-FBI agent, who presides over an array of secret photoelectric alarms and six Doberman pinschers, which emerge from their rooftop kennels to patrol the floors after dark.
Behind the scenes of the big store, Macy's constantly tests and measures its markets, its merchandise and its competition. The arbiters of its prices are its 36 comparison shoppers. They roam competing stores, spying out new styles, feeling the materials and comparing prices. Whenever they find that Macy's is being undersold, they order the store to lower its prices. Not even Straus can countermand their instructions. Neither can he contradict Macy's own Bureau of Standards, the arbiter of the store's conscience. In a backstairs laboratory that looks like a bathroom choked with chemistry sets, the bureau puts 7,500 products per year (including all of Macy's own brands) through tests of fire, water, high pressure and simulated wear. Recently the testers ordered Macy's advertising department not to call a raincoat "water-resistant" because it failed to withstand a heavy shower for 21 minutes, and not to call a plastic Christmas tree "fireproof," because it melted when exposed to flame.