For more than half a century, Macy's New York, the world's biggest department store, has never had a boss who was not a member of the owning Straus family. When Richard Weil Jr., a Straus grandson, stepped down from the presidency two months ago (TIME, March 24), the job was taken on by his first cousin, Jack Straus, who also runs the entire Macy chain. This week the family tradition was broken. Jack Straus announced a new boss for the store: 44-year-old Wheelock Hayward Bingham, who for seven years has run Macy's San Francisco in a way to make the whole family cheer in admiration.
Boston-born and educated, "Bing" Bingham was a promising freshman at Harvard when he spent a summer vacation working for Macy's in Manhattan. He sold a balky woman customer six pairs of shoes the first day there, was immediately rewarded with the offer of a spot on Macy's "training squad." Bing found the offer so alluring he never went back to college. Within a year, he was head of the store's Varsity Shop. At 22, the ex-shoe clerk became a full-fledged buyer, and at 32, a vice president.
As a Navy lieutenant in World War II, Bingham was picked to help organize the supply end of naval aviation. He did such a bang-up job that he won a commendation ribbon and was made a captain at 36. Then, in 1945, he got a call from Jack Straus: Macy's was expanding, had just bought San Francisco's old O'Connor, Moffat & Co., and Straus wanted Bingham to run it.
Bingham, just out of service, brought in a bunch of young ex-Navy men, hired not for merchandising experience but for organizing ability. "They hadn't acquired the traditional ways of thinking from other stores," says Bingham, who let them learn by their mistakes, and built what many retailers consider the best team of young merchandisers in the business. Bingham startled rivals with a newspaper-advertising splurge such as San Francisco had never seen, forced them to follow suit.
Within a year, the new boss had boosted sales to the point where the store was crowding its old quarters; Bingham added on buildings to double its floor space. Sales kept right on rising, until the San Francisco store pushed from sixth place to second, outsold only by The Emporium, which has twice as much floor space.