THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



37 



people. Consider the size of an institu- 

 tion that can meet the wants of a quarter 

 of a million people in a single selling day 

 in the big season. 



Then you will begin to get some idea 

 of the vastness of this wonderful temple 

 of trade. It is a business of such propor- 

 tions that it carries some 62,000 open ac- 

 counts per month and 100,000 per year. 

 Its stock of goods on hand is worth 

 enough to ransom a king and diversified 

 enough to supply every essential need of 

 a man or woman from the cradle to the 

 grave. 



A trip from the flagstaff to the tunnel 

 basement of this department store is an 

 experience one can never forget. A 

 stock-taking at the end of the journey 

 would reveal that the visitor had been 

 on his feet seven hours, had visited 150 

 sales departments, had surveyed wares 

 valued in eight figures, and had outhiked 

 an army on the march. 



FURS OF FABULOUS PRICF IN COLD 

 STORAGE 



Several upper floors are not used by 

 the selling departments, but are utilized 

 for divers and sundry purposes that we 

 ordinarily do not associate with merchan- 

 dising. Immense cold-storage vaults con- 

 taining furs valued at $4,000,000 are on 

 the one hand and vast refrigertors con- 

 taining provender sufficient to feed a 

 whole army division are on the other. 

 Here is a shoe shop that makes the vil- 

 lage cobbler appear ten centuries out of 

 date, and there a department that can 

 mend the rarest rug or restore the plain- 

 est carpet that a cosmopolitan trade may 

 send in. 



Here is a whole floor given up to res- 

 taurants, tea rooms, grills,' etc. Four 

 thousand people may find table room and 

 tempting bills of fare at a time. There 

 isn't a taste or a fancy, from those of the 

 bluff business man of the Middle West 

 to those of the staid society leader and 

 the whimsical debutante, that is not stud- 

 ied and provided for. 



As one marches down through the 

 mazes of buzzing activity there are many 

 sidelights that show the bigness of the in- 

 stitution and its atmosphere in striking 

 ways. For instance, the store, aiming at 



once to display its wares and to help its 

 customers, has installed 27 full-sized resi- 

 dence rooms, which are furnished in ap- 

 proved designs from time to time. Here 

 is one furnished as a living-room, there 

 one as a guest-room ; here another as a 

 nursery, and there still another as a den. 

 Yet so large is this store that these 27 

 rooms become all but lost, and scarcely 

 figure in any bird's-eye survey of the es- 

 tablishment. 



MAKING FRIENDS FOR THE FUTURE 



When one comes down to the chil- 

 dren's floor it is soon evident that the firm 

 is wide awake to its own future. There 

 are scores of rooms equipped with about 

 every sort of plaything that the most 

 imaginative kiddie in all Chicago could 

 conjure up. "Yes, indeed, our little 

 friend," the firm seems to say, "come 

 right in and have a good time. You 

 may break something now and then, but 

 that's all right. We want you to feel 

 that this store is your friend. So jump 

 right in." 



And maybe the kiddies don't accept 

 the invitation ! They enter into the spirit 

 with such glee that when they have be- 

 come men and women they could not be 

 pried away with a crowbar from trading 

 there. Does it cost much to maintain 

 such a policy? Go to the toy hospital 

 and look at the staff of people working 

 there ; go to the toy morgue and se.e the 

 daily accumulation of victims ready for 

 the potter's field. Yes, it is very expen- 

 sive. But untold thousands of those who 

 are today the store's best customers were 

 but yesterday the kiddies who visited the 

 "joy land of toyland in the little-girl-and- 

 boy-land" of that emporium. 



One might write a whole article about 

 such an institution. There is the credit 

 system, where a financial Who's Who 

 that is practically an open sesame for bad 

 debts is maintained. Mr. Black comes in 

 to buy a pair of shoes he wants charged, 

 and Mrs. White purchases some lingerie 

 and says, "Charge it, please." The sales- 

 folk make out the tickets in the usual 

 routine way, and send them through 

 pneumatic tubes to the credit department, 

 which maintains an endless array of slips 

 placed in frames like the room assign- 



