Welcome to the Assembly Line

I realize that my last post may have involved too many of the kind of geeky numbers that I enjoy immersing myself in, so I want to continue this series on Macy's with some of my personal experiences.

I started my time in New York looking to snag that elusive first internship, so Macy's was deep into hiring for the holiday season when I finally got around to looking for a real job to get me from getting the news about being a production assistant to actually being a production assistant. As with so many massive employers these days, Macy's begins their hiring process online (www.macysjobs.com if you are super curious). Macy's gets you to work before they even hire you by making you fill out an extensive application, including those annoying personality inventories which are meant to weed out the dumb potential thieves (though frankly, I am positive that the results of these questionnaires are simply ignored by an overworked HR department). It took me between forty minutes to an hour to apply. If that seems excessive, then you and I agree.

Eventually, someone makes an executive decisions and you get an invite. Macy's gives you a time to be at the Herald Square store. You are instructed to head to the 8th floor, which in addition to being home to Santaland, Au Bon Pain, and Ladies Outerwear, is also Human Resources central for the store (and possibly for the entire region). Your first trip to HR goes through the employees entrance on 7th Ave, a door that is easy to miss except for the crowd of six to ten people dressed in black sipping on coffee avoiding getting to work. The entrance to the store is a bad omen. The hallway is dingy and dirty. The exposed pipes are rusty and frequently dripping with some unknown liquid with clearly corrosive properties. The rusty cage protecting the stairwell up into the store proper is a sign as well. The uncomfortable truth of your future place of work is that the infrastructure of the store is clearly hurting.

Once you make it down the scary hallway and up the intimidating stairwell, you are immediately confronted with an ultra sophisticated security setup – another narrow hallway guarded on one side by a bored security guard who manages to look menacing and disinterested at the same time and on the other by the vendor sign-in window and the vendor coat and bag check. To the left, is a tiny alcove filled with crappy old chairs that serves as a holding area until an HR person comes to wave you past security without a pat down, search of backscatter scan of your person. The lesson of this is that they are more worried about the people leaving the building (that would be the employees). Your HR guide shepherds you into the elevator for the quick jaunt to the eighth floor via the back way. 

Once you get to the eighth floor, you are awarded with another dismal holding room full of chairs, though this room at least has the space for all the silent hopefuls staring at the Human Resources people beavering away in their glass enclosure. Their job is a mystery but it involves taking questions and looking like they are busy (knowing what I know now, I bet the company is giving them something idiotic to do that makes them simultaneously busy and unproductive). On the other side of the room is the computers for those who want to apply to Macy's in store rather than in their pajamas. The floor hums with activity as gregarious employees who have nothing better to do than chat with each other as they meander between the places they may or not supposed to be. At your first trip to the woman behind the glass (what is it about HR that makes it primarily female?), she has you fill out a few tidbits of information and then directs you to the security guard who prevents shoppers from accidentally wandering into the logistical nerve center of the region (or during the holidays, the home of an endless procession of children and parents waiting on line to see Santa). The security guard takes your ID and gives you a bright pink pass. Then you go back to the dreary holding cell and you wait. 

About twenty minutes past the time you were supposed to be there, you are invited into an interview room where as many as six prospective associates and managers are being interviewed at once. There is very little privacy in there and as far as I could tell, there was little of substance being asked for except to glean what I thought they wanted to hear about stealing - yes, stealing is wrong. Yes, I will narc on anyone I see stealing, etc. If you convince her that you are sincere about not stealing and committed to squealing on those who do, she will tell you to go back out into the awful sitting area and wait. Thank the Lord for technology because you will spend the next half an hour to forty five minutes surfing the net on your mobile internet device. No one reads actual books anymore.

Eventually, a different woman will bring you back into the interview room, and sketch the general shape of what to expect from being employed by Macy's over the holidays, things like what department you'll be working, dress code, and wages. Macy's has a theatrical approach to dress. Everyone (with a few exceptions, usually based on whether you make commission or not) is expected to wear black and for once, women have more options than men, because most men are expected to wear suit jackets.

And then there is the matter of pay. I'm searching for a word to describe the pay for an associate at Macy's. Only one word comes to mind: derisory (such a fun word, especially when you say it out loud). Eight dollars an hour. Eight. I admit to being a bit stunned by that. For one, burger flippers at McDonald's make 7.25, since that's the minimum and Macy's customers have a right to expect more service from their cashiers than from McD's cashiers. It's not entirely out of line with what other retailers pay though. I heard rumors that Express pays their employees minimum as well, which is utterly absurd considering the level of fashion expected from Express employees. Apple is at the other end of that scale. They pay fourteen dollar an hour, for essentially the same job, only easier because there isn't an Apple Store in the world that occupies nine stories of an entire New York City block. I would also like to point out that I was paid more than eight dollars an hour to work at the Bon Ton in York, PA almost six years ago. If there is a better benchmark for wage stagnation over the least half decade, I don't know it (it probably involves inflation adjusted purchasing power parity, but hey, that's not the kind of analysis that's we're doing here). 

Where was I? Oh yes, the woman had given you the down low. The next step is getting your ID back from the security guard (no one has ever explained why that security guard is in charge of my ID up until you get hired, but not afterward). Once you get your ID back, you are permitted to wait again, albeit in a different room. The eighth floor is a warren of cramped rooms that stretch your ability to come up with exotic synonyms for dismal and dreary. Let's call it utilitarian, since it is dominated by the desks and work stations of the HR managers (again predominantly women) who process the already copious amount of paperwork generated by hiring a temporary sales associate. The most important piece of paper is essentially a P.O. Or requisition and the product being ordered is you, which is (another) disturbing glimpse into Macy's inner workings. It turns out, that req number I had originally been given had already been used. That necessitated an additional wait, while they tracked down the woman who had briefed me (not the woman who had interviewed me) so she could sign the new form.

Your next bit of business is to choose two days for the completion of your Macy's training (I was surprised that they had any training at all, but that training session is a whole other topic, one that I can only address when I no longer work for Macy's). The whole thing was appallingly old fashioned, with these women dedicated to processing endless mountains of paper, stuck in this tiny room dealing with people and computers. Every. Day. Once you get that form, the one with the requisition number, the one that every HR person who talk to or even glance at or question during training (I need to go to the bathroom. Can I see your form?), you have been hired by Macy's.

During training, one of the HR people let slip that Macy's hires twenty five hundred, that's two thousand and five hundred, temporary employees for the holiday season at the Herald Square store. The entire set up, from signing up for your user id on macysjobs.com, to sitting with the HR ladies while they gossip and do your mindless paperwork, is a grinding machine, the kind of low power, high maintenance machine that passed for race cars in the fifties. You look at engines today and wonder what those guys in the fifties were doing only getting three hundred horses out of a V8 that big, when you should be getting six or seven. Here is Macy's with a huge HR department, 24 billion dollars in revenue and they still haven't graduated their HR procedures from the fifties and their IT department is stuck in the eighties. Macyjobs makes a good fist of things, but it's a giant database and the last thing that I or anyone else interested in hiring me should be doing is writing my name on a form, and yet that happened on countless occasions during the two hours between when I was interviewed and when I was hired. The Macy's I've been hired by is a relic, a hulking behemoth, that is lumbering under the weight of a bad business model and a terrible business infrastructure. It survives on its name, tradition, and the attractive ideal of a department store that offers a one stop shop for so many of your household needs (except wool socks). Macy's hires armies of underpaid temporary employees with overworked and unproductive staff. It's mass production in the age of just in time assembly. The Herald Square store is a time machine dedicated to the memory of the past in more ways than one.