Bamberger to Macy

"I want you to notice this corner very carefully. Florence. A half-century hence the business of New York will be centred between 34th and 42nd Streets. Here is to be the future business of this wonderful city."

So, in 1870, said Captain Rowland H. Macy, onetime whaling skipper, then a storekeeper, to his daughter. Thirty-two years later the R. H. Macy & Co. store was located on the corner (34th and Broadway) which the Captain had pointed out. Last week Macy's climaxed more than 70 years of steady growth with the purchase of L. Bamberger & Co., potent Newark department store. Macy's 1928 sales* were $90,251,396; Bamberger's were $35,001,214. The 1929 sales of the two stores are expected to reach $140,000,000. The 1928 net income of the combination was approximately $10,000,000, of which Macy's contributed $7,566,194 and Bamberger's $2,915,375. The two stores will each continue its present staff and policies--Bamberger's, for example, will continue to give charge accounts; Macy's will hold to its 71-year-old cash-only system.

Sale of Bamberger's to Macy's (the price was not announced) resulted largely from Louis Bamberger's desire to retire from active direction of his business. Said he: "I am getting old and want to be relieved of active management of the business which I founded. It is a big business. . . ."

In addition to its department store business, L. Bamberger & Co. operates Station WOR, over which it has long broadcast itself as "one of America's great stores."

Bamberger's also publishes Charm, elaborate house organ with 100,000 Bamberger readers.

R.H. Macy & Co., Inc., controls La Salle & Koch Co. of Toledo and the Davison-Paxton Co. of Atlanta.

Rowland Hussey Macy, Nantucket Quaker, Gold Rush Forty-Niner, whaling captain and grocery store owner, founded Macy's in 1858. The original Macy store (14th St. and Sixth Avenue) embodied present Macy policies of a cash business and "odd" prices (9-c- and 18-c- rather than 10-c- and 20-c-). In 1874 Lazarus Straus, who had come to the U. S. as a refugee after the German revolution of 1848, leased part of Macy's basement and opened a crockery store. Captain Macy died in 1877, and until 1888 junior partners carried on the business. In 1888 control passed to Nathan and Isidor Straus, sons of Lazarus Straus, and in 1902 Macy's moved to its present Herald Square location. Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus went down with the Titanic (1912). Their sons, Jesse L, Percy S., and Herbert N., purchased the Nathan Straus interest and are now in sole control of the Macy business.

Present head of Macy's is Jesse Isidor Straus, who always wishes to have his middle name written in full out of respect to the memory of his father. Purchasing Bamberger's was a logical step because, situated on the west side of Manhattan, many a Macy customer is a New Jerseyite and the two great stores were competing ever more keenly. Friends of Mr. Straus twittingly asked whether he bought Bamberger's with the discount at which Macy's aims to sell all merchandise.

Mr. Straus, in addition to managing Macy's, is also an Overseer of Harvard University, where he is particularly interested in the Graduate School of Business. At Harvard the memory of Isidor Straus is perpetuated in the Straus Dormitory.

*Fifty-three weeks ended Feb. 2, 1929.