Word: strause
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Lackadaisical Lad. The Macy's image was cast by Jack Straus's forebears. Straus is descended from a line of German-Jewish traders who at the turn of the century paid $1,645,000 to buy Macy's, a thriving store that had been founded in 1858 by a onetime Yankee whaler named Rowland Hussey Macy. Straus's grandfather Isidor was a legendary merchant who started Macy's on its road to fame, later went down with the Titanic rather than get into a lifeboat while women and children were still aboard. Jack...
...lackadaisical lad who grew up on Manhattan's upper East Side, Straus joined Macy's training squad straight out of Harvard in 1921, moved up from corsets and handbags into the nonselling side, eventually becoming fourth assistant general manager. Then one day his father chided him: "Jack, if I take a pushcart and fill it full of management, I haven't got much to sell. If I fill it with merchandise, I have something to sell." Straus began all over again as a junior buyer, did so well on the way back up that he was made...
...Brighter Breed. Straus has guided the store through a new era of change and crisis in retailing. The rise of discounters, the flight of customers to suburbia and the thickening traffic snarls have hurt all downtown stores, but they particularly challenged Macy's aging Herald Square store. The store was never the fanciest bazaar in Manhattan, and it has also become outmoded: less than 50% of its area can be devoted to selling space v. 75% in newer stores. Its sales, while huge, have barely changed in ten years. The store rings up a quarter of the Macy chain...
...combat such conditions, Macy's has reached far beyond Herald Square under Straus, who determined to take it to where the customers are. In the past ten years he has doubled the number of stores, and he plans in the next three to five years to raise the total from 49 to 60, expanding in California, Georgia, Missouri, New York and New Jersey. While most of the expansion has been in the high-growth, low-tax suburbs, Macy's has begun to build in government-subsidized urban redevelopment areas. But Straus vows: "I won't build anything...
...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...