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The Warehouse above the Train Station
p. 318-321
There is one thing you can’t forget when observing American big business. The well-adjusted person of the future will be absorbed into the requirements of the Speed Boss. There will be no wages, there will be no competition, only an incessantly reasonable cooperation, a single mass of workers operating underneath the dome of Business. Our well-adjusted person of the future is heading towards just such an assimilation.
You have no choice but to stand reverent and astonished in front of these powerful companies, which organize themselves so much according to the laws of nature, that they become in themselves a microcosm of the highest functionality. Not even Plato, Fourier or Napoleon could have imagined an organization more perfectly.
I am filled with this sort of astonishment when I think of the warehouse of Sears, Roebuck & Co. in Chicago. I want to describe my visit to this perfectly designed operation, which is one of the most exemplary organizations in modern America.
Five giant buildings, a city in itself, stand in one of the northwest suburbs of Chicago surrounded and framed by enclosed gardens, fountains, clubhouses, and lodgings for employees.
Sears Roebuck operates only in the United States, not in Canada and not in South America. It has no branches, no representatives, no traveling salesmen. It doesn’t accept credit, but only does business in cash. They never come into contact with their customers, and everything is carried out by mail.
In the strong business period from September to May, it employs 9,000 to 9,500 people. In the slack periods, about 7,500. Right now, at the end of November, they are preparing a catalog that should incite the public’s casual lust sometime after Christmas. The newspapers report that Sears Roebuck maintains the largest postage orders in the state for a private company: five million five-cent stamps for this one catalog, which they call a flier. These fliers are sent out twice a year, after Christmas and in the middle of July. The large catalog comes once a year and contains everything a person could want, with the exception of living creatures, vegetables, and fruit. (You can order from Sears Roebuck, among other things, an entire single-family home. All you have to give are the measurements and the number of rooms, and a wagon brings you the entire place, down to the last nail. All you need is a place to put it together.) They even stick sewing patterns into the catalog. I once went to the room where machines cut these patterns down to the stitch all year round. These "cut samples" cost Sears Roebuck one hundred thousand dollars a year.
The division of labor, that is, the arrangement of office rooms, storerooms, and the shutes, the polished slides which stretch for kilometers and shoot the items down to the warehouse on the first floor, is the most elementary that I have ever seen.
In the morning, at nine o’clock, the company, on average, receives 35,000 orders through the mail. Most of them contain mixed orders, orders with about five to ten items, amounting to an average of nine dollars total. (There is no minimum order.) Since every item has a price in the catalog, and Sears Roebuck does not take credit, the money is enclosed with the order. (This means fewer money orders from American Express and fewer checks from banks.)
By four o’clock in the afternoon, all of these orders are filled, and fifty to sixty wagons shoot out to the train station on the first floor, so that all the crates and parcels packed upstairs are sent out to the country in all directions. --
The offices are filled with the sound of metal. Rattling capsules, filled with letters, invoices, and freight notices, fly through copper tubes over the heads of nine thousand male and female clerks who sit in front of machines as they prepare letters, bills, and orders. This network of tubing comes to a total length of eighteen English miles.
An army of young women sits in an auditorium and is given nothing else to do but to place colored stamps on the incoming letters. Each stamp represents a different train line. Since, in the U.S., the railroads are privately owned, freight regulations vary widely from area to area, and a lot of the most complicated work takes place in this auditorium.
But even outside this auditorium, what a terrifying sort of work! Young ladies stick a hundred thousand stamps to a hundred thousand envelopes for the catalogs. The thin sheets fly like fan blades under their fingers. At the printing press, where the parts of the catalog are attached, the workers have to use all of their senses, nerves, and brains to make sure that the yellow sheets sit on top of the blue ones and not underneath. Your feelings well up within you when you walk by a few tables and realize that the only reason people are sitting here is because the company hasn’t yet found machines that can do this sort of work. And yet, these humiliated creatures are luckier than those who have lost their income because the company has managed to find the right machines.
Just think how far we’ve come to get to this wonderful sort of organization, as if we were a bee colony, or a termite hill or an ant hill. Imagine how far away we are from those primitive times, when we followed our impulses, and now we thinking creatures do nothing but obey the strange commands of other human creatures. Think of our evolution, our strong souls and ideas withering away underneath this brilliant organization that has triumphed over the human brain and brought it into action.
This is the “blessing” of peacetime, when commerce is allowed to expand.
Wherever I go in the city, I can still hear the metallic clang of Sears Roebuck in my ears. Above the smell of blood and glue, above the coal dust and the fog of Lake Michigan, this metal clang hovers like the harmony of the spheres, as dreary and cold as the modern world and its civilization, the most grim enemy of the human race. --