Making a Record of the Customer’s Order
This department is one of the most interesting as well as one of the largest departments, in point of number of employes, in this institution. During the busy season of the year, six hundred young women are employed in this room, the picture showing only a portion of this great office. The average number of young women in this department the year around is approximately five hundred. It is here that every order for merchandise is entered in our records, and the mere statement that from five to six hundred people are constantly employed in entering orders received from our customers will give you an idea of the great volume of business transacted by us. These young women are far above the average in intelligence, the very nature of their work requiring that they should bt well educated, that the orders from our customers may be intelligently handled. Upon the accuracy of this department the merchandise managers must depend in filling orders.
The work of this great department is divided into eight divisions, to conform to the system designed to facilitate the handling of customers’ orders. The Entry Division writes aU the orders for the merchandise departments. These order tickets average in excess of sixty thousand daily. In the busy season of the year one hundred and five thousand tickets a day are handled !’n this room. The work of transcribing customers’ orders to merchandise order tickets is performed on special typewriters; four hundred of these typewriters being in use at the present time. This gives the order fillers in the Merchandise Building typewritten instructions, thus minimizing the possibilty of error and facilitating the filling of orders.
It would be almost impossible to imagine a busier place than this department. Every young woman is intent upon the work in hand. The roar of four hundred typewriters, hurrying messengers delivering new orders and collecting finished orders, the intense application of every employe in this department conveys to our visitors a most adequate idea of the immense volume of business transacted in this great merchandising institution every twenty-four hours, and while the number of people engaged exclusively in the writing of customers’ orders is enormous, the activitie~ of all employes in this department are directed along systematic lines, so that the work moves with precision and wonderful rapidity. Of the thousands and thousands of orders which come to this department every day, everyone is copied and delivered to a merchandise department the same day it is received by us.
SEARS IN 1916
Entry Department
In this department the customers’ orders are entered on tickets which are sent to the various merchandise departments. On each ticket is printed the exact hour the order was shipped. This schedule is rigidly adhered to by the departments, which accomplishes the prompt shipment of every order that comes into our store.
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