We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE MAN OF THE MONTH
37
special emphasis at Easter and at Christmas. Reno goes further. From Kansas City he continues to mail additional sales circulars to selected lists, to move seasonal merchandise and ex' cess stocks. And each mailing pays its way in sales!
His other major contribution to Sears' operations was in the method of handling orders. In the pre-Reno era, when Sears paid on a weekly basis, business was highly seasonal by virtue of two big catalogs and two sale catalogs each year. Jobs were functionalized so that each person performed a simple operation which could be easily learned in a short time. One group of workers would open the letter, another count the money, while another would read the letter and so on. Similarly in order fiUing operations, pricing, filling, checking, and wrapping were performed by separate workers. The whole system was geared to seasonal fluctuations, frequent hiring and firing and unstable incomes. Reno believed that by combining mental and manual skills, the jobs would become more interesting and promote efficiency and enable the company to pay better wages and hire a high type of worker.
Combining operations performed many outstanding results. New equipment was required, new conveyors, new desks, mobile work carts, were designed and installed. Operations
were simplified to reduce effort and fatigue. Employees liked the variety of their new jobs. Gone were the monotonous and tiring manual operations, they were now required to think, remember and to make decisions and they liked it. Quality improved, errors decreased, and service improved. Formerly an average order filler walked 12 miles a day, now walks only one mile a day. Where it had once required three hours for an order to pass through a process it now required only one hour and forty minutes.
So outstanding were these innovations that Reno was called into the Parent Office in Chicago where he engineered these changes on a national basis in stores located in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Memphis, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Seattle from 1934 until 1940, when he returned to Kansas City as Mail Order General Manager. (While in the Parent Organization Reno standardised many changes.) Hourly wages supplanted weekly rates and wage incentive plans rewarding workers for high production and quality were installed. In addition Reno felt that something could be done about the "peaks" and "valleys" in business. First he developed the constant wage plan which guarantees work and pays for 40 hours work each week — regardless of how slow or rushed business may be;
Don Daw's. WHB president who put this article together, ac\nowledges the generous assistance of ]. B. Hann, Sears regional credit manager, and C. E. Converse, Sears' advertising manager in Kansas City. With Davis the job was a labor of love, recalling memories of his years 1919-20 in Chicago, when he wor\ed for the late Henry Schott in Ward's advertising department, at the time General R. E. Wood, now of Sears', was. Ward's chief executive officer.