The view from a Downtown Macy’s worker
Dave Malehorn was unfamiliar with the acronym a Macy’s manager tossed out Monday morning — G.O.B. — but other employees who had been with other Downtown stores that bit the dust knew the drill.
G.O.B. = Going Out of Business.
“GOB, as in gobsmacked,’’ Mr. Malehorn said.
Mr. Malehorn wears the mandatory black T-shirt over black pants and arrives at 6:30 a.m. four days a week to fill Macy’s shelves before the doors open.
”We work in the dark and dress all in black like retail ninjas,’’ he said.
He didn’t move to Pittsburgh for this. He moved to Morningside with his wife Lois and their four daughters in 2000 to take a job with a biotech startup. He’s a molecular biologist, and he did well in the Oakland hightech nexus for more than a decade. But his job as an untenured research assistant professor with University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute ended in a 2012 reorganization.
He tried finding similar work, but, as he put it, “you don’t see ‘matrix-assisted, laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectronomic tissue imaging’ in the classifieds much.” Determined to stay in Pittsburgh and pushing 50, he applied to be a stockboy at Kaufmann’s. Excuse me, I mean Macy’s. Mr. Malehorn has been working about 20 hours a week there, one of three jobs he juggles, since January 2013.
His story is a bit like Pittsburgh’s in reverse, going from “eds and meds’’ to a blue-collar job, but he loves this town and he and his wife have nearly paid off their mortgage. So at 52 he stocks shelves in the dark for less than $10 an hour, using a pen light to discern what’s a charcoal men’s suit and what’s gray or brown in the dark. He’s also a doorman at the Benedum and Byham theaters, and manages the lab for Pitt’s civil and environmental engineering department. The bus pass that comes along with his Pitt ID gets him around.
Beyond those 60 hours of work a week, Mr. Malehorn also acts on occasion. In 2012, he was part of the Bricolage ensemble in the experimental, interactive “STRATA,” which was a cowinner of the Post-Gazette’s play of the year.
So, as you might expect, he’s taking the store’s closing like a stoic, but says “I never lost the ability to appreciate the building and its history.”
It’s the oldest of cliches, but they don’t make them like this anymore. Take the freight elevator.
“It’s the creepy, steampunk kind from a century ago: a cage with a folding door, exposed chains and gears, and a naked light bulb,’’ he wrote in homage. ”You drive it by pushing big black buttons and rotating a crank handle.”
He showed me the bronze plaque beside the bronze elevators the customers use. They follow the same route upward that shoppers have traveled since the late 19th century, and the plaque has raised images celebrating “rugs,” “jewels,” “fashion,” ”furniture,““china” and more. Edgar Kaufmann had that plaque installed for the store’s 75th anniversary in 1947.
No telling where it will wind up. Kaufmann’s paneled office, designed in 1937 by Frank Lloyd Wright, is the property of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
I’ll miss this store. I’d rather go the dentist than to go to the mall, so this was my go-to place for everything from dress shirts to recliners.
Sadly, the reason I liked shopping there (no waiting) turns out to be not much of a business model.
Every worker has a unique story to tell, but now they’re all readying for big clearance sales.
“Maybe Rick Sebak will like to get something on film that’s about to be ‘Not There Anymore’,” Mr. Malehorn said, referring to the great WQED documentarian of all things Pittsburgh. “But he’s going to have to bring a flashlight.”
I contacted Mr. Sebak. He said Pittsburgh without this store is like London without Harrods, but he’s swamped. He’s made a point to shop there these past couple of decades, and wondered if the store still had the photo of President William Howard Taft buying a pair of big man pants right off the rack in 1910.
Neither I nor Mr. Malehorn could answer that, but this much is sure: It’s going to be last call for pants very soon.