FASHION : Will Andy Rooney Be the Anchor?

You know the cable shopping revolution is at hand when a heavy-hitter like Don Hewitt, executive producer of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” gets into the act. Hewitt, the driving force behind television’s most successful news show, will lend his programming expertise to R. H. Macy’s 24-hour-a-day home shopping channel, set to launch in the fall of ’94 on Cablevision.

“It was my idea!” Hewitt boasted Tuesday, after a press conference with store and cable executives at Macy’s Herald Square emporium in Manhattan. “We put the Oscars on TV, the Super Bowl . . . why not a department store?”

Hewitt may not be a merchant, he said, “but I know how to re-create a department store on TV.” Not the kind we’re all too familiar with, “where they squirt you with perfume and ignore you”--but a store filled with attractive, attentive salespeople, a huge selection of merchandise and the ambience of Macy’s.

And where do you find these happy-to-serve-you kind of clerks? “I thought of having an audition--on Broadway! If an actress can play Virginia Woolf, she can play a salesperson!” The cable shopping revolution will be televised.