Macy's

The holiday season, that time of year when the city that never sleeps takes a moment to reflect. Lights twinkle up and down the avenues of New York City, from the posh store fronts down in Soho, to the ornate window displays up along Fifth Avenue, to the epicenter in between, the miracle and magic of Macy's on 34th Street. Christmas isn't just a day, it's a frame of mind. Modern retailer sees on the season, hoping to capitalize on that frame of mind, creating something that lasts beyond just the holidays. A reflection of that effort can be found about an hour's drive away from Manhattan in the Long Island suburb of Garden City, New York, where Macy's is spearheading a broader corporate transformation. We're looking to be that neighborhood store. The place that you think of that is really convenient but also has special things that you can buy for the people you love. Tony Spring took over as CEO of Macy's Inc. in 2024 after more than nine years of helping to refresh the company's luxury retail arm, Bloomingdale's. Now, the focus is on the Macy's brand itself, a middle market department store that has been plagued by slowing sales and waning cultural relevancy. In his first month on the job, Spring announced plans to close a third of U. S. Macy's locations, a move that would free up $750 million of assets, money to be reinvested in the best performing stores, including here at the Roosevelt Field Mall. When it opened in the 1950s, the I. M. Pay Design Roosevelt Field Mall was the largest in North America and today is situated in a county whose median income is significantly higher than the U. S. average. This is a storied retailer with incredible rich history that we're very proud of, but we never want our rich history to get in the way of our brighter future. The optionality that the customer has that they may want to shop on their phone, they may want to shop in their car, they may want to shop in the store, and we have to be able to adjust the way we work to be able to provide that convenience for the customer. But that link between department stores and the customers they target, it's largely broken down. Department stores account for less than 1 percent of total U. S. retail sales, down from about 16 percent in the early 1990s. Retail historian Michael Lissicki suggests the decline stems from losing sight of the core cons These stores really excelled when they were able to directly serve their immediate communities. They weren't just commercial destinations, they were social destinations, and that was so important in their general success. Department stores have long been a mirror of the American cons To the Tokyo fabric shops of the 1600s, to the more modern template established in the 1850s, when a French husband and wife duo transformed a small Parisian novelty shop into Le Bon Marchu00e9, offering at the time the widest variety of goods under one roof. They started out in very modest, usually as dry goods stores, and then slowly graduated and became bigger. It really was the focal center of so many communities. What happened? America raced to the suburbs, and new families were not necessarily drawn to department stores. They wanted price, they wanted convenience, they wanted late hours, and though the department stores tried to chase their traditional shopper to the suburbs, the customer had changed. Who is the customer today? I think that's a question that these remaining department stores need to ask themselves. The middle is exactly where Macy still sees promise. Let's think of the middle as the center, the center of it all, which the center gives you the opportunity to serve up and to serve down. And I think from backstage to luxury, we have the opportunity across this retail portfolio to satisfy what customers are looking for. Today the customer has choices. They're not handcuffed to any mall or any downtown. They can shop literally anywhere, literally anywhere, and they love the freedom that they've been given. Mark Cohen is a retail veteran who worked as an executive for some of the most iconic and now defunct department stores of the Golden Era. Bradley's, Lord and Taylor, and Sears. A store has to be neat, clean, and friendly. That'sort of step one. That's old style store management, and it got lost at Macy's 25, 30 years ago. It seems It's easy if you're Apple and you only have a handful of products to sell, and your devotion is to those products, and your store presentation is deliberately, completely simple and straightforward. It's all about the merchandise. To make matters more complicated, the divide between the haves and have-nots is widening. Economic uncertainty forcing middle income households to pull back. When you look at where we are in 2025, heading into 2026, is there a middle market retail business model? There's a market. It's not the market that there once was. It's a market that's under tremendous pressure and challenge, but it's viable if it represents things customers really want to buy, and it treats customers well enough for customers to remain loyal. One of the ways Macy's attempted to capture the shrinking middle was through deep discounts. Tony Spring is changing that precedent. I think closing a sale with value is compelling. People do it in many walks of life, whether it's the hotel I stay at or the restaurant that I visit, and we're in many different loyalty programs, but we shouldn't start with the value. The value should be what helps close the sale, not what helps open the sale. Let's talk about leather. Let's talk about cashmere. Let's talk about lab-grown diamonds. Let's talk about fragrance. Let's talk about the things that people actually are attracted to, and then if value is a way to close the sale, so be it. It's a testament to a power shift from the old days where department stores and their fashion buyers were the taste makers, today where the customer is firmly in charge. So how does a department store meet shoppers on their terms? I mean, in America, it's not This is something you do if you have a kid and they outgrow it, but today's customer wants to be excited about buying something, and I think that's what's missing. Sean Graham Carter is a branding expert and associate professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology and was once the e-commerce director for Macy's helping launch its online strategy in the late 1990s. It's the magic of wanting to shop. Not having it as drudgery is something you have to do because of the holidays coming up and therefore you have to give a gift. It's the excitement of finding something new, finding something that you think is sexy or interesting or just playing what you want. These days, that excitement comes just as easily through a few clicks as e-commerce offers customers an online version of the everything store that department stores once were. You could go to Macy's, you could go to Marshall Fields, Garfinkels, Today, it's almost as if there's no excitement in shopping and that's the magic that's missing I mean we know Macy's will be Thanksgiving Day Parade and that's great but customers don't want to feel that you don't want them. People love to be taken care of and I think with our environment, That looks good on you, that doesn't look good on you. And I think we learned a long time ago in kind of retail sales 101 to tell somebody looks good in something just to make a sale only means you lose a customer for life. So you're better to give them the honest opinion and find something that works for them. I kind of come back to multi-brand, multi-category, multi-price. It is really an effective advantage in this environment where people really aren't sure what brand is right for them. Brand shopping in the U. S. topped $1. 3 trillion last year but in-store shopping is still the preferred method for most Americans with almost $6 trillion in sales according to a report from Capital One. Bloomingdale CEO Olivier Braun interprets these trends as complementary. Of course digital will keep growing. It's a fast growing channel for us and it's been the case for many years. I think we have seen more and more transactions happening online. But for me the best way to actually invest online is keep investing in the stores. The best branding investment we can make as a department store is investing in the store. Bloomingdale seems to have cracked the code. Under the Macy's Inc Bloomingdale's emerged from the murk of a middle ground, non-differentiated store on 3rd Avenue in the shadow of the 3rd Avenue L. I'm showing you my age. And became a real destination by virtue of the assortments that it presented, the ambience it created, the mojo that it delivered. Tony Spring is widely credited with restoring Bloomingdale'success. Serving as CEO from 2014 to 2023 he's now looking to bring that same feeling to Macy's. The wonder of Bloomingdale's is that you kind of come in and a lot of eye candy, you see great brands, there's the real careful precision and the curation and the editing of what you see and how it all comes to life. He did a great job as the CEO of Bloomingdale's. He's now got this enormous task of recreating, creating some form of magic that exists real at Macy's. It's a different customer though at Macy's than at Bloomingdale's. It's a different customer but it's the same challenge. It's the same challenge. You've got to be special. So when the holiday lights come down, the Thanksgiving Day parade balloons go back into storage and the New York rush res Macy's is still faced with the reality of a shrinking middle class. Who is the Macy's customer today? So working, woman, family, people who enjoy I think the nicer things in life but also We have the capacity to show retail, to show the cons