Federated Department Stores (Macy's, Inc.)

Federated Department Stores was the Cincinnati-born department-store group formed in 1929 by the combination of Abraham & Straus, Filene's, F&R Lazarus and Bloomingdale's. It grew into America's largest department-store company, acquired Macy's in 1994 and the May Department Stores Company in 2005, and on June 1, 2007 renamed itself Macy's, Inc., adopting the name of its best-known store as the corporate identity. The company trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol M, and this page's stock record belongs to that continuing company under its former name.

Company Profile

The historical account in the record tells the founding story at length: the 1929 combination that created Federated, the holding-company structure that let each nameplate keep its local identity, and the decades of consolidation that followed. Federated's model — local department-store names run on shared national systems — defined American department-store retailing for most of the twentieth century.

The page's own cross-references make the succession plain: it points readers to the Macy's financial profile for current information. After the 2005 May Company acquisition, most Federated and May nameplates were converted to Macy's, and the 2007 corporate rename completed the logic: one national brand, one listed company.

The range behind the name is department-store clothing, cosmetics, accessories and home goods under many nameplates. Its customers are American department-store shoppers, consolidated over time under the Macy's name. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Federated Department Stores (Macy's, Inc.) in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Federated Department Stores (Macy's, Inc.) with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Operating as Macy's, Inc. — Federated renamed itself Macy's, Inc. in June 2007 — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

For anyone researching the fashion industry's public-company era, Federated Department Stores (Macy's, Inc.) is a useful case: a 1929 combination that absorbed its rivals and finally took the name of its most famous store. The summaries in this section were compiled while the story was still unfolding, which is exactly what makes them worth keeping — they preserve what the company said about itself at the time, before the outcome was known.