Macy's History

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The Company Description of Its Time

Macy's, Inc., with corporate offices in Cincinnati and New York, files itself as one of the nation's premier retailers, and the snapshot kept here is deliberately dated. Fiscal 2010 sales were $25 billion. The Macy's brand then included about 810 department stores and furniture galleries in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico, alongside macys.com. Bloomingdale's counted 41 department stores and home stores in 12 states, bloomingdales.com, and, as of April 2, 2011, four Bloomingdale's Outlet stores in three states, plus a Dubai operation under a lease agreement with Al Tayer Group LLC. The workforce stood at approximately 166,000 employees.

Federated Is Born, and Fred Lazarus Moves Thanksgiving

On the morning of March 6, 1929, readers of The New York Times met the headline that Abraham and Straus and Filene's would unite. Federated grew from combining Abraham and Straus of Brooklyn, Filene's of Boston, F and R Lazarus and Company of Columbus, Ohio, and Bloomingdale's of New York, each keeping a separate identity while linking financial interests, and the new company was incorporated on November 25, 1929. Through the Depression and the Second World War the group introduced retail firsts such as pay-when-you-can credit and arranging merchandise by size rather than by colour, brand or price.

Fred Lazarus, president of F and R Lazarus, supplied the record's most retold episode. Realising in 1939 that Thanksgiving would fall on the last day of November and shorten the holiday selling season, he proposed anchoring Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday of November, carried the idea to President Roosevelt, and saw it pass Congress within two years. Wartime brought war bond sales, Red Cross volunteering, Victory Gardens and United Service Organizations work; thirteen percent of the workforce served and 56 died in action. A 1944 trip to Houston, where a sizeable city had no department store at all, convinced Lazarus to convert Federated from a holding company into an operating company in 1945, headquartered in Cincinnati.

Bankruptcy, Recovery, and the May Acquisition

Expansion ran through suburban malls for decades: divisions grew from five to fourteen, sales passed one billion dollars by 1964, and between 1964 and 1979 store numbers rose four hundred percent while sales quadrupled to $4.8 billion. Discount divisions in Florida, Texas and California, a real estate subsidiary building regional malls, and a fiftieth anniversary marked by acquiring Rich's of Atlanta closed the seventies. Then the record turns: a takeover by Canadian developer Robert Campeau in 1988 forced a bankruptcy filing two years later, yet Federated emerged in 1992 as a new public company, acquired Macy's itself in 1994 and Broadway Stores in 1995, and stumbled publicly over the Fingerhut e-commerce acquisition when the internet bubble burst.

The culminating deal joined two near-identical histories. In August 2005 Federated completed acquiring longtime competitor May Company, nearly doubling its size, placing Macy's stores in 63 of the top 65 markets and making it the fourth largest non-food retailer in the country. The pre-2007 division list kept here, regional groupings such as Macy's East, Florida, Midwest, North, Northwest, South and West with their own store counts and 2006 sales, shows how the empire was administered just before the Federated name disappeared. This Apparel Search profile was added on September 10, 2007 and modified in September 2011; quote its figures with those dates attached.

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