May Department Stores History

← Back to the current May Department Stores profile

The Company Description of Its Time

This page is kept as a historical profile. The May Department Stores Company was an American department store holding company, formerly headquartered in downtown St. Louis, Missouri, founded in Leadville, Colorado by David May in 1877 and moved to St. Louis in 1905. After many changes in the retail industry, the company merged with Federated Department Stores in 2005, and Federated then became Macy's, Inc.; the kept link from this page leads to the Macy's profile, which is where the combined company's story continues in this directory. May's own century, told in the timeline below, is a roll-up of local family department stores that mirrors Federated's history so closely that the two were described as near twins when they united.

Building a National Group, Division by Division

Acquisition by acquisition, the map filled in. A. Hamburger and Sons of Los Angeles became May Company California in 1923. Kaufmann's of Pittsburgh joined in 1946 and Strouss-Hirshberg of Youngstown in 1947, each retained as a separate division. The Daniels and Fisher Company of Denver merged into a new May-Daniels and Fisher division in 1956, Cohen Brothers of Jacksonville became May Cohens in 1958, and The Hecht Company of Baltimore arrived in 1959, followed by G. Fox in 1965 and the Meier and Frank chain of Portland, Oregon in 1966. David May's grandson Morton May became chairman in 1951 and led the company for sixteen years, active in St. Louis civic affairs and a patron of the St. Louis Art Museum.

Later decades mixed invention with ever larger deals. Venture Stores was founded in 1968 when Target co-founder John F. Geisse came to work for May, a discount experiment born because an antitrust settlement barred May from acquiring more retail chains at that moment. In 1986 May acquired the Associated Dry Goods holding company, with chains including Loehmann's, Lord and Taylor and Caldor, in what the record calls the largest retail acquisition in history at that time. Foley's of Houston and Filene's of Boston came from Federated in 1988, an early crossing of the two groups' territories, followed by the Robinsons-May combination in California in 1993, John Wanamaker in 1995, Strawbridge's in 1996, The Jones Store in 1998, Zions Cooperative Mercantile Institution folded into Meier and Frank in 1999, David's Bridal in 2000, and Marshall Field's from Target Corporation in 2004.

The 2005 Federated Purchase and the Macy's Renaming

On February 28, 2005, Federated Department Stores announced it would acquire May for eleven billion dollars in stock. The purchase completed that year, with all former May divisions folded into Federated's various Macy's branches. In 2006 over 400 former May stores, carrying a wide variety of long-standing local brand names, were consolidated and renamed as Macy's, while Federated sold off three former May chains: David's Bridal, Lord and Taylor and Priscilla of Boston. A nameplate map built over 128 years, Famous-Barr, Hecht's, Kaufmann's, Meier and Frank, Robinsons-May and the rest, became a single national fascia in roughly one selling season.

That ending is exactly why this profile is kept in full rather than redirected and forgotten. Local department store names carried generations of community memory, charge accounts, wedding registries and holiday traditions, and the timeline above is often the fastest way to answer when a particular city's store became May, and when May became Macy's. The directory keeps closed and absorbed companies as dated history by policy, and May is the letter M's largest example: a complete acquisition ledger from an 1877 silver-rush shop to an eleven-billion-dollar absorption, with every division's arrival year kept attached to its name.

← Back to the current May Department Stores profile