Macy's

Activists value Macy's real estate at $5B-$9B and want Bloomingdale's spun off. But the last buyer of those famous downtown stores paid Macy's $351 million — a fraction of what activists had valued Macy's flagship portfolio at. The board has learned what an activist's appraisal is worth.

The story says Macy's disrupted distribution with a modern digital pivot. But the no-middleman, one-price model dates to its 1858 founding. The real story is the reverse: a company that closed 150 stores and let vendors ship straight to your door is rebuilding the channel it spent 166 years pretending it had eliminated.

Macy's bet that a 30,000-sq-ft off-mall store could replace the dying anchor. The format is real and it works modestly — but even at full build-out it's under 2% of the company's floor space, and Macy's just closed four of them.

Department stores held 14.5% of U.S. retail sales in 1990 and 5.7% by 2013 — most of that collapse happened before mass e-commerce. Macy's then erased the one moat it had left: local loyalty. The 2024 plan to close ~150 stores isn't a pandemic pivot; it's the third closure round since 2016.

The story says the internet killed the department store. But Macy's filed for bankruptcy in 1992 with $3.7 billion in debt — years before Amazon existed. The wound was self-inflicted, and the 2024 'Bold New Chapter' is the bill coming due.