Hecht's to Hecht's-Macy's to Macy's?: Federated to buy May Department Stores

Newspapers across the country are featuring the deal for Federated Department Stores to buy May Department Stores. Because Federated is in the process of rebranding all their regional store chains (i.e., Rich's in Georgia or Burdines in Florida [which already consolidated Jordan Marsh Florida and Maas Brothers many years ago]) this is likely to mean the same for the various regional department store divisions that May owns, with some outstanding questions about the Field's division (its big store in Chicago on State Street is as renowned in the midwest as Macy's and Bloomingdales in Manhattan) and the upscale Lord&Taylor division, which is in the midst of an ongoing downsizing and refocusing process anyway.

Why this matters to urbanists is that while the department store may be a dinosaur (see this previous blog entry: http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2005/02/another-painful-blow-to-urban-shopping.html) it is a store format that still has "legs" in the downtown. Department stores were "retail-tainment" long before consultants and real estate professionals coined the term. And department stores are key pedestrian traffic generators (this by the way is the justification for financial incentives to department stores--they spend a lot of money on advertising and sales markdowns and this generates traffic for other stores in the shopping district).

May is based in St. Louis and its largest regional store division is the Hecht's chain in Washington, DC, which sprawls from North Carolina up to Pennsylvania and New Jersey. As far as store closures are concerned, the Hecht's division will be affected significantly, because they compete with Macy's East in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. (The California May divisions are likely to be impacted as well.)

(A few years ago, DC negotiated unsuccessfully to bring a Macy's Store downtown. The deal collapsed when Macy's tried to add a store in Chevy Chase to the deal. See "Macy's deal may be imminent." -- you might have to register with www.bizjournals.com to access the story.)

Here's a link to the AP story, "Federated buying rival May in $11B deal"; this story is from the bizjournals website, and this is from the Washington Post.