The Malaise of Macy’s

was never very busy when she shopped there, which, she also said, was not that often because she didn’t really like it.

To my mom, the store went downhill after it was converted from Kaufmann’s into Macy’s; she never saw much in there that she wanted to buy and the store itself wasn’t as nice either.

And, Mom said, a lot of other people in the area felt the same way.

Kaufmann’s had deep local roots.

Founded by 1871 by Jacob and Isaac Kaufmann, the department store was part of the fabric of Western Pennsylvania for decades. There’s the iconic clock in downtown Pittsburgh (“Meet me under the Kaufmann’s clock.”) and Fallingwater, the amazing Frank Lloyd Wright-designed weekend home the Kaufmann family had built in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, a must-see if you ever get to the area.

There really wasn’t any way for Macy’s to emulate that and, as a result, what ended up happening is exactly what my mom observed: People really never came to love Macy’s the way they loved Kaufmann’s.   

My mom’s musings on Macy’s sum up perfectly the point that was made in the Retail Dive article.

The retailer got too big to deliver any kind of personalized experience to customers, to stock each store with merchandise that suited them and to make area residents feel that Macy’s knew what they liked.

And, it seems, this lack of personalization was especially detrimental to Macy’s in Midwest metropolitan regions like Pittsburgh, as this is where Macy’s is expected to close the most stores, according to Retail Dive.

Retail today is so different and so difficult that I cannot offer jewelers a panacea, a single solution for all their store’s problems. I cannot say that being a town’s “local jeweler” will save a store because, as we’ve seen, longtime family-owned retailers are closing down too. 

And I cannot say that remaining a Kaufmann’s would have saved this specific store, given the long, slow economic decline of the area surrounding it and the myriad challenges facing brick-and-mortar retailers today, particularly those situated in aging malls.

But I think what can be learned from Macy’s is that for retailers, local/regional names do carry weight among area residents and aren’t necessarily so easily replaced.

As National Jeweler columnist Peter Smith stated when commenting on this story about San Francisco retailer Shreve & Co. closing the Portland, Oregon storeit opened in the space once occupied by 88-year-old store Carl Greve Jewelers: “I wonder if things would have been different if they had kept the Carl Greve name? Shreve’s had no awareness in that market. Sad to see.”

There is value in having a connection to the community and in knowing exactly what your customers want.