Customer opinion likely fueled Field's switch to Macy's
SUSAN CHANDLER
Knight Ridder Tribune News Service
CHICAGO - Kathryn Galainena, a busy Burr Ridge, Ill., mother of three, knows what she wants from a department store.
She wants quality merchandise and lots of styles. She wants clothes she can't find at other stores, unusual pieces that have friends asking "Where did you find that?" And it all has to be wrapped up with a certain level of service.
"I like to see salespeople who are available, who know how to work the registers, who don't have to ask a supervisor to do a return," she sighed. Then she added: "I haven't been getting it from Marshall Field's, that's for sure."
There's the trouble.
Folks like Galainena, who feel a long-standing attachment to Field's and still shop there for basics like kid's clothes, are dissatisfied with the overall experience they find at their hometown department store today.
That helps explain how Federated Department Stores justifies ditching the venerable Marshall Field's moniker in favor of its Macy's nameplate. Many shoppers with fond memories of browsing Field's and lunching at the Walnut Room don't spend their money there anymore - or do so rarely.
The question remains: Can department stores like Macy's give shoppers what they want these days even as discount chains like Target and Wal-Mart co-opt designers to create fashionable apparel and housewares at lower prices?
They can, and some of them are, say retail experts. Upscale merchants Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom are leading the way with impressive sales gains and high marks from customers, unhindered by H&M's fast-fashion knockoffs or Target's expanding version of cheap chic. Federated's two chains, Bloomingdale's and Macy's, are gaining market share as well.
But other department stores like Field's and Lord & Taylor have lost their way, cutting costs and service, playing the bargain game and turning off shoppers with a me-too assortment of the same national brands: Tommy Hilfiger, Polo Ralph Lauren, Liz Claiborne, Jones New York.
Underlying much of the decline is a dramatic shift in the power relationships between retailers and their suppliers, argues Neil Stern, a retail consultant with Chicago's McMillan/Doolittle.
Local department stores once acted as the buying agent and style interpreter for their customers, picking and choosing items from manufacturers' collections that they believed would be a hit.
That began to change in the 1980s as suppliers began building their own shops within department stores. These brand boutiques allowed designer Tommy Hilfiger, for example, to showcase his preppy red-white-and-blue apparel in an area complete with chunky oak tables and plenty of flags.
Department stores welcomed the boutiques. Suppliers paid for the cost of building and furnishing them, and sometimes subsidized the salaries of employees. For a while, the branded shops were something that set the early adopters apart. Brand-minded shoppers liked them, too, because they didn't have to search through racks to put together an outfit by their favorite designer.
But by the late 1980s, the strategy was backfiring.
"Tommy Hilfiger came in and created 300 shops. Now every one of the department store anchors has a Tommy shop and a Liz shop," said Stern. "It gave vendors more control, and it also was a real estate grab. There was no real defined reason to go to Marshall Field's because it has X, X and X that Carson's doesn't have."
Georgann Humphrey, an art director and longtime Field's shopper, puts it this way: "There are no surprises anymore in Marshall Field's."
Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus didn't follow the crowd, and now they are being rewarded for it.
Nordstrom, the Seattle-based chain, groups its fashion according to style, not manufacturer. Neiman Marcus has always prided itself on the taste of its buyers who cherry-pick the designer collections and work closely with suppliers to improve or tweak products for the Neiman's customer.
In the old days, shoppers flocked to one department store or another because each store had some merchandise the other didn't. But as suppliers grew more powerful and gobbled up a host of smaller brands, retailers lost much of their power to negotiate exclusives, retail consultants say. When shoppers complain about the decline of department stores, it's not just about the merchandise, it's also about the service.
Cost-cutting in the 1990s eviscerated the sales staffs of many department stores and left the sales floor filled with poorly trained employees who barely knew how to ring up a sale.
Federated has a big challenge on its hands. If the company flubs the May merger and the Macy's rebranding, it might not only mean doom for them, but for the entire department store sector.
ReplyDeleteThat's the thing that worries me. I love department stores and I hate to see it come down to one company pretty much determining the fate of the entire industry.
ReplyDeleteThe writer touched on the primary reasons that department stores began failing in the '90s: relinquishing matters of taste and appropriateness to the vendors. A vendor should have the right to say what his or her space looks in a store, but when vendor shops dominate a store environment to the point that the store itself has no point-of-view, it's disasterous.
I would also venture a guess that the internet has also played a part in what is happening with department stores. While many would never venture online to buy anything...Many have turned to online shopping as a quick and easy way to avoid going to the mall and to a department store. There are more options out there than there used to be.
ReplyDeleteI agree, Muddy. The internet definately put a damper on department store sales, and most department stores have primitive online commerce sites. It's got to have some kind of effect.
ReplyDelete