Macy’s Will Spend $400 Million Remodeling Their Flagship Store

With over a million square feet of retail space Macy’s flagship store, located on Herald Square in New York City, is the signal largest retail store in the world. Now the company is announcing that they will be spending an estimated $400 million dollars over the next three years to completely renovate this massive location and even increase its size by another 100,000 square feet. Terry Lundgren, CEO of Macy’s, told Women’s Wear Daily that the total redesign of the store’s ten floors is meant to accommodate “how a new generation of customers prefers to shop. In many cases, product will be organized by lifestyle to help customers create looks and build wardrobes across categories.”

Sounds all well and good, also sounds similar to what Macy’s competitor Bloomingdale’s has been doing to a number of their larger retail operations over the last few years, but if that’s what the customers want then it seems the department stores of the 21st century will be organized by lifestyle. If Macy’s flagship redesign truly is a taste of things to come the new breed of department store will also feature plenty of in store dining experiences. The Herald Square location will soon have everything a foodie could desire, from a demonstration kitchen to a coffee and wine bar and even a pub that will remain open after retail hours. The new layout will also feature 300 additional dressing rooms, more shop-in-shops boutiques that offer accessories, shoes and hand-bags and large increases in the square footage devoted to shoes and menswear.

According to Macy’s most recent projections the Herald Square location brings in nearly $1 billion in sales each year, and the lion’s share of that comes in the weeks between Black Friday and Christmas, as it does with most retail operations. So it makes sense that the redesign is not slated to begin until early spring of next year. As long as Macy’s doesn’t completely confuse their shoppers with the newly formulated layout there is no reason to predict anything but an uptick in revenue for the location so the $400 million spent on remodeling should be recuperated very quickly. The real question is how will this layout geared towards a “new generation” change the experience of department store shopping? Unfortunately the answer is going to require a lot of patience, because at the moment the completion date for the renovations is predicting for 2015.