Macy’s Closing 66 Stores as Part of Reorganization
Stores on the chopping block include its historic Downtown Brooklyn location
By Isabelle Durso January 10, 2025 5:09 pm
reprints
Attention Macy’s shoppers, your store might soon be closing — for good.
The department store chain announced Thursday it will close 66 stores across the country — including its historic Downtown Brooklyn outpost — as part of its new strategy to shutter approximately 150 stores over the next three years while investing in 350 locations it dubbed “go-forward” spots.
The impending store closures during the first quarter of this year include 10 stores in New York and New Jersey alone, according to Macy’s list of store closures.
Two of those stores are in Brooklyn: Sheepshead Bay’s 2027 Emmons Avenue and Downtown Brooklyn’s 422 Fulton Street — the latter of which a group of New York City investors including United American Land, Crown Acquisitions and the Jackson Group bought for $23 million in December.
The list also includes one of the department store’s flagship locations in Philadelphia’s Wanamaker Building at 1300 Market Street.
“Closing any store is never easy, but as part of our ‘Bold New Chapter’ strategy, we are closing underproductive Macy’s stores to allow us to focus our resources and prioritize investments in our go-forward stores, where customers are already responding positively to better product offerings and elevated service,” Macy’s CEO Tony Spring said in a statement.
The news of the store closures comes as part of Macy’s overall plan to boost its financials by selling off its own real estate, especially after its big Downtown Brooklyn sale last month.
In fact, the department store said it expects to see $275 million from sales of its retail properties in the next year as it shrinks its retail footprint by 25 percent, as Commercial Observer previously reported.
The move was encouraged by activist investors such as Barington Capital and Thor Equities, which had urged Macy’s to create its own real estate unit to offload more properties after seeing poor sales last year, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Macy’s has also been targeting more small-format locations — about one-fifth the footprint of its traditional 180,000- to 200,000-square-foot stores — outside of malls, with plans to open 30 by the fall of 2024, Chain Store Age reported.
During the third quarter of 2024, Macy’s reported net sales of $4.7 billion, a decrease of 2.4 percent from the same period in 2023, according to the company’s earnings report.
Isabelle Durso can be reached at idurso@commercialobserver.com.
