Store-closing ax doesn’t touch the Macy’s store at Peachtree Mall

In light of a corporate decision by Sears Holdings to close the Sears department store and all but one Kmart discount store in the Columbus-Phenix City market, there came some very welcome news Wednesday from retailer Macy’s.

The Cincinnati-based company, which dates to its founding in 1858 by Rowland Hussey Macy, released a list of 68 underperforming stores that will be closing to cut expenses.

The Macy’s store at Peachtree Mall, thankfully, was not among the casualties. It survives yet another day to serve shoppers in the Columbus and the surrounding Chattahoochee Valley.

“Over the past year, we have been focused and disciplined about making strategic decisions to position us to gain market share and return to growth over time,” Terry Lundgren, chairman and chief executive officer of Macy’s Inc., said in a statement Wednesday. “While we are pleased with the strong performance of our highly developed online business, as well as the progress we have made on selling and visual presentation programs and expense reduction initiatives in 2016, we continue to experience declining traffic in our stores where the majority of our business is still transacted.”

Thus, the company said, came the need to close the 68 stores, which are among 100 altogether announced by Macy’s last August, with some already having been shuttered. Prior to the 68 locations being eliminated, the chain has 730 stores.

“Our omnichannel strategies continue to evolve based on the changes in our customers' shopping behaviors, including a focus on buy online, pickup in store and mobile-enabled shopping,” Lundgren said.

Ledger-Enquirer readers might recall a report issued last year by Morningstar Credit Ratings in which it listed the Macy’s store at Peachtree Mall as among 28 throughout the U.S. that it considered “most at risk” for closure due to its presumably lower sales per square foot compared to the Macy’s overall average. That’s typically the definition of under-performance.

That’s why Wednesday’s news Macy’s — just as Sears Holdings was scorching and burning the Columbus market with its store closings announcement — was very sweet to anyone simply wanting to see any business succeed.

It doesn’t, however, mean the Columbus Macy’s or any other of the company’s stores are out of the woods completely. In its Wednesday announcement, the retailer noted that it “intends to opportunistically close” about 30 more stores over the next few years as leases or operating covenants expire or as it is able to sell properties. City tax records show Peachtree Mall and its parent company, General Growth Properties, own the 138,938-square-foot building in which Macy’s does business here.

Macy’s has said the current round of store closings will generate annual savings of about $550 million. Whether or not that will be enough to stabilize its operational ship or if the company will have to return to the cost-cutting well in the future, only time will tell. That’s why it seemingly behooves Columbus-area consumers to support Macy’s and the other tenants of Peachtree Mall, as well as any store doing business in the local market.

The words of Macy’s CEO Lundgren laid out the landscape his company now faces fairly plainly. And these days, with the Internet’s burgeoning impact on commerce, it could be a fairly universal outlook for any brick-and-mortar store operator.

“It is essential that we maintain a healthy portfolio of the right stores in the right places,” he said. “We are closing locations that are unproductive or are no longer robust shopping destinations due to changes in the local retail shopping landscape, as well as monetizing locations with highly valued real estate.”

Entering the new year, that’s why it’s not a bad idea at all to raise a toast to the prospect of Macy’s serving customers locally for years to come, lest it suffer the unfortunate and painful fate of iconic Sears and its discount brethren Kmart.

This story was originally published January 5, 2017 at 12:44 PM with the headline "Store-closing ax doesn’t touch the Macy’s store at Peachtree Mall."