Macy’s is closing in on the finish line of a plan to shut roughly 150 of its namesake department stores, a retrenchment that began in early 2024 and runs through the retailer’s current fiscal year. When the cull is complete, the chain expects to operate about 350 go-forward Macy’s locations, down sharply from where it stood before the plan. For millions of older shoppers who still treat a nearby Macy’s as the place to try on clothes, get alterations, or return a gift in person, the shrinking footprint changes the everyday math of where to shop.
The Bold New Chapter plan behind the closures
The closures are the centerpiece of the strategy Macy’s calls A Bold New Chapter, which the company laid out to investors in February 2024. Rather than defend every store, management decided to close about 150 of its least productive locations and pour money into the roughly 350 it intends to keep. The idea is to concentrate staff, inventory, and remodeling dollars in stores that already draw traffic, and to stop subsidizing aging locations that were losing money.
The wind-down has moved in waves. Macy’s confirmed the store-closing plan and shuttered 66 stores in 2025, the largest single batch, and named an additional 14 underperforming locations for closure in 2026 across a dozen states, from California and Texas to New York and Pennsylvania. A Forbes analysis noted that the smaller 2026 batch was itself a sign the plan was working as intended, with the deepest cuts front-loaded and the remaining fleet stabilizing.
Alongside the closures, Macy’s has been testing a scaled-up service model in a group of pilot stores it branded the First 50. Those locations added staffing on the selling floor and reworked departments, and the company has pointed to consecutive quarters of comparable-sales growth there as evidence that investment, not just cost-cutting, drives the turnaround. The pilot results are the argument for why closing 150 stores is supposed to leave the survivors stronger.
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What an older shopper loses when a store goes dark
For a retiree, a department store is not only a place to buy a sweater. It is often the anchor of a familiar mall trip, a source of in-person help from a salesperson, and the simplest place to handle a return without printing a label or standing in line at a shipping counter. When the nearest Macy’s closes, those conveniences do not migrate cleanly to a website. The nearest surviving store may be a longer drive, which matters more for someone who no longer wants to travel far or navigate an unfamiliar shopping center.
The closures also thin out the competition that keeps prices honest. A mall that loses its anchor tends to lose foot traffic for the smaller shops around it, and some of those neighbors eventually close too. Fast Company, tracking the running list of shuttered locations, has documented how the closures cluster in older regional malls that were already fragile. For shoppers in those markets, the practical result is fewer places to comparison-shop in person and a longer trip to reach a full-line store.
Gift cards, loyalty points, and store-credit balances add another wrinkle. A Macy’s gift card remains valid at other Macy’s stores and online, but a shopper who assumed the local branch would always be there may find the nearest redemption option is now far away or purely digital. The chain’s own closure announcements have included clearance sales at departing stores, which can offer real discounts but also pressure shoppers to spend down balances quickly at a single location.
Where the money is going instead
The flip side of 150 closures is a bet on the stores that remain. Macy’s has said the go-forward fleet of about 350 locations will absorb the remodeling budget, upgraded fitting rooms, and staffing that the closed stores can no longer justify. In theory, a shopper who lives near a surviving store should see a better-run location, not a worse one, because the chain is no longer spreading its resources across a larger money-losing base.
That trade-off is central to the turnaround’s logic and to its risk. If the remaining stores deliver the improved experience the pilot program promised, the smaller Macy’s could be steadier and more profitable, which protects the brand shoppers rely on. If foot traffic keeps sliding despite the investment, the pressure to close more stores does not end at 150. The company has framed the current plan as finite, but nothing in retail guarantees the number holds if sales soften.
For an older shopper, the useful takeaway is less about the corporate strategy than about geography. The stores already named for closure are public, and the surviving 350 are the ones Macy’s intends to invest in, which makes it worth knowing which nearby location falls into which camp before planning a trip, spending a gift card, or scheduling an alteration. The chain that emerges from A Bold New Chapter will be smaller and, Macy’s hopes, sturdier, but for the neighborhoods losing their store, the immediate consequence is simply one fewer place to shop within easy reach.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
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