Macy's is a chain of mid-range American department stores with its flagship store
in Herald Square, New York City, which, with its one million square feet of selling
space has been billed as the "world's largest store" since completion of
the Seventh Avenue addition in 1924. (Though it actually ties with London's more
upmarket Harrods in terms of vastness of selling space.) The company also operates
two other national flagship stores, at San Francisco's Union Square and the
former Marshall Field's flagship Marshall Field and Company Building on State
Street in the Chicago Loop. Additionally, divisional flagship store locations
operate in Atlanta, Miami, Washington, D.C. and Seattle.
The company
produces the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, a well known parade which
was started in Newark, New Jersey by L. Bamberger & Co. and has been held on the
streets of New York City annually since 1924.
Macy's was founded
in 1858 by Rowland Hussey Macy a Quaker businessman whose religion dominated Manhattan
at that time. On the company's first day of business the sales totaled
$11.06. Macy had established a dry goods store in downtown Haverhill, Massachusetts
in 1851 that initially served the whaling community there. Macy moved to New
York City and established a new store named "R. H. Macy & Company" on the corner
of 14th Street and 6th Avenue, later expanding to 18th Street and Broadway,
on the "Ladies' Mile", the 19th century elite shopping district, where it remained
for nearly forty years. |
