Not just another department store

Macy's? That's just another department store, indistinguishable from any other. When you want to go shopping in downtown Chicago, you go to Marshall Field's.

On Tuesday Federated Department Stores, parent of Field's, Macy's, and Bloomingdales, announced that they would discontinue the Marshall Field's brand and convert all the stores to Macy's, including the one on State Street. Maybe Macy's is every bit as good as Marshall Fields. I wouldn't know, nor would many other Chicagoans, because Chicagoans don't know the Macy's brand.

As America homogenizes the world, so does America homogenize itself from within. I don't mind so much if the shopping-mall locations get changed to Macy's; does it make that much difference if the store in Grand Forks, North Dakota, is a Field's or a Macy's? But to a Chicagoan, Marshall Field's is the solid, old building on the northeast corner of State and Washington.

Until recently, they had a wine department staffed by a sommelier, and their Frangos were made in a chocolate factory up on the 13th floor. The building itself, a Daniel Burnham design, is a palace of commerce, with its Tiffany glass ceiling (couldn't resist the pun) and its famous clocks.

There is an online petition to save the Marshall Field's brand. On September 21, the day after the Macy's announcement, the site was inundated with signatures, and since that date, 12,841 signatures have been added (according to a grep count -- I do love the Mac OS X Unix kernel!), not including mine.

[09:05:00 25 SEP 2005] Update: I did a little research on the online peition and found that it was created by a 25-year-old resident of Minneapolis named Nick Potts. So I guess it's not just in Chicago that people are upset about the name change.