Macy’s moves to open smaller stores outside malls

Macy’s is accelerating its plans to open smaller stores that aren’t attached to suburban shopping malls, in a bid to evolve along with its customers’ shopping preferences coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The department store chain said Wednesday that it will open three stores this fall that each represent ways Macy’s is thinking about how it aims to reposition its real estate in the future. That includes:

• Combining some of its different businesses under one roof
• Closing one of its department stores at a traditional mall to open a smaller-format Macy’s store, known as The Market by Macy’s, in a more densely populated part of town nearby
• Adding another Market by Macy’s location in an area where it already has multiple of those shops

“We want to be convenient and we want to make it easy,” Marc Mastronardi, Macy’s chief stores officer, said in an interview. “Customer behavior just keeps changing. And the more that we have the agility as an organization to shift and react, this feels like the next natural evolution.”