Though I rarely accept products for review on my blog, a recession has a way of making an offer of free food hard to say no to. A month ago, the PR firm supporting Dominick’s Just For U coupon-card campaign offered me $200 in gift certificates to try out the service. The nearest Dominick’s supermarket is a small hike from where I currently live in the Fulton River District, but, hey, $200 is what it is.

I accepted and was asked to share some of the gift cards around and to write a post within a week or two of receiving them. The PR firm asked me to do that sharing with my readers, but I chose to shift some of that free gift-card bounty on to the homeless, instead. I also let the PR firm know that a week was too short a time to ask anyone to offer an opinion on a lifestyle product. To really know how you feel about them, you have to live with them first, no?

So I lived with Just for U for a month. And as it turns out, a month is enough. Just For U works by linking your existing Dominick’s Fresh Values customer card to the web. Once linked, you sign onto the Just For U website and, in a page from Peapod, browse through online aisles of food, clicking on “special” coupon deals on products you’re interested in buying in the store. When you’re done, you print out or email yourself  copy of your deals list, then go shopping with it.

I’m a single man living in urban America. Admittedly I’m a home cook and strive to meal-plan. But, in general, do I have the time or the patience to sit down, sign-on, search for coupon deals, and then run to the supermarket that, in all likelihood, I’m actually headed towards in the early evening, running late from a client meeting/interview/argument at the post office?

Not really, no.

That extra, time-consuming step pretty much made Just For U more of a pain than a pleasure for me to use. It just didn’t feel convenient. Worse, once you get to the Just For U website, it’s needlessly clunky and not at all intuitive to find your way around. Using it reminded me a lot of navigating 1990s websites on Netscape: unclear navigation; inconsistent fonts; a relative lack of feedback for important mouse clicks; and an overall feeling that the importance of usability trials had not yet been discovered by the Columbuses of the web design world.

Unfortunately, you can’t escape that tepid website experience–or the need to waste time and paper by printing out a deals list–by using a JustForU mobile app to do your deal shopping from the convenience of your smart phone once you’re firmly inside an actual Dominick’s. No mobile app exists, and the Just For U FAQ page makes it clear that one isn’t forthcoming, either. Yes, I k,now I can email myself a deals list, but if you’re asking me to shop with my smart phone in my hand, it’s incumbent upon you to make that experience as easy and useful as possible.

I really wanted to like Just For U. The gift cards were put to good use, and I can see how it might work for a mom or dad sitting down to plan a biweekly grocery expedition for their family. Then again, I don’t know any busy moms or dads who have enough time or patience on a Saturday or Sunday with kids to actually do that. Instead, I was just left with the feeling that Dominick’s Just For U campaign didn’t receive nearly enough thoughtful strategy up front or thoughtful design in its architecture and features as it should have to make it actually, well, worth using. I hate to say that, because without Dominick’s, I wouldn’t be able to find my favorite highly non-pork chicken Andouille sausage.

But if I had to use the JustForU website every time I set out to buy that sausage, I might just go to Jewel, eat the pork, and talk it out with God on Friday night, instead.

___

UPDATE (11/10/10): According to the Dominick’s PR firm, parent company Safeway is in the process of creating an iPhone app. So, potentially more to come…

This content originally appeared on my former Chicagosphere online-media blog, hosted on the Chicago Tribune’s ChicagoNow network.

As a parting shot to Christmas, freelance communications consultant Steve Tanner (@tannerman) and wife Amy take a look at this year’s Macy’s (née Marshall Field’s) State Street holiday windows. Even though Steve’s an avowed “Macy’s hater”, the Tanners find a few things to like in a window display at least better than last year’s illuminated vacuum-cleaner hoses.

Almost every year, the Tanners examine Christmas decorations in the Chicago Loop. This year they properly lambasted our drooping, civic Charlie Brown tree (who didn’t?), but found the theme and overall decorative quality of Macy’s State Street windows an improvement over 2008.

The windows explored how a typical letter gets to Santa at the North Pole. The fact that there was a cohesive theme at all made this year’s windows (not to mention the fabulous, silvery 2009 Walnut Room Great Tree) a success for me. The Tanners found the windows still a bit generic–and hated what they called “Satanic Robotic Red-Nosed Elves”–leftover from 2008, unfortunately.

Browse their photo-filled post about this year’s windows and see what you think for yourself. I’m just glad the windows are still there, period, even if the old nameplate isn’t. (It’s been three years, people. It’s Macy’s now. Let it go…)

(Photo: During the frigid, fallow months of a Chicago winter, being prepared is more than just a Boy Scout motto…)

With fall almost upon us and (my favorite living local columnist) Mary Schmich no doubt on the verge of her annual verbal dirge about the Windy City’s wrathful winter weather, I can finally officially say: I’m prepared. Three months almost to the day since the first wave of my technological migration, I’m proud to complete my transition to the modern age. Give or take a couple years.

In June, I pared down to a single phone number and email address, dumping years of Vonage echoes and inflexible Apple desktop software for an iPhone- and Google-based lifestyle. I rightly figured doing so would save both aggravation and money, those benefits helping me better concentrate on building my consulting business in the throes of the New Depression.

Happily, the lately brightening economy has brought my client base back out of hiding. Given the late calendar date, it hasn’t happened a moment too soon. I don’t think I could suffer through another long Chicago winter with standard-definition TV.

Not that I’m a weather whiner–frequently during months ending in -ember and -ary I call out particularly plaintive locals for having the audacity to bitch about the cold while donning wispy windbreakers and eschewing woolen wear. Me, I dress for the success of living to see another day when Jack Frost comes calling in these parts.

It’s just that I have a habit of holding onto outdated audio-video technology until my sense of shame at having friends over becomes too much to bear. Feel free to hand me a shiny, new Macbook and iPhone every year. But don’t touch my nine-year-old hi-fi stereo VCR–how else am I supposed to watch my 15-year-old reruns of Maude?

Yes, I know, on YouTube, but that’s not the point. It’s bad enough I’m feeling old at 39. That’s near-deceased in technological terms. Folks just a few years older than me still use phrases like, “information superhighway,” “mix tape,” and “television dial.” I at least know the terminology. Allowing myself to take a really hard look at my entertainment center a couple of weeks ago, though, had me feeling already dead and buried.

Included there in addition to the 2000 VCR: a 1995 receiver and double tape deck, and leftover plastic bits from the malfunctioning remote I tossed at the wall in ‘07, forcing me to get up every time I wanted to change the channel on my standard-definition DirectTV box. Oh, and burying the lead, the 32-inch LCD HDTV I bought last October in a failed effort to force myself to upgrade the aforementioned items.

In my defense, the HDTV replaced the $99 picture-tube 20-inch that I picked up at Circuit City when I moved to Chitown and promptly nursed for the subsequent six, fuzzily pixelated years. Which was fine until Overly Frank bought a top-of-the-line Sony Bravia shortly before Labor Day…

In defense of my dating life–I certainly didn’t expect him to come to my house to watch DVDs on my crummy set-up, would you?–I knew something had to give.

Five-hundred dollars later, what eventually gave, as it turned out, was my wallet. In return, at least for starters, that got me an HDMI cable to convert my backup Macbook into an HDTV-focused media center. Given my recent distaste for Apple-provided software solutions, a few quick Google searches had me downloading the popular Boxee and (Mac-only) Plex media-center applications, to supplement Apple’s annoyingly controlled-access Front Row.

Before long, I was watching my iTunes catalog of Kathy Griffin concerts and streaming old episodes of Mary Tyler More via Hulu. Which was fine until Frank told me about Netflix online movie streaming…

I crossed my fingers that the ancient DVD drive in my old Macbook would still work, signed up (at incredibly long last) for Netflix, and clicked on that little red app box in Boxee. Okay, the streaming movie selection is sucky. But I’ve already spent so many hours streaming entire Britcom series from beginning to end that I upped my DSL pipeline to super-mega-seatbelt speed to ensure AT&T doesn’t cut me off out of spite for not using U-Verse. Which was fine until my first Netflix DVD came…

You should see my Netflix queue. I never go to the movies as it is. I prefer bygone-era comedies and previous-decade blockbusters. Recognizing the chance to bone up on my pop-culture credibility, however, I’ve got one recent blockbuster, Pixar movie, or critically acclaimed hit after another lined up in my queue. Generously padded with 1930s screwball comedies and Hitckcock thrillers, of course. (A tiger doesn’t change its stripes overnight, you know.)

I managed to get Peter Bogdonavich’s Barbra Streisand/Ryan O’Neal farce, What’s Up Doc?, fired up on the old Mac when Frank came calling over the weekend–after about a dozen tries. Monsters, Inc. the next day, not so much. I’m glad Frank wasn’t there to witness the hundred tries that didn’t work. He’d just gone out and bought a Costco-discounted Sony Blu-ray player to go with his HDTV, so my sense of chagrin would have been palpable. Which wouldn’t have been fine and so…

I figured it was about time to visit my local Best Buy anyway. It’s the swanky new one in the Hancock, sagely bereft of major appliances since Michigan Avenue tourists don’t tend to lug washers and dryers home on Southwest. What I ended up lugging home, myself, was a very familiar and fully Cook County-taxed Sony Blu-ray player. But it worked, and that’s all that mattered. Which would have been the end of the story, except…

Dammit, it’s an HDTV I bought last fall, I’m not getting any younger, and for once in my life I’d like to have the same high-definition television experience I originally hawked to high-income The Great Indoors shoppers when I arrived in Chicago six years ago and couldn’t find a job any nearer to civilization than said Sears home-furnishing store. In Schaumburg.

So the rest of said money–and 45 minutes of my life waiting on hold–went to downtown Chicago’s paragon of unreliability, DirecTV reseller MDU Communications, who currently own Marina City’s wiring and “benefit” we Marina Citizens by exclusively offering DirecTV. The bastards fine upstanding resellers made me buy my HD DVR receiver at retail cost. But it’s not like putting Dish Network on my balcony or moving to a building wired for (God forbid) Comcast would have been any cheaper, so I sucked it up.

The late-arriving installer left a few hours ago. I’ve spent the rest of today watching informationally feeble, hi-def documentaries and remembering how liberating it feels to hit the DVR record button on a white plastic remote. Last time I had a DVR–albeit briefly–I was 33-years-old, and used it to learn how to cook by recording all hell out of the Food Network. This time, I’m thinking, numerous episodes of something in a nice Niecy Nash…

And there you have it, my journey firmly into TV tech circa 2007. Sure, I’m a bit late to the party, but I’m already having a blast. In fact, I’d catch you up more on recent events, but I’m busy at the moment programming favorite channels and building an industrial strength electric fence with nuclear armament to keep Camões from taking a hike across my media center shelves. (His verboten paws across my old Macbook’s keyboard have changed my hard drive name to “/697*” once already.)

Feel free to check in on me once the thermometer hits 80 again. Yes, I know, it was 80 today, but I can’t be bothered to notice, what with Oprah’s Whitney interview waiting on my DVR, 25 more episodes of As Time Goes By to stream on Netflix, and the entire William Powell/Myrna Loy 1930s screwball Thin Man series lined up in my delivery queue.

It’s a good thing I like to choose my own produce, or I might sign up for Peapod and never again make it down from the 38th floor. Or off my futon, for that matter. Or even out from under my blanket.

Do me a favor and turn up the A/C on your way out…

(Photo: Hey, which one of you guys ate the alligator?)

Earlier this month, a visit to the Brookfield Zoo with Sonny (aka Mr. New Guy) uncovered new depths of hidden obsessiveness in Yours Truly. I’ve always liked the place–it reminds me of a pancake-flat Bronx Zoo, minus the Bengali Express monorail ride through Wild Asia that I grew up riding. (My transit geekiness started young.) But there’s one thing I unfortunately didn’t grow up with at the NYC animal park: Mold-A-Rama!

Sonny and I did Brookfield on a chilly, drizzly weekend afternoon. As I only had (and continue to have) goo-goo eyes for him, I didn’t mind the wet much. The pallid weather gave us the zoo mostly to ourselves, and kept the few potentially marauding yuppie toddlers in attendance snugly bundled in their plastic-domed, already-outgrown strollers.

Being a member and lifelong visitor, Sonny knew the best way to circuit the zoo. We entered from the South Gate and wended our way counter-clockwise around the Roosevelt Fountain starting with the Bear Grottos, then working towards the Seven Seas Dolphin Arena and on from there.

All the while, Sonny told me tales of being a little kid making regular visits to the big zoo. He remembered Olga, the giant walrus (She used to come up to the edge and blow water at you; they didn’t have all this Plexiglas here then), Ziggy, the chained bull elephant (He died right after they set him free), and the day Binti Jua rescued the 3-year-old who fell into her gorilla exhibit.

But walking into the Australia House, our combined relative calm shattered when Sonny saw the Mold-A-Rama machine in the entry alcove.

“Oh my God, those are so COOL!” he cooed like a little kid. “I grew up making plastic animals with them! Every time we came here, I used to beg my parents until they let me have one–just one. Eventually, we had a whole herd of plastic animals around the house. Did you have these back in New York?”

I swept my gaze over the ice machine-sized, 1960s-era blue monstrosity of dials, switches, pistons, and plastic. “Um, no,” I replied. “I can’t believe you people keep these things around, they look dangerous.”

“Nonsense,” said Sonny. “You don’t know what you missed back there in New Yawk City not having these around.”

I thought about his comment while we passed through the miniscule Down-Under exhibit. As we exited out the way we came in, I stopped by the gently purring machine. I told Sonny, “OK, I want one.”

He stopped me from pulling out my wallet, deposited two singles into the money slot below the big, clear plastic dome, and told me to watch. I was surprised at the ferocity of the rumbling that soon began. While the floor beneath us trembled, pistons pushed two metal molds together, hot plastic was injected in-between, and (as I would later learn) air blasted the molten plastic hollow, then anti-freeze brought everything down to a less dangerous temperature.

But still an uncomfortably warm one. “You have to be careful when you take them out,” Sonny warned, as he reached inside the vending hopper and pulled out a newly minted pink aardvark. “You gotta hold them upside-down like this until they cool off, so no plastic drips out of the holes on the bottom onto your hands.”

I wanted to make a snarky comment about potential liability suits, envisioning decades of ten-year-olds with aardvark-shaped burns on fingers and palms. But the thing was just so damned shiny.

“It needs a name,” said Sonny. “I know! Let’s call him Artie–Artie the aardvark!” Artie smelled like a crayon on a radiator. But there was no denying it; he was amazingly, unexpectedly, kitschily cute. I felt the time bomb begin ticking before we even left the zoo.

The same weekend, Sonny gave me a dozen roses–orange ones, to signify desire, enthusiasm, and passion. The moment I saw the colorful blooms, I knew exactly how they’d be repaid.

The weather was less charitable than my mood when I made my clandestine visit back to the zoo the following Wednesday. Before I hopped on Metra for the 20-minute ride west to the Hollywood/Zoo stop, I visited a downtown bank branch to break a twenty into singles.

I told the clerk, “I need them for the Mold-A-Ramas at the Brookfield Zoo.” The single look she shot me instantly told me she had fond childhood memories of the machines–and thought I was insane for visiting a zoo on an 18-degree day.

Never having taken commuter rail to the zoo, I was pleasantly surprised to find the walk from Metra to be a leisurely 10-minute residential stroll from station to the zoo’s South Gate, a less-urban version of the similarly short saunter from the number 5 train to the Bronx Zoo’s Asia Gate.

I paid my full admission, pulled my double-wrapped wool scarf a little higher around my neck, and headed towards the Dolphin Arena, where I remembered to be the first set of Mold-A-Rama machines I had passed with Sonny during our weekend visit.

Once there, I pulled out my wad of singles, grabbed one of several freezer bags I had stuffed in my computer bag, and proceeded to devolve into a pre-teen. As I watched a dolphin watch a workman scrape old paint off a viewing window ledge in the arena’s otherwise empty lower level, I made myself a blue dolphin, an orange lion, and a black gorilla.

Sonny was right, I quickly learned to be ginger in my attempts to remove the still-semi-nuclear playthings from their creaky, metallic birth canals. Worried they would stay hot in my computer bag, I decided to forgo my simmering sense of embarrassment and sat with my potentially carcinogenic menagerie on a bench in the cold to let them cool.

It was a strategy I repeated–sitting outside the Pachyderm House with a gray elephant and a brown rhinoceros, outside the Australia House with another pink aardvark, outside The Living Coast with a pointy, white penguin. And each time a Mold-A-Rama machine vibrated the ground as it brought one of these animals to inanimate life, I felt an immediate, grade-school-boy urge to immediately find another one and do it all over again.

By the time I found the three dinosaur Mold-A-Ramas in the hallway next to the Perching Bird House, I knew I likely had a diagnosable obsession. The unexpected apatosaurus, triceratops, and tyrannosaurus rex molds had been brought in specially for this year’s Dinosaurs Alive! animatronic dino exhibit. Sitting right next to each other as they were, I knew what I had to do.

I took six remaining singles out of my wallet, and a deep breath. Then I ran crazily from one machine to the other, inserting dollar bills as quickly as humanly possible, making three Mold-A-Rama machines simultaneously stutter to life in the same room. As the whirring, rumbling, thundering trio played its cacophonous mechanical melody, I rode the rush and tried to handle it.

I blame the fogginess of my following refractory period for having missed the alligator mold machine in the Swamp exhibit. No matter, I’m sure I’ll be back, singles in hand. A perusal of several Mold-A-Rama fan sites informs me that the MARs change at Brookfield pretty frequently, so there’ll be some new animal to mold soon enough.

(Yes, there are several fan sites. Yes, we rabid fans call the shiny molded animals MARs for short. Yes, all of this gives me pause, too.)

On the train ride home with my rubber fauna, I worried whether an appropriate 12-step program exists for someone who amasses a Mold-A-Rama menagerie in a mere two hours. I wondered just how far gone I was.

Not as far gone as some, apparently. I only gifted the ten Mold-A-Rama animals.

Sonny named them.

(Photo: Next year’s Walnut Room Christmas tree? Original Credit: not Mike.)

This from fellow blogger Leigh Hanlon over at Thrillarama: a video podcast of this year’s (allegedly) animated holiday windows at Macy’s State Street, known to you me and every other Chicagoan as “the former Marshall Field’s.”

Last month after viewing the windows and feeling my heart sink from their abject suckiness, I wrote in these pages and over at HuffPost:

“Macy’s State Street has cost-cut its Chicago Loop holiday windows and Christmas tree so deeply this year, I personally don’t believe it’s worth bothering to make that time-honored family foray downtown to see them.”

In case you didn’t believe me then, take a look at Hanlon’s video and decide for yourself whether the firing of longtime window dresser Amy Meadows in January of this year was really such a bright idea. (If you’re reading, Macy’s honcho Terry Lundgren, here’s a hint: no, it wasn’t.)

“Macy’s Holiday Windows Suck” from Leigh Hanlon

(RSS subscribers click through to view the video directly on Thrillarama)

(Photo: A slight exaggeration over the cut-rate Christmas on view at Macy’s State Street. Credit: not Mike.)

Update 11/16/10: Thank you to Time Out Chicago for shouting out this post in this month’s TOC look at the better–though tiny and very NYC-centric–2010 Macy’s State Street windows.

I’ll cut to the chase: Macy’s State Street has cost-cut its Chicago Loop holiday windows and Christmas tree so deeply this year, I personally don’t believe it’s worth bothering to make that time-honored family foray downtown to see them.

In January 2008, Macy’s fired longtime window dresser Amy Meadows, the woman responsible for decorating 25 years worth of State Street holiday windows and Walnut Room Great Trees, as part of a particularly brutal wave of cost-cutting layoffs at the retailer’s Chicagoland stores.  When it happened, the Sun-Times quoted a Macy’s spokesperson saying, “We have a talented visual team who will decorate our store windows and continue the time-honored tradition.”

Given the former-Federated’s track record in Chicago, I doubted those words. And if this holiday season’s State Street windows and Great Tree, publicly unveiled on Saturday, November 8th, are any indication, I had good reason for pause.

I’ve said it, I’ve repeated it, and I’ve even ended up on the front page of the Chicago Tribune business section saying it: Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren will go to the grave–and take the former Marshall Fields with him–before he and his team get a clue about how to honor Chicagoans and their local retail traditions.

The first two years of State Street holiday decorations under Macy’s tenure were an uneven affair, but at least there was evidence of an artistic program, not to mention a budget.  The 2006 season gave us Cinderella windows and a Swarovski crystal-festooned tree.  The following season brought a Mary Poppins storyline and a tree decorated by Martha Stewart.

What a difference another 12 months make. The decorations for this year’s windows and tree were “inspired” by celebrity designer Tommy Hilfiger around a clumsy one-word theme of “Believe.” Abject disbelief is closer to the feeling I was left with upon experiencing them, not to mention more than a little suspicion that Hilfiger’s hands went nowhere near a drawing board here.

The first thing I can tell you about the holiday windows is that there are fewer of them.  The animated scenes do not even make it across the entire State Street frontage. The dressed windows are interrupted at the Randolph corner by an uninspired collection of toy piles more akin to a retail endcap than a historic holiday window.

At the Washington corner, things get even worse: adult mannequins sporting fashion clothing, perfect for deflating the holiday interest of any Windy City child.

I’d love to tell you the storyline of the windows that do exist.  However, I couldn’t decipher one.  They seem to be an abbreviated series of vignettes about grotesque toys come to life in some way.

What way or why I couldn’t figure. Not that there’s much life to speak of.  In an obvious attempt to try to sell the Christmas-shopping public on doing more with less, this year’s holiday windows have fewer moving parts and more garish blinking lights–for some indecipherable reason, frequently hidden inside semi-transparent vacuum cleaner-esque hoses and tubes.

At first glance, things are more festive upstairs at the 7th-floor Walnut Room.  This year marks the 101st anniversary of the two-story tall Great Tree, set in the center of the hoary old restaurant’s main room. Last year, the store didn’t bother to decorate behind the embarrassingly cheesy cardboard cutout of a town set at the bottom of the tree, giving hordes of shoppers on the 8th-floor gallery above a clear view of wires, duct tape, and scuffed flooring.

This year, to its credit, Macy’s has placed actual, three-dimensional boxes and F.A.O. Schwarz-branded toys all the way under and around the tree, completing the holiday illusion for viewers from any angle. However, that improved view is of a surprisingly nondescript tree. Aside from the aforementioned toys, nothing is to be found bedecking the tree more interesting than inexpensive twinkle lights, cloth ornaments, and garland. The bling of years past is nowhere to be seen.

And the sum of all of that is a shame. After the cost cuts in January, Macy’s made a very public attempt to try and heal the retail wounds it had wrought in Chicago over the previous two years since taking ownership of the former Marshall Field’s by narrow-marketing to local consumers.

Speaking as one of those local consumers, not to mention a downtown resident (I live steps up State Street from the store) and a former New Yorker who before moving to Lake Michigan shores would otherwise have had no axe to grind with Macy’s, Lundgren’s retail empire has blown it big time this holiday season in the heart of Chicago.

If this is the best Macy’s can do after almost three years of ire, perceived insult, and frankly disappointment from Windy City shoppers, something is very wrong at Lundgren’s shop. Starting at the top, and finishing with a heart-breaking holiday thud on the State Street pavement.

(Photo: The more things change at Macy’s State Street, the more they suck the same.)

I’ve said it, and said it and I’ve said it again: Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren will go to the grave–and take the former Marshall Fields with him–before he and his team get a clue about how to treat Chicagoans.

Shame on anyone with a 606xx ZIP Code for thinking that the carbetbagging New York nameplate and national-presence pretender had finally gotten it last fall when Macy’s finally announced the rollout of a Chicago-centric advertising campaign centering on the State Street store. (You know, the campaign Chicagoans have been calling for since 2005?)

Nice idea, but after a second consecutive Christmas with declining sales, it may be too late to save the old Marshall Fields flagship. And this time, the post-season job cuts are affecting Macy’s Chicago area stores, including State Street.

First to go: all food-service workers at every Macy’s in the Chicago area except for State Street. And not with advance warning, mind you. With an HR person standing in front of each food court last Friday morning telling arriving workers that they were instantly out of a job.

Great idea, Terry. Dump those food counters that give shoppers an in-store refreshment break, keeping ‘em happily captured behind the Macy’s nameplate and readying them up for a second round of shopping post-lunch shopping. Why retain any practical strategy that gives shoppers a reason not to leave a Macy’s while they’re still in one?

But if you think the post-Christmas treatment of Macy’s local food-service workers was Grinchy, keep reading. According to the Sun-Times, Macy’s has also unceremoniously dumped Amy Meadows. Don’t know her name, dear Chicagoan? Trust me, you’ve seen her work.

She’s dressed the State Street Christmas windows and decorated the Great Tree for the past 25 years.

According to a Macy’s spokesperson, “We have a talented visual team who will decorate our store windows and continue the time-honored tradition.” Give me a Goddamn break.

Lundgren and his team at long last say they’ll respect Chicago sensibilities, and then turn around and piss on Chicago tradition once again and act like it doesn’t matter. I’ve been optimistic about the State Street store’s chances for ore than a year. I give up. I don’t have the energy to bitch about the stupidity anymore, I think it speaks for itself.

I’m tired of making excuses. There aren’t any (except for the supposition that Lundgren and his time are on crack).

I was right in August 2006 when I waked through Macy’s State Street and cried wolf to citywide media on those initial, boneheaded store maps that listed the wrong names of the streets surrounding the store. At that time I said:

“When you’re under intense scrutiny from an entire city of your potential customers. many of whom have already labeled you callous and capricious when it comes to local culture, it’s really best to dot your ‘is and cross your ‘t’s. Or at least to show that you know where the store you bought is actually located.”

It is equally important to know where their hearts are located, too. In this town, that would be at the State Street store, every Christmas, gaping in colorful windows and up at sparkling trees to see the culmination of years of local tradition.

It is that tradition that soundly got the ax with Meadows’ firing. You cannot value-engineer institutional memory and you cannot replace more than two decades of holiday tradition with a $10-an-hour casual employee given glitter and a glue gun.

With Terry Lundgren remaining at the helm of Macy’s, I don’t see how we have another Christmas on State Street to speak of, friends. The next cuts will be deeper and throughout the Chicago flagship store.

Terry, how ’bout you tell 3 million of your potential customers why proving that you’re right and we’re wrong keeps on helping your bottom line? You made the worst retail blunder of the past 20 years–and of your career–by shoving the Macy’s nameplate down the collective throat of Chicago. Given the colossal stupidity of that mistake, I can’t imagine why the rest of your board has any confidence in you now to fix it.

Memo to Steven Bollenbach, Deirdre Connelly, Mayer Feldberg, Sara Levinson, Joseph Neubauer, Joseph Pichler, Joyce Roche, Karl von der Heyden, Craig Weatherup, and Marna Whittington: if you folks are looking for candidates for your next round of employee cuts, my advice is to look to the head of the board table y’all are seated at, first.