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: 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.

[UPDATE 12/11/08: Welcome to my readers from FieldsFansChicago.org! You can find my full two-and-a-half years of coverage--and criticism--of Macy's poorly executed takeover of Chicago's historic Marshall Field's State Street retail flagship in my Macy's State Street archive.]

Who says you can’t teach an old Macy’s, Inc. CEO new tricks? Last week, Crain’s Chicago Business and the Chicago Tribune both announced the rollout of a new Macy’s marketing campaign entitled, “Take Me to State Street”. According to the papers, the campaign will be full-court media push highlighting the flagship State Street store as a premiere retail destination.

Pessimistic Chicago shoppers might say the strategy was a long time in coming. Sure, Chicagoans held the store in high esteem for the 100 years or so that it was Marshall Field’s. But even after a disastrous 2006 holiday shopping season followed by a year of declining sales, until last week’s announcement Macy’s, Inc. provided little evidence that it gave a fig for local sentiment. (Local designers and long-lost chocolates do not a respected shopping destination revive).

After all, the former-Federated retail juggernaut burst onto the Second City scene with a year of commercials and print ads happily (and as many locals noted, rather cluelessly) shouting that Macy’s was now to be found all across the country–without ever mentioning the word Chicago.

As I detailed earlier this year, the woefully misfiring ad campaign was only one of a string of thoughtless blunders committed by a retail CEO too caught up in the hubris of continental retail conquest to notice. (Remember Macy’s forgetting the names of the streets that surround the State Street store? Giving up sponsorship of Chicago’s Thanksgiving Day Parade? Cutting the pay of store associates to make up for tanking receipts?)

In 2005, when Federated closed the deal on the former Field’s nameplate and announced plans to retire the monicker, Lundgren faced directly into the firestorm of local protest and made no bones about his belief that civic sentiment would have no effect on the bottom line. The propensity of New York interests to underestimate any and all things Chicagoan is laughable at times. Lundgren’s career-defining lack of judgment in this regard would be hysterical–if it didn’t call the continued viability of the State Street store into question.

And that scares me. Far be it from me to want to see the old Marshall Field’s building go the way of downtown’s former Carson’s store (i.e., down the tubes). There’s nothing I enjoy more than a long lunch on the seventh floor followed by a lazy browse from the top of the State Street store to the bottom. The store represents a chance to experience a living retail history that many urban Americans don’t have access to anymore, and we’re lucky to have the opportunity here in Chicago, no matter what the nameplate on the door. So I hope the store has a better Christmas this year–I want it to stick around.

But it’s telling who made last week’s announcement: Frank Guzetta, Chairman and CEO of Macy’s North. At least the local management finally gets it. Given the massive, money-bleeding scope of the preceding marketing cock-up, I’m not surprised Lundgren laid low last week.

If his absence was supposed to be a face-saving strategy, though, it came as too little, too late for at least one critic quoted by the Trib. Minneapolis retail analyst William Lozito brutally pegged Lundgren’s reputation thusly: “Lundgren just tried to will Macy’s into being. He said everything is going to be Macy’s, and the business just went south.”

May I say on behalf of all Chicagoans, everywhere, we told you so? Chicago may not have the economic heft of Gotham, quite as long a history, or necessarily as blunt a populace. But we do have one thing in common with New Yorkers: we Chicagoans think that our city is the center of the known universe, too. (Even those of us, like me, who moved here from New York).

Future carpet-bagging retailers with their targets set on Hogtown wallets would do well to heed that fact, lest they too witness their sales receipts pull another “Lundgren”.

(Photo: “It’s that ABC news van again…”.)

[Ed. Note: A big shout out to my readers from the estimable Gapers Block today, and thanks for the coverage, JA!]

It’s generally not a good sign when the ABC news van is parked in front of your establishment in the middle of the business day. So it was on Monday, as I walked past the Randolph Street frontage of the financially troubled Macy’s on State Street and came face-to-face with this curiously parked news vehicle.

Numerous news reports over the past two days (see the Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times, and, yes, ABC7 Chicago) chronicled Macy’s newsworthy faux pas of the day: a Chicago Health Department smackdown of Macy’s popular lower-level food court (in part, for, of all things, a fruit-fly infestation). That the eatery closures occurred in the basement of the erstwhile Marshall Field’s flagship store is a delicious irony for anyone wondering to what further depths Federated-cum-Macy’s Inc.’s management would drag Chitown’s historic shopping mecca.

Not the least of those wondering whither the store’s future: its rank-and-file floor clerks. Some I spoke with on Monday suggested that the health-code violations were merely the tip of the iceberg of the store’s problems. Also among the candid opinions I encountered from store staff: surprise that the 7th Floor eateries weren’t cited; and outright doubt that the store would last out the year under current (mis-)management.

While staff must wonder quietly, though, I don’t. So does anyone else want to know how many months of missteps it will take before Macy’s, Inc. honcho Terry Lundgren finally admits that he made the mistake of his career by attempting to ram the Macy’s nameplate down the throats of 8 million Chicagolanders who, as time has proven, weren’t kidding when they vociferously asserted last year that they had no taste for the new monicker?

Let’s review the silliness of it all:

–Department-store juggernaut Federated (now Macy’s Inc.) in late 2005 announces its intention to wipe the century-old Marshall Field’s nameplate off of State Street and from the midwest in general, triggering loud and emotional protests across Chicagoland (see the 2006 Google News archive).

–Adding insult to injury, a Chicago-native PR specialist is tapped to create the ad campaign announcing Macy’s arrival in the midwest and across the country. Amazingly, it is a wholly generic ad campaign that completely ignores the local angle–potential customers across the county are simply told to be happy that Macy’s is now located wherever people want to travel (hands up how many of you out there have ever, say, booked a trip to Maui because your favorite department store had an outlet there?).

–Equally insulting, Macy’s installs new wayfinding maps throughout the store that actually list the wrong street names for three of the four streets surrounding the store. Regular readers will remember it was Yours Truly who tipped Chicago media on this, earning Chicago Carless the front page of the September 1, 2006 Chicago Tribune business section. (And as if that weren’t enough of a public-relations blunder, in the same week Macy’s threatens to sue a local eatery for selling a sandwich formerly popular at the old Marshall Field’s).

–The nameplate change occurs. The change is met with numerous brand changes, widely considered to be downmarket choices by former Field’s shoppers, the beginning of Macy’s hopelessly messy, Walmart-esque “let’s pile boxes of everything everywhere” stocking strategy, and protests, protests, protests.

—And for the next year, news report after news report (see here for the Google News archives on same for 2006 and 2007), not to mention reports from Macy’s, Inc., themselves, announce the perilous decline of shoppers–and shopping receipts–both at the State Street flagship and in other cities that received similar nameplate changes by Federated in 2006.

Hope seemed to arrive in January 2007, when Lundgren announced upper-level management changes–after one of the State Street store’s worst Christmas seasons ever–aimed at making the store more welcoming to Chicago shoppers. Health-code violations in my formerly favorite food-court are not what I, as a local living three blocks from the store, had in mind, though, Terry.

Neither, I might add, are closures of other local stores (and if Macy’s can’t make money in tony Lake Forest, just where can they turn a buck?), allegedly looking for a buy-out offer, or cutting the compensation and commission rates of hard-working store employees in order to make others pay for what have been from the beginning very personally led corporate blunders.

Instead, how about, for once, finally admitting that Macy’s on State Street is, ahem, on State Street, in Chicago? How about celebrating Chicago, and the long-standing relationship between city and store, in a big, loud, and persistent manner? How about commercials and newspaper ads that say “Chicago’s Macy’s” instead of “Macy’s, you better love us because we’re everywhere so get used to it”?

If Macy’s is (apparently now) so desperate for Chicagoans to love them, my advice is to let Chicagoans feel the love, first. It’s time to show some love towards the locals you want to keep you in business, Terry. A lot more. This is not a difficult concept.

Then again, judging from recent actions, maybe it is. After all, you sponsor a nationally televised Thanksgiving parade in New York, but let Macy’s dump Chicago’s 2006 turkey-day parade into the hands of McDonald’s. McDonald’s, for God’s sake. Hello? Is this thing on? Is anyone actually awake and listening out there in Cincinnati?

A region of eight million shakes its head and continues to wonder.

(Photo: Wonder what these folks want? Apparently not Macy’s cards.)

If you thought you heard a citywide refrain of “I told you so” yesterday, you weren’t imagining things. According to a report in Wednesday’s Chicago Tribune, Federated finally admits feeling financial pain over a hardcore group of former Marshall Field’s shoppers who quit shopping the chain when the nameplate was switched to Macy’s last fall.

How much pain? According to the Trib, since the September name change, sales for the midwestern Macy’s North division are down more than ten percent versus this time in 2005, including an absolutely astounding drop of 11 percent just from October to November of this year. What’s more, shares of parent-company Federated have dropped 16 percent in the past six weeks.

So if you’re a former Field’s shopper who’s recently gotten a big-money coupon in the mail, or an unexpected personal call from a real live Macy’s marketing person, now you know why. (And if you’re Federated-honcho Terry Lundgren, you’re learning the hard way how not to take lightly Hogtown cultural history, as I previously opined here, here, and here).

Analysts quoted in the article lay blame squarely at Federated’s feet, for ramming the name change so quickly down the throats of Chicago shoppers and almost completely underestimating the depths of Second City loyalty for the hoary, homegrown Field’s nameplate. The experts do say they expect Macy’s sales will eventually recover.

Maybe. But not without Federated enjoying a nice plate of crow this holiday shopping season, because the same analysts all but say that in its hubris, the retail giant has pretty much killed its chances of having a strong Christmas in Chicago.

I’d like to sit down and write Lundgren a big, fat, “I told you so” letter, myself. Really, I would. But I have to go hit the South Loop Target to finish off my holiday shopping.

Give the lady–or gent–what they want, indeed.