In what Macy’s is calling a continual effort to connect with the ever changing consumer, CEO Terry Lundgren announced plans to see a total of 500 stores double as fulfillment centers by the end of 2013.
A little over a year ago, the retailer announced plans to see 292 fulfillment stores by November 2012. At that time, Macy’s spokesman Jim Sluzewski told Multichannel Merchant that the retailer would consider further expansion of its ship-from-store initiatives after it evaluates its 2012 holiday sales figures.
It appears the holiday season fared well for Macy’s, according to a statement issued at the Annual Meeting of Shareholders, Lundgren said “total sales have risen by more than $1 billion in each of the past three years. In fact, our total sales in 2012, at $27.7 billion, were about $4.2 billion higher than 2009.”
The improved “cash flow,” according to Lundgren, has allowed Macy’s to adjust to the rapidly changing shopping patterns of the consumer. “We operate in an increasingly omnichannel world where consumers gravitate seamlessly between stores, desktops and mobile devices. They shop whenever, wherever and however they prefer,” Lundgren said.
This, Lundgren said, means that Macy’s stores, website and customer mobile devices all need to seamlessly interact and one way to do that is by creating additional fulfillment centers in the store. In the next few months, Lundgren said, Macy’s will be adding another 208 stores to the fulfillment fleet and a total of 500 by the end of 2013.
Lundgren appears to be about 300 short of his original goal, which was to have all 800 Macy’s stores to be ship-from-store compatible by the end of this year.
These distribution centers, he said, will ship inventory directly to customer’s homes and “drive incremental sales, increase inventory turn and improve gross margin.”