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Originally Posted by Centropolis
Downtown Cincy has a Saks. Probably the #1 under-rated downtown in the midwest and weirdly the most visited midwestern urban core outside of St. Louis for me during the pandemic era.
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Cincinnati became the headquarters of Macy's back in the 1950s when Fred Lazarus, owner of Cincinnati's Shillito's Dept Store, formed Federated Department Stores. This parent company enabled all of the downtown departments stores nationwide under its umbrella to do purchasing as a bloc, develop category strategies, exchange inventory, etc. In the late 1990s, Federated changed its name to Macy's when it rebranded many of its department stores under that famous nameplate. Macy's picked up and moved its HQ from Cincinnati to New York a couple years ago, around 2019.
My old boss was an accountant at one of the old downtown department stores in the 1960s and he said he was involved in doing payroll back before checks. He said that the accounting department would tabulate everyone's pay, then go down to the loading dock, meet a few armored trucks, then pay every employee with cash in envelopes. He said it was a ridiculously tedious process, plus it was really dangerous since there was always the threat of a robbery. Those department stores had hundreds of employees back then so you can imagine what a scene it was each payday.
My grandmother was a buyer for Shillito's from ages 18-22, until she got married and started having kids. She traveled around upstate New York by train and bought clothes directly from the factories, back when American companies still made clothes.
She always claimed that this was a very prestigious job and I don't doubt it since she and the many similar young women who worked at the department stores were the sort who would have gone to college had they been born a generation later. When I was a kid I remember hearing people complain about how bad the service had become in retail since just 20-30 years earlier all of these intelligent women with good high school educations were working at them.