Macy’s Unveils Plan to Open up to 30 Small-Format Stores

Net sales in the first quarter of 2018 totaled $5.541 billion, an increase of 3.6 percent, compared with sales of $5.350 billion in the first quarter of 2017. Comparable sales on an owned basis were up 3.9 percent in the first quarter and up 4.2 percent on an owned plus licensed basis. The company estimates that comparable sales in the first quarter of 2018 benefited approximately 250 basis points from the shift of Friends and Family from the second quarter to the first. Excluding this, the company estimates that comparable sales were up 1.7 percent on an owned plus licensed basis. Macy's, Inc.'s operating income for the first quarter of 2018 totaled $238 million, or 4.3 percent of sales, compared to $219 million, or 4.1 percent of sales, for the first quarter of 2017. Operating income for the first quarter of 2018 totaled $257 million, or 4.6 percent of sales, excluding impairment and other costs of $19 million, which primarily relate to the wind-down of Macy's China Limited as discussed below. The company anticipates recognizing additional charges of approximately $10 million related to the wind-down over the course of fiscal 2018. There were no impairment and other costs in the first quarter of 2017. Click Read More below for additional information.

In late 2010, I was thinking quite a bit about book use in research libraries. The conventional wisdom was that “no one uses print books anymore” in libraries like mine, and indeed annual data provided by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) showed a pretty clear decline in book circulations: between 1991 and 2008 (the most recent data available at that time), the number of initial circulations in ARL libraries had fallen by over a quarter. And when I ventured into the book stacks in my own library I usually found them spookily deserted. But I was haunted by a passing comment a colleague had made to me a few years earlier, noting that the conclusions we draw from library usage data can easily be confounded by changes in the library’s user population. It occurred to me that if we really want to understand what’s happening with regard to library patrons and printed books, we need to take into account the changing nature of our patron base. And the simplest and most consistent change in that population is growth over time: university enrollment tends to grow from year to year. Click Read More below for more of the story.

We continue to expand our delivery operations to help customers get the items they need when they need them, and it’s been an exciting journey. From Express delivery, where customers can have items delivered to their doorsteps in as little as two hours, to InHome, where they can get those orders placed right into their refrigerators, we’re proud to offer customers multiple options that help them save time and money. One solution we’ve been working on over the last year is delivery via drone. Today we’re announcing we’ll be expanding our DroneUp delivery network to 34 sites by the end the year, providing the potential to reach 4 million U.S. households across six states – Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, Utah and Virginia. This provides us the ability to deliver over 1 million packages by drone in a year.