Absolutely. Also, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy a decade ago after a meteoric rise in its early years.

money.cnn.com/2009/07/17/smallbusiness/crocs.smb/

Post that, With a new management and about $200mn of equity investment, it became more nimble closing down several owned stores, closing factories and transferring control of others to distributors and keep its focus razor-sharp on one thing: Making stylish and attractive comfy footwear.

Indeed. While there is a sizable part dependent on vaccine and Covid management, there are few departmental stores which are poised to survive and the argument that mall culture in itself will die as people can just buy online, it just goes again the very nature of human societal being where they look for experience while shopping. And as someone said at the height of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic

"NY will never come back"

We know how far along everyone has move forward.

Thanks, Adam. To answer your question, I'd redirect to one of my previous article where I had highlighted on the survival within the departmental stores space. As predicted, JC Penney has now already declared bankruptcy.

talkmarkets.com/.../deeper-diagnosis-of-department-stores-survival

Management noted that they had considerably curtailed the marketing spends in the quarter as they did not think the marketing costs to be effective. To give a context, the company spent $4bn on its $37bn revenue in 2019 (~11% of revenue) which has had a significant impact on SG&A expenses allowing the company to maintain margins.

One would have thought that a couple of months back as investors cheered the encouraging macro data and the country beating the virus, however, it remains to be seen when we can actually brush past those issues and can Disney have its theme parks bustling and theaters brimming with cinemagoers.

I believe it's through the choice of products primarily with the core customer generally looking for a more common type of product that they'd know while younger would be more looking for trendier and diverse apparel.

Thanks Isaac. According to the management, digital business has shown encouraging results by all metrics from sales, traffic, conversion, mobile engagement and new customer acquisition with most of the users being young and more diverse compared to a typical Macy's customer. They are focusing on strategies to retain these new customers and try to convert them into omni-shoppers.

Thanks for the feedback William. And as mentioned by Macy's CEO Jeff, he does expect the organization to be smaller in the post-pandemic world. But the scale is quite unprecedented. The only hope is things normalize soon before the holiday quarter which would be a litmus test for the company.

That was not the context out of it. The pandemic has brought the world on their heels as well as the department stores who has been one of the hardest hit and the pandemic has claimed several casualties in terms of JC Penney and J Crew. I believe a somewhat silver lining every crisis gives is an opportunity to structurally change and just think the ones that will come out of the storm would be much leaner and hopefully more fitter to compete in the space. But that goes without saying that it has wreaked absolute havoc on the people, economy and the department store industry in general.

I reckon the department store industry was struggling from competition with online channels like Amazon as well as discount retailers. The pandemic just aggravated the situation to a grinding halt. It would, in a way, be quite helpful for the industry I believe. As the industry would be looking to make several changes, with #Macy's closing several non-profitable stores and so on.