Federated (owner of Macy's and Bloomingdale's) is going to buy May (owner of Marshall Field's and Lord & Taylor's). The consolidation of department store ownership continues.
Minneapolitans--who only recently saw Dayton's become Marshall Field's, and now Macy's--were sheltered from the death of the long-time name because their hometown store did so well.
When many department stores began in the late nineteenth century they were typically given the name of their founder, hence the persisting apostrophes. (Though the signs outside some stores lost the apostrophe, perhaps they are difficult for signwriters?) Most large cities had several stores.
Ownership and management passed to the second generation in the early twentieth century. Stores that felt the need to expand opened branch stores in newly developing suburbs from the 1920s onwards, with the branch stores proliferating in the late 1940s and 1950s.
The Depression of the 1930s forced co-operation in purchasing on department stores, who were able to negotiate better terms from manufacturers as a collective. Typically these groups were formed by stores from different cities, and no financial relationship beyond joint buying took place for most groups, except Federated. (1). But the foundations of consolidation had been laid, and from the 1950s onwards the family-owned, single-location department store began to be eclipsed by (a) the multiple location store with a downtown location and suburban branches, and (b) the consolidated department store holding firm with operations in several cities. Federated did well, very well, at buying up other stores.
Federated was lucky to survive its acquistion in the 1980s by Robert Campeau. Their corporate webpage understates> the near disaster.
And now they will dominate the Twin Cities department store market too. The department store is not dead, its death has been foretold since the 1920s, but its role in the retailing sector will be relatively smaller than it was at the turn of the previous century. Dayton's did well to survive the trend to consolidation for so long. There should be less lament for its passing, and more acknowledgment of its distinctiveness over a century and more.
UPDATE (28 February): The New York Times (bless 'em) finds two historians who are willing to go on record with a romantic portrayal of the department store's past.
And the Washington Post wonders what will happen to Hecht's (another apostrophe in the name).
References
McNair, M.P. 1931. "Trends in large scale retailing." Harvard Business Review 10 (1):30-39.